Robert Fisk: US blind to looters' fury

It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German Embassy and threw the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag - flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section - as a mob of middle-aged men, chadored women and screaming children rifled through the consul's office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from a window.

The Slovakian Embassy was broken into a few hours later.

At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing new photocopiers on top of each other and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition across the floors.

The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad after the most stage-managed photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima, but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty - seem to have a different idea of what liberation means.

It also represented a serious breach of the Geneva Convention. As the occupying power, the United States is responsible for protecting embassies and UN offices in their area of control, but their troops were driving past the German Embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the front gate.

It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania which American troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection, I saw US Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise buildings, scanning the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters - two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators - crowded the highway beneath them. Outside the UN offices, a car slowed beside me and one of the unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth visiting because "we've already taken everything".

Understandably, the poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam's regime who have impoverished and destroyed their lives - sometimes literally - for more than two decades.

I watched whole families search through the Tigris bank homes of Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former Interior Minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid -"Chemical Ali" who mustard- gassed the Kurds and was killed last week in Basra - and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys to make off with the contents of these huge villas.

It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings which senior Baath party members aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drink trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy that it took three muscular thieves to carry them, standard lamps concealed inside brass palm trees, inlaid wooden tables and huge American fridges, so many fridges for so much booze to be drunk by Saddam's acolytes.

Outside the gutted home of one former minister, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

City buses passed me driven by leering young men while trucks backed up to living room windows to load furnishings directly from the rooms.

On the Saddam Bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed that he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and lay dead at the wheel.

But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no arguments, no fist-fights.

The dozens of thieves in the German Embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children were used to unscrew door hinges and - in the UN offices - to remove light fittings.

One stood on the ambassador's desk to take a light bulb from its ceiling socket.

On the other side of the Saddam Bridge, an even more surreal sight could be observed - a truck laden with chairs but with the two white hunting dogs, which belonged to Saddam's son Qusay, tethered by two white ropes and galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I even caught a glimpse of four of Saddam's horses - including the white stallion he used in presidential portraits - being loaded on to a trailer.

Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files, computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen, but how is the Government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now the state's property has been so comprehensively looted?

And what is one to make of the scene on the Hilla road yesterday where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries.

I found that this desperate and armed attempt to preserve the basis of Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100m away by eight soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks and doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown are just 200m from a US Marine checkpoint.

And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to look like an army of occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Doura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers - in front of other civilians, including women - to prove that they were not suicide bombers.

Following a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car which failed to halt - then shot and killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing.

Within minutes, the sniper shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in his vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Britain's Channel 4 Television were present when the killings took place.

In the suburb of Doura, the bodies of Iraqi civilians - many killed by US troops in a battle between American and Iraqi forces earlier in the week - still lay rotting in their smouldering cars.

Vast areas of Baghdad remain outside US control. And at dusk on Thursday on day one of the American occupation, I crossed through the American lines, back to the little bit of Saddam' s regime that then remained intact within the vast, flat city.

And there, on the corner of Bab al-Moazzam St, were a small group of Mujahedin fighters, firing their Kalashnikov rifles at the American tanks on the other side of the waterway. It was brave, of course, and utterly pathetic and painfully instructive.

For the men turned out to be Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Not an Iraqi was among them. The Baathist militiamen, the Republican Guard, the greasy Iraqi intelligence men, the so-called Saddam "fedayeen" had all left their posts and crept home. Only the foreign Arabs fought on.

Said one: "We left our wives and children and came here to die for these people and then they told us to go."

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq war