Looters raid Baghdad shops
Looting surged and buildings were set on fire across Baghdad today while American troops focused more on fighting pockets of resistance than on keeping order.
Thousands of people carried out the second round of looting to hit Baghdad in recent days, with American forces making little or no effort to stop them as they carried off TV sets, refrigerators, carpets and other items.
Among the buildings plundered were the home of Saddam’s son Odai, the German embassy and the French Cultural Centre.
The Red Cross said a Baghdad hospital was ransacked and others had closed their doors because of the street violence and looting.
Spokeswoman Nada Doumani said the Al Kindi hospital was attacked by a group of armed looters who had stripped it of everything, including beds, electrical fittings and medical equipment.
“Small hospitals have closed their doors and big hospitals are inaccessible,” she said.
The home of Saddam’s urbane deputy premier Tariq Aziz was also targeted. His luxury house was stripped of virtually everything, including kitchen units.
But left behind in his library were the complete works of Saddam Hussein, Godfather author Mario Puzo’s Mafia novels and a book on geopolitics by former US President Richard Nixon.
Many of the looters were from the Saddam City area, home to about two million impoverished Shiite Muslims.
Asked why he was robbing the house, one man wordlessly pointed to his open mouth to indicate he was hungry.
A house in southern Baghdad belonging to Saddam’s notorious cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid – known as Chemical Ali – was also robbed.
Majid, who earned his nickname for overseeing the use of poison gas against Kurdish villagers in 1988, was put in charge of the defence of southern Iraq by Saddam. He may have been killed in a bomb attack in Basra at the weekend.
One man, who said he was an Iraqi poet and gave his name as Abu Eyaih, carried off two of Majid’s walking sticks. He said he was taking the sticks as a gesture of contempt towards Majid, who sometimes walked with the aid of a stick.
“I’m not here to loot the house of this criminal Ali Hassan al-Majid. I took these two things as a symbol to humiliate him,” he said.
Some American forces were told today that they should begin trying to stop the looting, but they were only just beginning to devise ways to do so.
“There’s civilian looting like crazy, all over the place. There just aren’t enough of us to clear it out,” said Lance Corporal Darren Pickard, who was trying to protect an Iraqi police academy compound that was being picked over by looters.
Reinforcements had to be called in to help protect the compound’s armoury, which included hundreds of rifles along with grenades, knives, pistols and mortars.
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Belcher, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, told officers to try to quell looting.
“There’s so much. How do you stop it?” Belcher said. ”I’m a security force. I can fight, I can keep the peace. But police work is not our forte.”
Civilians began bringing their wounded to the military medics. Some Iraqis waved at soldiers and pointing at their stomachs, saying “Hungry! Hungry!” and begging for food. Other complained of a lack of water.
One hotel manager said: ”There’s one good thing only – Saddam has disappeared. Everything else is bad. There’s no food. there’s no water. and everyone is afraid.”
Around the city, looters hit stores and government installations, including the Irrigation Ministry, the Transport Ministry, the Air Force officers club, the government computer centre, the Olympic hospital and state laboratories.
The German Embassy, a three-storey off-white building in the centre of al-Karada district, was also sacked.
Looters emerged with air conditioners and computers. Looters also cleaned out the French Cultural Centre.
In the city centre, donkey-drawn and horse-drawn carts were loaded with office furniture, TV sets, appliances and carpets.
In Saddam City, a poor, densely populated Shiite Muslim section of Baghdad, residents set up roadblocks and confiscated loot, sending it to a mosque, said Imam Amar Al-Saadi.
After looting first broke out in Baghdad, US Central Command said American civil affairs troops were there and in other cities to help Iraqis re-establish order.
However, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks at Central Command said he expected much of the unrest to die down naturally as the euphoria of the regime’s collapse wore off. “We believe that this will settle down in due time,” he said.
Around the city, most motorists were flying white flags. Some public buses were running.
The Interior Ministry offices were being turned into a command centre for US forces, who went through them to see what they find.
Saddam pictures, posters, calendars and oil paintings adorned practically every surface. Some pictures of his face had been cut out or punched in with fists before American forces got there. Some troops, encountering large pictures of Saddam with his face cut out, posed for pictures with their own faces thrust through the hole.
Two floors down from the Interior Minister’s office was the office of an unidentified three-star general.
On the bookshelf behind his desk sat a gold-embossed, green-leather volume dating to the 1990s.
It resembled a family photo album, but the pictures – page after page – were of bombed-out buildings and charred, mangled corpses.
