Inside Basra

Saadi al Shuwaili was shaken from his bed by the rumbling of U.S. bombers over his neighborhood, the Tuwasah district of Basra. About an hour later — 5:30 a.m. on April 5 — he heard six deafening blasts, two of which came from a house 500 m from his own. British intelligence had a solid tip that Ali Hassan al-Majid — known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing the Kurds in 1988, and now the general commanding the Iraqi military in the south — was meeting at the house with Ba'ath party officials. The bombs incinerated the building, and with it went Iraqi resistance in Basra. News traveled fast that Chemical Ali was gone. "The next morning, everything was over," says Saadi, a 53-year-old math teacher at Tahrir Intermediate Boys' school. "The fedayeen [militia] all disappeared by 10 in the morning." Then the British marched into Basra to face not gunfire but cheering crowds.

This was exactly the scene that British and American war planners hoped to see: jubilant Iraqis welcoming coalition troops into a liberated city. For two weeks, the residents of Basra had shown enormous fortitude and resilience as their city was pounded by British artillery and American bombs. Caught in a standoff between the British forces surrounding the city and the Ba'athist loyalists who still controlled it, they suffered food and water shortages and power failures; families faced the threat of execution by the fedayeen if their men refused to fight. Somehow they managed to get on with their lives — and finally Basra fell. But there was more to survive. The joy of liberation was soon followed by anarchy as mobs rampaged through the city in an orgy of looting. Thieves roamed the streets of the business district armed with crowbars and some firearms, and after dark there were running firefights between rival gangs. One afternoon a small group of looters was busy removing weapons and ammunition from a red shipping container abandoned by fleeing Iraqi soldiers. They were watched by two British snipers positioned on the roof of the Basra Teaching Hospital, about 350 m away. With Basra on the brink of anarchy, the last thing the city needed was more weapons on the streets. But the snipers were not authorized to shoot unless the looters stormed the hospital or threatened doctors or British forces.

"It's bloody frustrating," said Lance Corporal Nick Young, an eight-year veteran of the British Royal Marines. "We can't do a thing. They won't even let us put warning shots down." Young was eventually allowed to fire warnings that dispersed the gang, but only after they had already grabbed most of the weapons cache. Security around the city had deteriorated so badly that by the weekend British troops were mounting patrols with local police officers to keep the peace. The battle to restore law and order had begun.

Some people expected the worst from the start. Even before the invasion began, Abu Fawez, the owner of the 49-room Al Rashed Hotel off Al Wattana Street in the city center, was bricking up doors and windows — not against war damage, but against the looting that was sure to follow the fighting. "We knew what was coming," he says. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad, coalition planes dropped leaflets over Basra explaining that the British were coming as liberators and promising to bring food and water. A few days later, British Challenger tanks and artillery were engaging Iraqi military positions on the outskirts of the city.

During the first few days of fighting the city closed down; shops remained shuttered and people mostly stayed at home. But when it became clear that most artillery and air strikes were hitting only government and military buildings, the streets sprang to life again, at least during daylight hours. "It was a bit bizarre," says Andres Kruesi, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Basra. "Life in the city went on much as normal, while a couple of miles outside the city the fighting was going on."

As the British inched closer, the fedayeen, many dressed in black and driving white Toyota pickups, cruised the streets for young men to pressgang into fighting. Basem Hussain, 50, a teacher of mechanics at the local technical college, made his two sons, Ali, 18, and Mohar, 20, stay inside. "I was scared they would take both of them," he says. Hussain watched in terror as the fedayeen drove down his street several times, but they never entered his house. His wife had stockpiled enough rice, flour, vegetable oil and canned food for several months, and at night the whole family watched the news on Kuwait TV. "Iraqi TV was all lies, but we believed Kuwait TV because they had pictures of the Americans in Nasiriyah and Najaf," Hussain says. Every time a bomb fell, his 9-year-old daughter Shehed jumped into his arms for comfort.

Despite the devastation, some Basrans were glad to see the bombs fall. Ahmed Al Abadi, 42, who lost his technician's job after the failed 1991 Shi'a rebellion against Saddam, went out on his roof to watch: "I was not afraid. We all knew the bombing was very precise. When they hit the Ba'ath party office, I was happy to see it blown up." But not all bombs hit their targets, and there was a constant stream of casualties to the Basra Teaching Hospital. By the end of the battle for Basra, the Teaching Hospital had received 700 casualties, 75 of whom died.

After two weeks of siege, the British began pushing forward against the fedayeen positions. The 7th Armoured Brigade crossed the bridge on the main southern approach to the city and captured the Technical College. Many of the fedayeen retreated into the city center. "A lot of them moved into the Al Khansa girls school in Tuwasah," says Saadi Al Shuwaili. Anti-aircraft guns were set up in the school courtyard, and large supplies of rockets and ammunition were stockpiled inside the school buildings. But people sensed the end was near, as reports on Kuwait TV showed the Iraqi army collapsing all around the country. Then came the strike that apparently took out Chemical Ali.

Several bombs went astray that morning — one landed on the house of Dr. Akram Abad Hassan, the widely admired director of the Teaching Hospital. Dr. Akram was working in the hospital at the time, but 10 of his family members were killed — his mother, sister, brother, three of his siblings' children and four of his own. "That was our worst day," says Dr. Ahmed Al Ghalib, 30. "How could we treat others when Dr. Akram's family was all dead?"

The British 7th Armored Brigade and the Royal Marines marched virtually unopposed into Basra the following day, the streets lined with people cheering their arrival. Then the looting started. After 24 years of brutal oppression, Basrans are getting reacquainted with the joys and perils of freedom.