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Lawlessness spreads in Baghdad
An Iraqi boy gathering currency notes in front of a ransacked bank in Mosul on Friday. Widespread looting was reported in this northern city even as U.S. and Kurdish fighters claimed control of it. — AFP
In Baghdad, U.S. troops worked to hold key intersections and manned checkpoints, on high alert against suicide attacks by fighters loyal to Mr. Hussein. Top U.S. commanders issued new rules of behaviour for American forces in the capital to stop the looting.
Under the rules issued Friday by U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks, troops are forbidden to use deadly force to prevent looting. They should allow government workers to go to their jobs. Hospitals, businesses and mosques should remain open. Schools should reopen and record attendance.
However, British forces shot and killed five men trying to rob a bank who opened fire on them in Basra, the scene of looting over the past week, a U.S. military spokesman said today.
A car carrying an Iraqi family drove through a checkpoint in Baghdad without stopping today, and Marines opened fire. Three adults were killed, and a 5-year-old girl was wounded.
In the Al-Mansour district in western Baghdad, pro-Saddam bands of Arab volunteers manned sandbagged positions, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles. Residents said they were mostly Syrians.
Children as young as 10 and entire families took part in the looting.
``Tell the Americans to stop the killing and the looting. We can't live like this much longer, with Muslims looting other Muslims,'' said 41-year-old Jabryah Aziz. ``I need to feel safe so I can go and collect my food ration.''
The Trade Ministry was also smouldering, along with one of the main markets in the city centre.
In the city's Karadah neighbourhood, residents fought back: They armed themselves with Kalashnikov rifles, set up roadblocks and checked passing cars for stolen goods. Any plunder was confiscated, and people in the cars were taken out and beaten and tossed in an alley.
In Saddam City, a Baghdad slum dominated by Shia Muslims and named after the Sunni Muslim leader they despised, mosque minarets blared appeals to people to stop looting and destroying their city. Some people heeded the clerics' calls and brought stolen goods to mosques for safekeeping.
In some neighbourhoods, residents erected street barricades of tiles, huge rocks and sandbags to keep looters out.
A man strapped with explosives blew himself up at a checkpoint near the Saddam City section of Baghdad on Thursday night. Four Marines were seriously wounded.
A short time later, a man started walking toward U.S. soldiers stationed at an intersection near the Government's tourism department. The soldiers fired four warning shots, but the man kept coming. They opened fire. When they found his body in the morning, he was unarmed.
The nursing college at Baghdad University was ransacked along with the Engineering College Al-Mustansiriyah. A company from the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division stumbled on a personal weapons cache belonging to Mr. Hussein's son Uday in a Baath Party enclave in an otherwise empty house. There were hundreds of Beretta 9mm pistol boxes — the pistols had been looted — and dozens of gold- and silver-plated military weapons, apparently presented as gifts to Uday.
The fall of Mosul, a city of more than 600,000, came a day after U.S. and Kurdish forces took Kirkuk, the other major city in the north. Both cities have economic links to nearby oil fields that have been secured virtually intact. Mosul, the main city in the north and the third-largest in Iraq, fell without bloodshed as American forces arrived and accepted the surrender of the Iraqi army's 5th Corps commander. Unarmed, bootless ex-soldiers began a long trek home, while looters moved in, pillaging banks and other buildings. Looting and celebrations spread quickly; some people grabbed wads of bills from the Central Bank.
Kurdish civilians from their autonomous region in the far northeast of Iraq were streaming into Kirkuk on Friday, delighted at the chance to see friends and relatives for the first time in years. Many were dressed in what appeared to be their finest clothes.
On the other side of Kirkuk, thousands of young Iraqi soldiers walked south toward Baghdad, making their way home on a blacktop highway after abandoning their positions. A report from Cairo said Mr. Hussein's half-brother, Barzan al-Takriti, died today morning in a U.S. bombing of his farm, in the region of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
AP, Reuters, AFP
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