Robert Fisk: American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour

3.00pm

BAGHDAD - It started with a series of massive vibrations, a great 'stomping' sound that physically shook my room.

Stomp, stomp, stomp, it went.

I lay in bed trying to fathom the cause.

It was like the moment in Jurassic Park when the tourists first hear the footfalls of the dinosaur, an ever increasing, ever more frightening thunder of regular, monstrous heartbeats.

Through my window on the east bank of the Tigris, I saw an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun firing from the roof of a white, four-storey building half a mile away, shooting straight across the river at something on the opposite bank.

Stomp, stomp, it went again, the sound so enormous that it set off the burglar alarms in a thousand cars along the riverbank.

And it was only when I stood on the roadway at dawn that I knew what had happened.

Not since the last Gulf War in 1991 had I heard the sound of American artillery fire.

And there, only a few hundred metres away on the far bank of the Tigris, I saw them.

At first they looked like tiny, armoured centipedes, stopping and starting, dappled brown and grey, weird little creatures that had come to inspect an alien land and search for water.

You had to keep your eye on the centipedes to interpret reality, to realise that each creature was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, that its tail was a cluster of US Marines hiding for cover behind the armour, moving forward together each time their protection revved its engines and manoeuvred closer to the Tigris.

There was a burst of gunfire from the Americans and a smart clatter of rocket-propelled grenades and puffs of white smoke from the Iraqi soldiers and militiamen dug into their foxholes and trenches on the same riverbank farther south.

It was that quick and that simple and that awesome.

Indeed, the sight was so extraordinary, so unexpected -- despite all the Pentagon boasts and Bush promises -- that one somehow forgot the precedents that it was setting for the future history of the Middle East.

Amid the crack of gunfire and the tracer streaking across the river and the huge oil fires which the Iraqis lit to give them cover to retreat, one had to look away -- to the great river bridges further north, into the pale green waters of that most ancient of rivers -- to realise that a western army on a moral crusade had broken through to the heart of an Arab city for the first time since General Allenby marched into Jerusalem in 1918.

But Allenby walked into Jerusalem on foot, in reverence for Christ's birthplace; yesterday's American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour about it.

The Marines and Special Forces who spread out along the west bank of the river broke into Saddam Hussein's largest palace, filmed its lavatories and bathrooms and lay resting on its lawns before moving down towards the Rashid Hotel and sniping at both soldiers and civilians.

Hundreds of Iraqi men, women and children were brought in agony to Baghdad's hospitals in the hours that followed, victims of bullets, shrapnel and cluster bombs.

We could actually see the twin-engined American A-10s firing their depleted uranium rounds into the far shore of the river.

From the eastern bank, I watched the Marines run towards a ditch with rifles to their shoulders to search for Iraqi troops.

But their enemies went on firing from the mudflats to the south until, one after another, I saw them running for their lives.

The Iraqis clambered out of their foxholes amid the American shellfire and began a run of terror along the waterside. Most kept their weapons, some fell back to an exhausted walk, others splashed right into the waters of the Tigris, up to their knees, even their necks.

Three soldiers climbed from a trench with their hands in the air, in front of a group of Marines.

But others fought on. The Stomp, Stomp, Stomp of the American guns went on for more than an hour.

Then the A-10s came back, and an F-18 fighter-bomber that sent a ripple of fire along the trenches after which the shooting died away.

It seemed as if Baghdad would fall within hours. But the day was to be characterised with that most curious of war's attributes, a crazed mixture of normality, death and high farce.

For even as the Americans were fighting their way north up the river and the F-18s were returning to bombard the bank, the Iraqi minister of information turned up to give a press conference on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, scarcely half a mile from the battle.

As shells exploded to his left and the air was shredded by the power-diving American jets, Mohamed al-Sahaff announced to perhaps a hundred journalists that the whole thing was a propaganda exercise, that the Americans were no longer in possession of Baghdad airport, that reporters must "check their facts and re-check their facts - that's all I ask you to do."

Mercifully, the oil fires, bomb explosions and cordite smoke now obscured the western bank of the river so that fact-checking could no longer be accomplished by looking behind Mr. Sahaff's back.

What the world wanted to know, of course, was if Baghdad was about to be occupied, whether the Iraqi government would surrender and -- the Question of All Questions -- where was Saddam? But Mr Sahaff used up his time to condemn the Arabic television channel Al-Djezairai for its bias towards the United States and to excoriate the Americans for using 'the lounges and halls' of Saddam Hussein to make "cheap propaganda".

The Americans "will be buried here," he shouted above the battle.

"Don't believe these invaders. They will be defeated."

Only last week, Mr Sahaff informed us that the Americans would acquire graves in the desert. Now their place of interment had moved to the city.

And the more he spoke, the more one wanted to interrupt Mr Sahaff, to say "but hang on, Mr. Minister, take a look over your right shoulder." But of course, that's not the way things happen.

Why didn't we all take a drive around town, he suggested.

So I did.

The corporation's double-decker buses were running and, if the shops were shut, stallholders were open, and near Yassir Arafat street, men had gathered in cheap tea-houses to discuss the war.

I went off to buy fruit, and the shopkeeper didn't stop counting my dinars -- all 11,500 of them -- when a low-flying American jet crossed the street and dropped its payload a thousand metres away in an explosion that changed the air pressure in our ears.

But every street corner had its clutch of militiamen and, when I reached the side of the Foreign Ministry on the western bank of the river upstream from the Marines, an Iraqi artillery crew was firing a 120mm gun at the Americans from the middle of a duel carriageway, its tongue of fire bright against the grey-black fog that was now drifting over Baghdad.

Within an hour and a half, the Americans had moved up the southern waterfront and were in danger of overrunning the old ministry of information.

Outside the Rashid hotel, they opened fire on civilians and militiamen alike, blasting a passing motorcyclist onto the road and shooting at a Reuters photographer who escaped with only bullet holes in his car.

All across Baghdad, hospitals were inundated with wounded, many of them women and children hit by fragments of cluster bombs.

By dusk, the Americans were flying F-18s in close air support to the US Marines, so confident of their destruction of Iraq's anti-aircraft gunners that they could clearly be seen cruising the brown and grey skies in pairs over central Baghdad, turning lazily southwards and west while the cross-river shellfire continued.

At mid-afternoon, the Americans located an ammunition dump on the western bank of the river not far from the presidential palace -- one of three they occupied yesterday -- and blew up the lot in a sheet of flame several hundred feet high.

For hours afterwards, shells could be heard whizzing from the conflagration, sometimes exploding in the sky.

Even as they did so -- and clearly intending to enrage Saddam and his ministers -- the Americans transmitted live-time pictures of their exploration of the Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris, showing the presidential lavatory seat, his marble-walled bathroom and gold-plated taps and chandeliers and Special Forces soldiers sun-bathing -- though there was no sun -- on the presidential lawn.

Was this what they call "rich in history"? General Stanley Maude invaded Iraq in 1917 and occupied Baghdad. We repeated the performance in 1941 when Rashid Ali decided to give Iraq's backing to Nazi Germany.

The British and Australians and the Arabs "liberated" Damascus from the Turks in 1918. The Israelis occupied Beirut in 1982 and lived -- though not all of them -- to regret it.

Now the armies of America and, far behind them, the British -- a pale ghost of Maude's army -- are moving steadily into this most northeastern of Arab capitals to dominate a land which borders Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

As night fell yesterday, I came across a small rampart of concrete at the eastern end of the great Rashid Bridge over the Tigris.

Its three Iraqi defenders had propped their Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade launchers neatly in line along the top of the parapet.

Hundreds of American tanks and armoured vehicles were rumoured to be pouring down to the Tigris from the southwest of Baghdad and these three Iraqis -- two Baathist militiaman and a policeman -- were standing there ready to defend the eastern shore from the greatest army ever known to man.

That in itself, I thought, said something about both the courage and the hopelessness of the Arabs.

Herald Feature: Iraq war