[Peace-discuss] Baghdad in Chaos

[patton paul]

Mosul Falls, Baghdad in Chaos
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Kurdish forces completed their conquest of
northern Iraq on Friday by taking Mosul without a fight, but Baghdad and
other captured cities descended into anarchy.

The fall of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, left Saddam Hussein's home
town of Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad, as the last significant target
for the United States.

U.S. bombers continued to pound positions around the town but Saddam's
whereabouts were not known.

In Baghdad, Mosul and the southern city of Basra, law and order crumbled
as pent-up passions spilled on to the streets after 24 years of iron rule
by Saddam.

In Baghdad, gunmen apparently from the Shi'ite Muslim community in the
east-side slums battled paramilitaries loyal to Saddam overnight, U.S.
military sources said.

Throughout the day, armed men roamed the streets, robbing buildings and
hijacking cars.

In the city center this correspondent saw a youth wearing a red baseball
cap back-to-front brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle and waiting for a
passing car to hijack.

He let me go by but shot the driver of the next vehicle, dragged him out
and drove away in the truck.

"Is this your liberation?" screamed one shopkeeper at the crew of a U.S.
Abrams tank as youths helped themselves to everything in his small
hardware store.

At Saddam Hussein's military intelligence headquarters, crowds of
desperate Iraqis hacked through concrete floors looking for relatives they
believed were trapped in dungeons.

But the thrill of reaching fathers, brothers, friends turned into
disappointment. U.S. soldiers said the cells were empty.

"They must be all dead, God rest their souls," said one sobbing woman who
had been searching for her brother since 1980.

TROOPS AS POLICE

Reuters journalists in Mosul saw no military clashes after Iraqi forces
abandoned the city, just crowds in a frenzy of arson and plunder,
stripping buildings and torching a market.

Looting also raged in Basra, where British troops on Friday killed five
men trying to rob a bank. Two U.N. humanitarian agencies said it was not
even safe to visit Basra during daylight hours.

The anarchy in Iraq's main cities, and the murder of a religious leader on
Thursday in the holy city of Najaf, highlighted the problems U.S. troops
face in restoring public order after a crushing military victory.

"The United States have neither the will nor the capacity to rein in the
disorder in Iraq," said Bruno Tertrais, senior fellow at the Paris-based
Foundation for Strategic Research.

"Today there are not nearly enough forces in the towns. Secondly, they are
tired after three weeks of war."

Analysts have also said U.S. forces were reluctant to perform policing
missions but a U.S. officer disagreed.

"Now we are a little bit out of our comfort zone, but we're not unprepared
or untrained," Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Chartier, commanding officer of the
U.S. Marines' 1st Tank Battalion, told Reuters near Baghdad's Martyrs'
Monument.

"If I need to provide security for a grocery store so they don't get
robbed, I'll do it. On the other hand, there's still people out there who
want to kill us, so we can't let our guard down," he said.

MILITARY ADVANCES

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said it is too early to declare
victory in Iraq but he said Saddam's control of the country has "all but
disappeared."

U.S. commander General Tommy Franks said Saddam and his inner circle were
"either dead or running like hell."

Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said at a briefing in Qatar U.S. troops
were issued with a list of 55 people to be captured or killed amid signs
Iraqi leaders may be trying to flee abroad.

A U.S. aircraft dropped six "smart bombs" on the residence of Barzan
Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former head of Iraq's
Mukhabarat intelligence service.

The results of the attack at Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, were not
immediately known.

In Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said the entire
Iraqi 5th Corps had surrendered following negotiations with Western
officers, although it was not clear how many men were involved.

"There was a written document that was signed today," said Lieutenant Mark
Kitchens at war headquarters in Qatar.

Television showed hundreds of men walking out of the city at the start of
a long trek south to their hometowns.

"We're in the process of deciding whether they'll become (prisoners of
war) or just go home," Captain Frank Thorp said.

Troops of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade moved to control of strategic
northern prize of Kirkuk one day after it was captured by Kurdish
guerrillas and U.S. special forces.

U.S. soldiers began spreading through the nearby oilfields, which provide
40 percent of Iraq's oil revenue.

The Kurds' withdrawal from their traditional capital is designed to calm
fears in Ankara that they could use the city's wealth to finance an
independent state and stimulate separatist demands by Turkey's large
Kurdish minority.

HEALTH CRISIS

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Baghdad's medical
system had all but collapsed due to combat damage, looting and fear of
anarchy. It said in a statement, few medical or hospital support staff
were reporting for work and patients had either fled or been left without
care.

A Reuters witness said bodies were being buried in hospital gardens and
corpses rotted by roadsides or in cars blown up by coalition forces as
they captured Baghdad earlier in the week.

"This is going to cause a major problem for sanitation and the water
system," a U.S. army engineer officer told Reuters.

"The water table is very low here and what goes in the ground, goes in the
water," he said.

Washington is trying to organize a meeting in the coming week of Iraqi
opposition leaders to start selecting an interim government to help Iraq
rebuild.

"The majority of the people attending will be from inside Iraq and there
will also be attendees from outside Iraq returning to their country,"
Centcom spokesman Thorp said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder met in St. Petersburg on Friday and
reiterated their call for United Nations to solve Iraq's postwar problems.