The symbols and substance of Saddam Hussein’s 24-year reign crumbled Wednesday in the streets of Baghdad, with jubilant civilians helping U.S. forces pull down a mammoth statue of the Iraqi president even as diehard loyalists desperately fought on nearby.
Nearly three weeks after the United States opened the war with a thunderous bombardment of a Hussein compound, the regime’s presence all but disappeared from the capital.
No police patrolled the streets. Government officials abandoned buildings. And for the first time since the war began, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf failed to regale reporters with accounts of lopsided Iraqi victories.
Iraqis responded in ways that would have been unthinkable just days ago. They welcomed American soldiers with hugs, flowers and cheers of “Welcome to Baghdad!” and “Bush is great!”
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But others greeted the U.S. forces with bullets and rocket-propelled grenades. American officials warned of tough fighting ahead. “There is still work to be done,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said at Central Command headquarters in Qatar.
Though a 20-foot bronze statue of Hussein was smashed and scattered, the real Hussein was nowhere to be found. U.S. officials declined to speculate on whether he had been killed in a bombing early this week.
“He’s either dead or he’s incapacitated, or he’s healthy and cowering in a tunnel someplace,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon.
“Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed, brutal dictators–and the Iraqi people are well on their way to freedom,” Rumsfeld said.
The weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration cited as a reason to go to war have not been found, and fighting still raged in parts of Baghdad. Marines lobbed mortars at a group of loyalists backed up to the Tigris River on the campus of Baghdad University, while Army units battled other holdouts in the western part of the city.
U.S. Marines took control of a palace north of Baghdad early Thursday after a three-hour firefight with an undetermined Iraqi force. One Marine was killed and at least eight were wounded.
But allied military planners began focusing on Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown 90 miles north of Baghdad, and on the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, as the regime’s only remaining strongholds.
“The game is over,” said Mohammed al-Douri, Iraq’s ambassador to the UN in the first admission by an Iraqi official that Hussein’s forces had been overcome. “I hope the Iraqi people will have a happy life.”
Arab reaction
The astonishing images of the Hussein regime falling apart provoked fear and anger in other Arab countries.
After weeks of hearing the Iraqi information minister’s vows to defeat the “infidel invaders,” many expressed shock that the Americans had entered the capital so quickly. Some said they hoped the regime’s demise could foster more democracy in the region, but even U.S. allies such as Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal called for a quick end to the American presence.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said, “Iraqis must take control of their country as fast as possible.”
Other analysts predicted that an extended American-led occupation of the cradle of Arab civilization could spark greater resentment and possibly violence against the U.S. and its partners.
In northern Iraq, thousands of Kurds celebrated the apparent downfall of a dictator who persecuted them for a generation, killing an estimated 150,000 and unleashing a chemical attack against one of their towns in 1988.
“He’s gone, he’s gone,” shouted a group of boys dancing in Irbil. Others waved hand-drawn American flags and adults burned photographs of the Iraqi president.
In the eastern city of Sulaymaniyah, hundreds of Kurds chanted: “George Bush! George Bush!”
Kurdish fighters, supported by U.S. commandos and American warplanes, have pushed south from their independent region in northern Iraq and now stand within striking distance of the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk.
Those fighters captured a small town north of Mosul on Wednesday and took up to 200 Iraqis prisoner, Brooks said. They also struck Iraqi troops and armor about 20 miles south of Irbil.
The only other major military objective is Tikrit, possibly the last stronghold of the vaunted Republican Guard. Allied warplanes bombed Tikrit on Wednesday, but it was unclear when ground forces would advance.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon that there were about 10 Iraqi army divisions still in the north, as well as a brigade of a Republican Guard division, or about 5,000 fighters.
“They have been subjected to bombing by air power and will continue to be dealt with in that way for some time,” he said, adding that so-called death squads were believed to still be operating in the western part of the country.
Brooks suggested that some Iraqi fighters were drifting south and north toward Tikrit, fleeing from the advancing allied forces. “We certainly are focused on Tikrit to prevent the regime from being able to use it to command and control, to restore command and control, or to hide,” he said.
The defense in Tikrit, he said, probably consists of conventional military forces or paramilitary militias loyal to Hussein’s Baath Party.
“We haven’t located every leader of the regime,” he said. “We haven’t found every instrument of the regime. And so those operations continue.”
But Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, acknowledged that “the end of the combat phase is days away” in Baghdad and southern Iraq.
With the regime’s apparent end at hand, Bush administration officials served notice to other nations they believe may be trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, warned at a news conference in Rome that such nations as Iran, Syria and North Korea should “draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.”
At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld charged that senior members of the Hussein regime were fleeing to Syria with Syrian help. “We find it notably unhelpful,” he said.
On the ground, U.S. Special Forces were searching the rubble of a building destroyed Monday by American bombs, looking for evidence that Hussein or his sons may have been inside. Russian officials denied that the Iraqi president was hiding in their embassy.
Despite the cautionary notes sounded by Rumsfeld and other American leaders, many of Baghdad’s 5 million residents appeared certain that the war was all but over.
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They marched through the streets, beating posters of Hussein with sticks and shoes. Top government officials and even the minders assigned to foreign journalists covering the war failed to show up for work.
Some handed flowers to U.S. soldiers and flashed V-for-victory signs. Others pointed out places where weapons had been stored or where Hussein diehards were hiding.
With no signs of Hussein’s police force on the street, some Iraqis began looting government buildings, helping themselves to television sets, computers and refrigerators.
The headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, believed to be used as a torture center by Hussein’s son Udai, burned on the city’s eastern edge.
The most poignant scene came at Firdos Square, Arabic for “paradise.” A crowd gathered at the foot of a statue Hussein erected only a year ago as his birthday gift to the city. Several men looped a rope around the statue’s neck like a noose and tried to pull it down.
Then U.S. Marines climbed the statue and briefly covered its face with an American flag. When they quickly replaced it with the Iraqi flag, cheers erupted.
The Marines attached a chain to the statue, hooked it to a tank recovery vehicle and slowly pulled down the statue as television cameras beamed the scene around the world. President Bush was among those watching, half a world away. “They got it down,” he said.
Once the statue fell, some Iraqis uncorked years of bottled rage, beating it with sledgehammers, lopping off its head and dragging it through the street. “I’m 49 but I never lived a single day,” said Yussuf Abed Kazim as he pounded on the statue’s base. “Only now will I start living.”
Paintings of the Iraqi leader now sported devil’s horns and beards.
The celebrations were especially joyous in areas populated by Shiite Muslims, long dominated by the Sunni Muslim regime. Hundreds of Shiites waved palm fronds and shouted thanks to Allah.
“Bush, Bush, thank you,” chanted youths in Saddam City, a Shiite area of eastern Baghdad.
Diehard fighters
The fighting that remained in the capital was scattered and apparently involved diehard fighters holed up in buildings throughout the city. Iraqi forces clung to two of the five bridges across the Tigris in the middle of Baghdad.
But the Marines advancing from the east and the Army from the west were so close to each other that Army units were instructed not to fire on Iraqi soldiers on the other side of the river, lest they hit the Marines.
Myers said there had been no organized resistance from the Republican Guard inside Baghdad. “There is sporadic resistance,” he said. “How well-organized, it’s hard to tell.”
Army units reported the capture of the headquarters of the Special Republican Guard, the unit controlled by Hussein’s son Qusai and considered most loyal to the regime.
By nightfall, Marine tanks sat on the eastern banks of the Tigris River, and the Army was on the west. The Ministry of Transport and Communication was burning.
“Anyone seeing the faces of liberated Iraqis . . . has to say this is a very good day,” Rumsfeld said.