Painful rebirth of Iraq after Saddam

With pistols drawn, the four American soldiers charged into a crowd of several thousand looters around Iraq's Ministry of Housing. 'He's got a weapon! He's got a weapon! Drop the fucking weapon!' screamed one of the soldiers as they ran forward, their pistols pointed at a man carrying a grenade-launcher over his shoulder.

That was not the sole threat. Everybody seemed to have some form of weapon in Baghdad yesterday. Looters were being handed guns through broken windows and through shattered doors. They were also scooping up 40mm grenade-launchers, heavy mortars, AK-47s, mines, rocket-propelled grenades, pistols and boxes and bags overflowing with ammunition.

On the nearby al-Jumhuriyah Bridge an elderly man and a small child dragged a box of small-arms ammunition as the man brandished a shotgun. Another man, bare to the chest, walked across the span, and pointed an AK-47 at passers-by, laughing. Children sprinted past, pockets jingling with bullets. A teenager appeared with a machine gun.

Two of the American soldiers of the Third Infantry Division sprinted into a basement in the complex. An Iraqi with a white flag pointed to the location of the armoury as a young soldier stood guarding a pile of weapons taken from the looters; and was still surrounded by the mob.

'I don't like being left on my own to do this. I need some support,' he snapped as his sergeant reappeared and wrestled to the ground a looter who was reaching for a hidden weapon. The soldier snatched back the dropped magazine from his pistol as the Iraqi tried to grab it and hide it beneath his feet. The reason for the soldiers' fear was clear a few minutes later when one of the stolen RPGs was fired into a nearby building, sending nearby US troops running for cover.

It was not meant to be like this. In three days, the scene in Baghdad has soured from the jubilation of liberation to one of utter lawlessness that has been echoed in the advance of coalition troops across the country. In each town and city that has been liberated from Saddam, from the port city of Umm Qasr in the south through Iraq's second city of Basra, from Baghdad to the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, the cheering crowds have been replaced by gangs of violent looters - some with factional agendas - who have stripped bare what was left undamaged by US tanks and bombers.

In Baghdad, it has been done with a particular violence. On Friday, men who were armed with weapons looted from those city armouries not already blown up by US soldiers, first posted their own vigilante patrols to stop the looting. These same patrols then joined in the looting, dragging drivers from their cars at gunpoint.

Other roads have become almost impassable as gunmen have fired on vehicles, sending crowds of angry Iraqis to the US Marine command post to demand that US soldiers - who have too few troops to police this city and apparently even less inclination - intervene.

It has been a process that has shown no regard for common need, for common sense or any sense of community. In barely a week the people of Iraq have stripped their country bare. Iraq is close to a bandit territory, without laws or governance or any form of police. In Basra and Baghdad, the looters have attacked hospitals to rob them of beds, even those still occupied by patients injured in the bombing.

According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, most Baghdad hospitals are closed because of combat damage, looting or fear of looting, while few medical or support staff are reporting for work. Patients have fled the hospitals orbeen left without care. In a statement expressing its 'profound concern' over the chaos in Iraq, the Red Cross continued: 'The medical system in Baghdad has virtually collapsed. The dead are left unattended, and the increasing summer heat and deteriorating water and electricity supplies create a high risk of epidemic disease.'

On Thursday, the Swiss-based agency reported the Al Kindi hospital in central Baghdad had been attacked by armed looters who had stripped it of everything, including beds, electrical fittings and medical equipment, while the 650-bed Medical City had also ceased to function.

The Red Cross called on US-led forces, which control most of the capital, rapidly to restore order, saying this was their duty under the Geneva Conventions setting out the rules of war.

But it may be too late to repair the damage. Baghdad is following a pattern that has been repeated across the country. In Basra last week, Iraqis from the surrounding countryside were driving out all the municipal vehicles that any new government might need - rubbish trucks and fire engines, bulldozers, even abandoned military vehicles. British Government sources said yesterday some semblance of normality had returned to the city, with joint police patrols between Iraqi officials and British soldiers. Shops have begun re-opening and some market stalls are functioning.

The days of rampant disorder have shocked many Iraqis as troops stand by. It is the theft and demolition of an entire discredited society, the self-immolation of Iraq on the pyre of Saddam's regime. And amid this devastation, a new question has emerged: the war may be almost won, and Saddam vanquished, but what future is there for Iraq?

In Washington yesterday, nobody seemed sure. As the US grappled with the task of establishing a new Iraq, the scene backstage was one of squabbling, infighting and a re-drawing of diplomatic battle lines that hallmarked the road to war. Within the Bush administration, vitriol was being exchanged between the State Department, CIA and Pentagon over the role of the UN, and about the leadership of the next Iraqi government. Senators and Congressmen were bickering over picking up the tab for war and reconstruction, as special interests and contracts are inserted into language authorising the massive $80 billion bill.

Member countries of the World Bank and IMF meet in Washington this weekend, and will hear pleas from the US to invest funds in the rebuilding of Iraq, both by making money available and encouraging specific countries to write off debts from the Saddam era.

The US is desperate to enlist financial and personnel support from as many other countries as possible in paying the bill for reconstruction, which rises with each new day of looting and pillage, especially of hospitals and other buildings essential to the relief effort.

This appeal comes indirectly from the Pentagon itself, with the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace, saying his department had sent the State Department a list of urgent needs, including police officers and paramilitary units to try to keep order. State Department sources say nearly 70 nations have been contacted in search of support.

The US Secretary for the Treasury, John Snow, says he hopes the two organisations will 'act promptly' to aid the new Iraq, and that Iraq's main creditors will forgive the most part of the tens of billions of dollars the country owes them.

Snow said he wanted a 'substantial conversation about how our nations and financial institutions can work together to help the Iraqi people recover'. He was joined by the voice of the real architect of the war and American vision for Iraq, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who said: 'I hope they will think about how they can contribute to helping the people of Iraq get back on their feet. I think they ought to consider whether it might not be appropriate to forgive all or some of that debt.'

But there is still extreme wariness among IMF and World Bank staff - as among that at the UN - over picking up the pieces for a war that the UN did not authorise. World Bank president James Wolfensohn echoed their demand as regards the field of financial aid, retorting that in the absence of a United Nations resolution legitimising a new regime in Baghdad, the bank will not so much as dispatch a mission to Baghdad.

But on that UN role, the Pentagon - clearly in the driving seat - is adamant. Wolfowitz said on Thursday that he envisaged a 'vital' role for the UN in Iraq, but not a 'lead role', which would belong to the US and its military allies alone. 'The UN can be an important partner,' Wolfowitz said, 'but it can't be the managing partner. It can't be in charge.'

As the looting continued last night, there was also conflict about the composition of the new Iraqi government.The rivalry between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Pentagon that characterised the lead-up to war - in which Powell was trounced and ultimately co-opted - cuts across the peace. Powell now insists there must be a UN blessing beyond the aid programme, including such details as issuing a new currency, the sale of oil and other aspects of reintegration into the international community.

Powell's State Department favours maintaining military rule with the present Iraqi government apparatus largely intact, while a number of Iraqis living under Saddam can be nurtured and elections held.

A second faction, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, is known to want to pull out troops as soon as is viable, and not to get over-involved in the political process. 'Theirs is a very pessimistic view of the world,' says Ivo Dalder of the Brookings Institution think-tank, who is writing a book about Iraq entitled America Unbound . 'It is a view that there are some very evil people in this world and our job is to confront and destroy them before they confront us. That done, you leave as soon as you can'.

Then, says Dalder, there is the third group: the neo-conservatives under Wolfowitz, who 'believe that these dictatorships can be transformed into democracies. They will want to make an investment, an effort and commitment'.

Both the latter factions, based in the Pentagon, counter the State Department, saying there are too few people left in the current apparatus who can be trusted, and 'having studied the deNazification of Germany' want a restructuring of government departments and a purge of the Baath Party and bureaucratic apparatus, with exiles assuming an early role.

Already exasperated, the overall commissar of the office for reconstruction, retired General Jay Garner, is said by sources to favour a half-and-half mix between exiles and current citizens. He is so distracted by the infighting that, say sources, he has discussed resignation with his confidants, before he has even started work.

The acrimony is focused around the exiled Iraqi National Congress grouping, led by Ahmad Chalabi, a banker, former aristocrat in the monarchist Iraqi regime overthrown in the 1950s, and since convicted in absentia in Jordan for fraud and embezzlement. Chalabi is backed by Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon to head a provisional government. But Chalabi is suspected by the State Department and CIA, which believe he is at best a fraud and at worst has little chance of rallying support in Iraq after nearly half a century in exile. The CIA severed its relationship with Chalabi after the Iraqi National Congress was unable to account fully for millions of dollars in covert US aid.

The former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, jibes that 'Chalabi knows more people on Capitol Hill than he does in Iraq'. The dispute was reportedly arbitrated by the White House last week on the authority of the President himself and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who demanded that a series of public meetings be organised, open alike to exiles and Iraqis living under Saddam and chaired by the US military commander, General Tommy Franks. They are to begin on Tuesday.

That cannot come soon enough for the British and US troops hoping to impose some order on the mayhem. Or the many law-abiding Iraqis who have been horrified by the present violence. This was predicted the day before it began in earnest in Baghdad last week by Sami Gabarra, a professor of maths at Mustansariya University, and an Iraqi Christian, who had enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle under Saddam's regime.

'You have to understand that I had a very normal life,' he said. 'I offended no one and so nobody bothered me. When I was asked to vote for Saddam I voted for Saddam. His name was the only name on the ballot paper. Democracy and human rights are big and great ideas, but you have to understand that for all the claims to the contrary Iraq is really underneath it all a Third World country. Saddam is gone now, but there is also no security here.'

Many who are interviewed are nervous still about being named, afraid that what they say may be overheard by former members of Saddam's security apparatus, and unsure what the future will bring, whether a wrong word now, may be, as in the past, dangerous to utter in Iraq's uncertain future.

It is expressed by a young graduate of agricultural sciences who will not even give his first name. 'Am I happy that the Americans are in the city? No, of course, I am not happy. We feel we have been cheated by a conspiracy. We ask ourselves whether all this is a kind of nasty fantasy. Will we be given the future we have been promised or another kind of fear from that given by Saddam?

'We have been lucky so far here. There has been no robbery here, but I don't know what is going to happen. Already I have seen looters firing on a vehicle of the Red Crescent and looting it. It is already the day of the barbarians. People are making no distinction between the property of the government and the property of the people.' It is a distinction, and a source of anger, that has yet to dawn on the US forces in Iraq.

Iraq's sudden fragmentation is explained by the more literate Iraqis in Baghdad. In a police state, where democracy was ruthlessly suppressed, and where access to education, health and social housing was controlled to keep the keep the population in check, the social glue was fear of the regime. Without that glue Iraq's society has atomised in an instant.

Unless something is done quickly, many fear, it will fragment along the most obvious of lines: Shia against Sunni; Muslim against Christian; religious against secular; the strong against the weak; Kurd against Arab.

Already Kurd on Arab violence is erupting in the North. On Friday morning, gunmen came to the house of Hamoudi Mohammed Isa. The 36-year old farmer had driven into the city of Kirkuk from his village on the outskirts a day earlier to see his extended family in the Haddidin quarter of the city.

Hamoudi heard the gunmen shouting: 'We know you are Arabs. Come out now.' Shots rang out. Hamoudi went to the door and was met by a volley of automatic fire. 'Give us the keys to your cars and we'll let you live,' the men told him. Minutes later the men were driving away in Hamoudi's two prized pick-up trucks. 'Now I have lost my most valuable possessions and I can't run my farm,' he said. 'But at least I am alive.'

Others were not so lucky. Mahdi Mali, one of Kirkuk's Turkman ethnic minority, was shot dead when he refused to give up the keys to his car. By yesterday several others had been killed and many more wounded.

All day on Friday, angry and frightened local citizens thronged the former governor's offices in the centre of Kirkuk. Yards away, a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein lay in the street. Inside, broken glass and smashed portraits of the dictator littered the floor. In the governor's office itself Kurdish peshmerga fighters reclined on sofas and hung their weapons from the coatrack. A US Special Forces team shouldered its way through the crowd and headed off into the chaotic interior. Minutes later the Americans emerged, pushing a scared middle-aged Iraqi in front of them. 'He's a good man,' one one looker shouted. 'Why are you taking him away?'

The Special Forces got into their jeep and, with a machine gun covering the crowd, drove off, past the burning municipal offices. Not far away more automatic fire rattled out. Having emptied the bazaar, the looters were heading for the hospitals. Kirkuk fell, after a short fight, on Thursday morning. By the next day, although thousands of peshmerga fighters had flooded into the city, it had descended into anarchy.

While looting in Baghdad has been more vicious, the violence in Kirkuk has an ethnic dimension that bodes ill for postwar reconstruction in Iraq. No one is sure who is doing most of the looting. Some is by local people. Some may be peshmerga fighters from the two major parties in the region, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Most appears to be by opportunist thieves who have come into the city to take advantage of the chaos. But what is clear is that the cities ethnic minorities, the Arabs and the Turkmen, have suffered worst.

The violence was predictable. Like the Shia in the south, Kurds too have suffered hugely under the Saddam and har bour deep grievances. Tens of thousands of local Kurds were forced out of their houses or off their land by Baath party officials who then gave the property to ethnic Arabs. Now even Arabs who have lived in Kirkuk for decades are being seen as party to 'ethnic cleansing'.

The Kurdish military leaders have made little effort to impose order. On Friday Rostam Kirkuki, a PUK general, said he had issued orders for the arrest of looters though he admitted that none had yet been apprehended. KDP peshmerga set up checkpoints on the road out of Kirkuk and seized any vehicles they thought might be stolen.

However, only a few miles away, The Observer witnessed men, from no identifiable group, firing on cars with Kalashnikovs to force them to stop. 'We are waiting for the Americans. They should be here by Sunday,' Rostam said. By Friday evening only a few dozen Special Forces soldiers and less than a hundred men from the 173rd Airborne were trying to secure a city of 600,000 people. More than 4,000 troops were expected to arrive today.

In Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, things were even worse. The Iraqi army negotiated a surrender and then melted away. Complete anarchy ensued. All the American forces could do was throw a perimeter around the city of more than a million people, and watch as smoke filled the sky and the looters went to work. Crowds broke into the bank, hurling wads of thousands of iraqi dinars into the air like confetti before stealing sackloads of notes.

Nor could the peshmerga try to keep order. Their headlong charge into Kirkuk had prompted the Turks, who have massed nearly 30,000 troops on the Iraq-Turkey border, to threaten an invasion unless the peshmerga pulled back. For the Kurdish troops to move into Mosul too would have been seen as a provocation too far and the Americans warned the Kurds to stay out. Having entered the city on Friday, the lightly armed peshmerga then pulled back.

But, like the ethnic violence in Kirkuk, the episode is a warning of problems to come. The Turks fear the Kurds in Iraq might be tempted to form an independent breakaway state if they can hold on to Kirkuk, with its substantial oil fields, and Mosul. Yesterday, Turkish military observers were being deployed into Kirkuk to monitor the withdrawal of peshmerga forces and the handover to the Americans. Others were on their way to make sure the Kurds did not move into Mosul.

'We were scared of Saddam but he kept us united and secure,' said one member of Iraq's intelligentsia in Baghdad last week. 'Now Saddam and his kind of fear has gone and we are more afraid than ever.'

That is something that America and Britain are keen to resolve. They know the eyes of the world are watching, and they are intent on introducing security measures to ensure victory is not marred by prolonged scenes of civil unrest. There are already plans to introduce curfews after nightfall in Baghdad. The war has been won; now the battle is under way for the peace.

Reporting team: Peter Beaumont and Patrick Graham in Baghdad, Jason Burke in Kirkuk, Ed Vulliamy in Washington, Paul Harris in Basra, Kamal Ahmed in London