The Waiting Game
News: Baghdad is now a city under siege, where residents, officials, and journalists can do little but wait for the inevitable.
April 8, 2003
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In three weeks, Baghdad has been transformed from a nervous capital -- essentially a city under house arrest -- to a city under siege.
"Siege" is a word the American military avoids, but it is the appropriate word to describe Baghdad now. Civilian casualties choke up expanded triage rooms in Baghdad's trauma centers during coalition air strikes. Bombing continues day and night. The air-raid sirens that warned of incoming coalition planes in the first days of the air-war now sound for only about every-third attack if at all.
Anti-aircraft fire is a better indicator of incoming planes, but some days pass without any response from air defense positions that seem to be holding out for the "Conclusive Battle" as the Iraqi government has named it.
Baghdad television, the one station that has managed to broadcast in spite of heavy bombing damage to communications facilities and TV broadcast stations, recently showed images of a funeral convoy traveling to Negev that, according to the report, was attacked and incinerated by coalition forces including charred corpses reminiscent of the highway of death bombing of retreating soldiers and fleeing civilians in the 1991 Gulf War.
The road to Damascus sees public buses full of inbound Arab volunteers reportedly streaming to Baghdad to join the struggle of Iraq against the invaders. A few journalists and aid workers occasionally make trips to Jordan or Syria when they are expelled for infractions of protocol, or called back by frightened home offices. Many Iraqis in Jordan continue to wait for visas out of the region. These are the fortunate Iraqis, the relatively wealthy. Far fewer travel the other direction, going to Iraq to be with their families through the catastrophe and help in whatever way they can.
Waiting is an increasingly dominant pastime for many in Iraq. Small, sandbagged trenches around the city are encircled by soldiers, sitting in plastic patio furniture -- strangely often purple -- drinking tea, smoking, eating picnic lunches. Tents are pitched near defense positions, waiting for the defense of Baghdad to begin in earnest.
Civilians are endlessly shopping in ever-smaller circuits at the few stores and markets that remain open. Aid workers reported that civilians were selling their government provided food rations, of flour, sugar, rice, and other dry goods, to buy what other items they may need while waiting for the fighting to end.
Shops that sell non-essential items are closed and shuttered, welded or locked shut. A smattering of pharmacies, experiencing sky-rocketing sales of valium and hypertension drugs remain open, as do outdoor fruit and vegetable markets, nargila cafes, and roast chicken stands. Hotels hosting foreign aid workers or journalists are operating on half-staff. Taxi drivers make endless loops around the city honking to pedestrians for the odd fare. Bombing in the distance or very nearby punctuates normal but limited daily activities. The sound of plane engines seems ever-present. Bit by bit ordinary civilian life has regressed to a crawl and Baghdad has become the unblinking eye of the storm.
The conduit for the voice of the state, and to some extent the voice and experience of the Iraqi people themselves, are the 250 or so foreign journalists and a handful of depressed but determined peace activists who remain in Baghdad.
Journalists live mostly in two approved state hotels. The Palestine Hotel and the Sheraton, reopened for business when word got out that the more comfortable Al-Rasheid hotel had been labeled a potential bombing target.
Similarly, the press conferences are announced, rescheduled and re-announced in the lobby of the Palestine hotel, the official press center of the Ministry of Information after the ministry's headquarters was bombed by coalition forces on consecutive nights. Press conferences are not mandatory, but if you're in the lobby when one is called to order, a suited ministry bureaucrat will chastise and coo you into a Q&A session with spokespeople or ministry officials whose messages seem to converge on the single mantra of "resistance at all costs."
At Al-Yarmouk hospital, one of the several civilian hospitals in Baghdad with major trauma units, Dr. Hussein Ali, the hospital's director, briefed a delegation of journalists and peace activists from the US-based group Voices in the Wilderness on the growing problems he faces in helping the wounded.
Civilian telephone lines disrupted city-wide by coalitions bombing, and a shortage of ambulance parts create trouble in reaching the injured among Baghdad's poorest and most vulnerable dark outskirts, especially during the pre-dawn hours when bombing tends to be most severe. Night before last, he said, a man came screaming to the front door of the hospital that an ambulance was needed in a southern suburb of Baghdad. It took the man an hour to reach the hospital. "I am a medical professional," Dr. Ali said, "I know what an hour means."
Dr. Ali traveled himself to the site where an extended family was trapped beneath the rubble of their flimsy home that collapsed from a blast during an air-raid in the early hours of the morning. Most severely wounded civilians come from poor neighborhoods in the sprawling suburbs of Baghdad whose residents and defenders will be the first Baghdad residents to lay eyes on the Anglo-American forces. He found 12 members of the family buried beneath the rubble.
By the time he arrived, the only victim alive was a 13-year-old boy whose two badly burned arms had to be amputated to save him. "War wounds are always multiple wounds," the doctor explained. "It's not as simple as a bullet."
Image: Kael Alford/Panos
