DESPATCHES AT RANDOM (All stories from The Telegraph)

IRAQ 2003

Road of fear keeps refugees home- only convoys dare take 1000-km baghdad highway

SUJAN DUTTA

Along the road to Baghdad: It is five hours to the Karama border crossing from Amman, Jordan, on a biting cold night. Then it is 660 km to Baghdad. On the Jordanian side, the desert is a rocky, undulating stretch of black vastness and jagged outlines in the light of the full moon.Daybreak brings Iraq and American soldiers and military Humvees: Americans in the Iraqi desert, Americans checking passports of Iraqis and either turning them back or letting them in.On the Jordan side, the camps of white tents set up by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees are mostly empty. A few Sudanese had crossed over.In Kuwait, near the border at Umm Qasr in southern Iraq, US military civil affairs officers say this is a war without refugees. “We planned it that way. We dropped millions of pamphlets advising people to stay at home, we were convincing when we said we will not target civilians.”Here, the road to and from Baghdad — all of 1,000 km long — is a long reason, one of several why the war has not caused an exodus. Under the UN sanctions regime, the Amman-Baghdad highway is the only legal entry and exit point to Iraq. (In their dash to Baghdad, the American forces did not take this route).The road is wider on the Iraqi side, six-laned, an endless strip of black asphalt on hues of brown. The desert stretches end to end, rising sometimes into mesas and dropping into gullies. Two or three bedouin herd sheep every hundred kilometres or so.The road to Baghdad is a stretch of fear. Few dare travel it on their own in these times. All traffic plies in convoys. All traffic is a potential target: for lawless bands of militia from a disintegrating Iraqi army, from desperados in invisible desert settlements, or from “friendly fire” of buzzing US aircraft.There is traffic on the road to Syria, too, in the wake of the war. Syria is to the north of the Amman-Baghdad highway. That is also the route, the US suspects, taken by fleeing leaders of Saddam Hussein’s regime. (The Russian ambassador’s convoy was attacked on that road. It was headed for Damascus.)Rutbah is the first town from the Jordan road, 160 km inside Iraq. The local hospital is destroyed. Patients are either treated at a local health centre or sent to a hospital in Ramadi 300 km away.The highway passes over a bridge near a crossing. The bridge was bombed — the Baghdad side of the road here is blocked. A gaping hole in the concrete eats into the lanes on the other side. But traffic passes through: the vehicles drive in single file through a narrow gap between the hole and the edge of the highway. This is really the only serious damage to the road that otherwise affords speeds of upto 140 kmph.The detritus of war is all along the stretch: the median is torn away every few kilometres, burnt-out cars, buses, pick-up vans, charred, shot-up chassis of tanks, armoured carriers and anti-aircraft guns have been pushed to the sides. Burnt and exploded tyres have been gathered into piles since the war peaked and the road was cleared.The convoy stops for a breather by the skeletal remains of a bus lying on its side. It has no wheels, its windows are smashed, its insides charred. There is not a bird in sight, just brown desolation and a mad wind that howls.The Jordanian drivers decide to leave suddenly. On the horizon, someone has seen the threatening shape of a sandstorm. In the event, it is not one. The wind has whipped up loose sand and the road is vanishing in a watercolour effect.Some 100 km short of Baghdad, the convoy stops to refuel. It is the first time in weeks that benzene is available. The blackmarket is functioning. Iraqi fuel is dirt cheap (80 litres cost $35 in Jordan and just $5 here) and the Jordanians fill up their jerricans here. The fuel station is at a crossing where the road from Al Qaim near the Syrian border heads south to Ramadi.Raad Mohammad,with his family in two shiny Mercedes, is headed towards Baghdad. They had left the capital and taken refuge in Qaim. Raad is about 50. He studied fuel engineering, wears a pricey leather jacket, horn-rimmed glasses and flashes a Tucson, Arizona, driver’s licence. “I’m returning after three weeks,” he says.The family had first thought they would go abroad but then decided on a friend’s place in the north. If the situation got worse, they had decided, they would slip into Syria.Raad is a businessman who speaks English with an American twang. He is uncomfortable speaking to journalists who are not from the States. He is unabashed about his prosperity. “I don’t know,” he replies when asked if he would rate himself as rich. “Maybe I’m just smart.”An hour later, the road passes through abandoned gun positions on either side. The sandbags from the bunkers have burst open. Half the road is swallowed by six Abrams tanks, their youthful American soldiers stripped to the waist and washing or smoking.“Saddam International Airport,” a signboard reads. Two Iraqi tanks, their turrets and tracks blown off, are on either side. A column of thick black smoke rises from a gutted factory shed.

TREMOR ACROSS THE LINE: KASHMIR EARTHQUAKE OCTOBER 2005

Enemy soldier to saathi
- Indians save life of a Pakistani trooper slipping down hill
SUJAN DUTTA
2005
Military post near Tangdhar, Oct. 10: Shouts of saathi ? friend, comrade, colleague ? fly back and forth across this disputed boundary between soldiers of Indian and Pakistani armies.
Armies that have been eyeball-to-eyeball for over five decades are striking a strange fellowship founded on grief and concern.
Troops of the Indian army’s Shakti Vijay Brigade and Pakistan’s 54 Brigade have not waited for orders or permission from commanding officers to alert each other.
Abdur Rouf, a soldier of the Indian Army’s 12 Field Regiment from Basirhat, north of Calcutta, will carry back with him a story to narrate to his grandchildren.
Rouf was in a detachment manning the Rani Post, 25 metres from two Pakistani army posts, Point 1 and Point 2, yesterday. He saw a Pakistani soldier slip and fall down a hillside. The soldier could be seen by the Indians, but not by the Pakistanis.
The quake has loosened rocks and boulders all over these hills. Several bodies are trapped under them, invisible from aerial recces.
“Saathi,” Rouf hollered. They could not hear. “Saathi, saathi,” his mates joined him in a chorus. This time they heard. “Aapka banda wahan gir gaya hain (Your chap has fallen there. Pick him up, we won’t fire.”
The Pakistani soldier was saved.
The officers know, and have even encouraged this fellowship. Helicopters that were forbidden from flying within less than a km from the LoC now fly to Tithwal and Bajarkot and Simara and Tarh, villages perched almost on the line.
The line here is the Kishanganga River, called Neelum on the Pakistani side.
The Pakistan army’s mujahid battalions across have responded in kind. An Indian soldier on patrol who strayed across the LoC during the quake was returned.
Cheetah and Chetak helicopters of the army’s aviation corps and the BSF ferry casualties from villages and posts all along the boundary here. The smaller helicopters fly between the hills to the helipad in Tangdhar. Casualties that have to be evacuated to a larger hospital in Srinagar are transferred to larger Mi-17 choppers.
Across the watershed, the Pakistani army is flying two- and four-seater Puma helicopters. The small helicopters look like glass-and-metal grasshoppers without wings. In the Pakistani village named Chilliana that can be seen from an Indian post the traffic is particularly heavy. An army officer says there are 30 children buried in the debris of a school there.
Pakistani soldiers of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and mujahid battalions who man posts, some of them 11,000 to 14,000 feet high, have taken several times more casualties than the Indians.
As the crow flies, the epicentre of the quake is just about 25 km from here in the locality called Nausheri-Nausadda in the PoK capital, Muzaffarabad. The tremors did not stop at the LoC.
The military hospital in Tangdhar, the Indian brigade headquarters surrounded by the LoC on three sides, is almost entirely destroyed but is still functional. Three boulders the size of Ambassador cars rolled down and bounded through the hospital like tennis balls. Two soldiers were killed.
The Border Security Force’s 83rd battalion that is posted here along with the army has lost 14 of some 21 posts. Usually, naming and identifying military posts is fraught with risks. Not so now, because military posts on both sides have been devastated, more on the Pakistani side.
Some of the posts have beautiful names: Majmun and Usha, Talwar and Khan FDL (forward defended locality), Bukhari, Neeti and Nageena, Gayatri and Bijlidhar.
The BSF commandant at a post in Tithwal volunteered help to the Pakistanis on the other side. He saw Pakistani posts on the Kaferkhan Range in Lipa Valley, just west of here, come down with the entire rockface of the ridge.
“After that mountain came down,” he recalls, “we could not see anything because it was brown with dust”.

Army in a relief battle it can’t win
SUJAN DUTTA IN URI AND TANGDHAR
Oct. 11: Humiliated and outraged, Anwar Hussain’s voice cracks and his words are barely audible as he shouts at the young army captain, waves his fist and urges the driver of his taxi to push on.
In the seat behind him, his frail mother, her head and her left hand bandaged but bleeding, stares with eyes that look unseeing.
“Can’t you see,” a tearful Hussain is yelling at and pleading with the army officer at the same time, “she may die; I must get her to the hospital in Baramulla.”
People from his village on the outskirts of Uri have gathered around the car and the restive mob, many of them with red, flaring eyes from two sleepless and shelterless nights, is on the verge of getting violent.
But the young captain from Bangalore has his orders and his INSAS rifle. The orders stipulate that all cars and people passing through his checkpoint must be frisked.
This is Kashmir today. Kashmir is a word for disaster relief in a war zone.
It calls for an effort of gargantuan proportions that cannot easily be imagined even in Bhuj (earthquake) and Nagapattinam (tsunami). The calamity has not meant a stop to either militancy or counter-insurgency operations.
However energetic the efforts look here, they are still feeble given the enormity of the disaster.
Just 7 km from where Hussain was pleading with the captain to let his patient through, on the helipad of the Kala Pahar Brigade, army and air force personnel are rushing with stretchers bearing bloodied bodies from helicopter to field ambulance to helicopter.
The stretcher-bearers ? jawans ? hardly have time to catch their breath. There just aren’t enough flying machines to evacuate all the casualties to Srinagar’s hospitals. Security check at the entrance to the brigade’s establishment is tight.
In six years, there has been an earthquake in Gujarat, a tsunami off Tamil Nadu, a cyclone in Orissa and there is a drought in so many districts 24/7.
Last week, Air Chief Marshal Shashi Tyagi described the past 12 months as “the year of aid to civil authority”.
A National Disaster Management Authority under General (retired) N.C. Vij was set up last month but it was busy trying to find living quarters for the former chief of army staff when the earthquake in Kashmir struck.
In Kashmir, one of the most militarised regions in the world, the army has responded with wartime urgency because it was already here, because it is part of the life of this place. Yet there are distractions.
Since this morning the hubs of emergency operations ? the airport and the air force station in Srinagar, the helipads in Uri and Tangdhar and the entrances and exits to them ? are choking with security personnel. There is a third VIP visit in three days. After Sonia Gandhi and Pranab Mukherjee, it’s Manmohan Singh.
Uri and Tangdhar need porters to carry tents and food, stretcher-bearers to transport the injured and doctors to help those who can survive. The Congress president, the defence minister and the Prime Minister rank in none of these groups.


GUJARAT FEBRUARY-MARCH 2002

2002
WHEN GUARDIANS OF GUJARAT GAVE 24-HOUR LICENCE FOR PUNITIVE ACTION


FROM SUJAN DUTTA

Ahmedabad, March 9:
Pogrom > noun; organised massacre (originally of Jews in Russia) (The Little Oxford Dictionary)
The riots in Gujarat in the wake of the Godhra train carnage on February 27 were not only tacitly backed by the state administration, but chief minister Narendra Modi’s government also gave the VHP/Bajrang Dal stormtroopers 24 hours to do the job.
While it cannot be reported that the government set a deadline, investigations by The Telegraph over the past week reveal that the top men in the government moved in a fashion that made it clear to the VHP/Bajrang Dal that “turant jawabi karvai” (quick punitive action in the words of the Bajrang Dal) must be taken by the evening of February 28.
In the event, much of the vengeance — if that is what the systematic pillage, looting and killing can be called — spent itself out within that time, but the violence spilled over to the districts, villages and smaller towns. It continues in small pockets more than a week after the Godhra burnings.
That the VHP and the Bajrang Dal have organic linkages with the current rulers of Gujarat is public knowledge. Even so, the pointman between the administration and the VHP leadership was the person entrusted with the peaceful running of the state: state home minister Gordhanbhai Zhadapia, himself a secretary of the VHP for six years before moving on to electoral politics and the BJP.
The Modi government’s decision to support the “jawabi karvai” was conveyed to the VHP/Bajrang Dal on the evening of February 27 in Godhra itself. That day, chief minister Modi, home minister Zhadapia, health minister Ashok Bhatt, VHP state joint general secretary Jaidipbhai Patel and VHP state organising secretary Arvindbhai Patel were in the town.
They met and talked several times: in Signal Falia where the S-6 coach of the Sabarmati Express was torched, in the collectorate, in the hospital, in the run of things. It was not a formal, structured meeting in which the decision was made clear to the VHP. It was conveyed to them on-the-fly, as it were, but with the warning that a spiralling of violence could mean deployment of the army by midnight Thursday-Friday (February 28-March 1).
Till late in the evening of February 27, the VHP leadership was anxious to get support from the BJP for the statewide bandh on February 28, the day following the Godhra killings. The decision to call for a bandh was taken by the afternoon of February 27, and across Gujarat, the VHP/Bajrang Dal cadre interpreted it as a call to action.
The decision was taken mostly in mobile-phone consultations between the VHP office-bearers in Godhra and Ahmedabad, state VHP general secretary Dilipbhai Trivedi, who was going to Delhi from Ayodhya on the Saryu-Yamuna Express, VHP international division chief Praveen Togadia and Gujarat BJP president and MP Rajendra Sing Rana, who was in New Delhi for the Parliament session.
The formal decision of the BJP to support the bandh call was announced through a press note issued around 8 pm. The VHP/Bajrang Dal took that as an endorsement of its stand. The BJP did agonise over the decision to support the bandh call chiefly because the state police intelligence chief, additional director-general of police G.C. Raigar, had warned of its consequences.
Even by the afternoon and the early evening of February 27 — the Sabarmati Express was torched in the morning — violence was breaking out. The BJP was also hopeful of a more strident condemnation of the attack on the Sabarmati Express from secular forces.
The Telegraph quotes from a conversation with Kaushik Mehta, one of the two joint general secretaries of the VHP in Gujarat. The conversation took place in the VHP office in Ahmedabad on March 7 and was an hour long.
Mehta wanted the conversation to be kept off the record. But The Telegraph did not make a commitment.
Mehta: “Let me tell you something off the record. The violence would not have taken place if the secular parties had strongly condemned the attack on the Ram sevaks. In particular, till the late-evening of the 27th, we were expecting a condemnation of the attack from the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. But that did not come.
“Then it was decided there should be a model for reprisals. It was important to teach a lesson that could be emulated…. We had also sensed that once again the Centre was moving towards blaming the ISI for perpetrating the Godhra attack. All the 2,000 men, women and children could not have been ISI agents.”
What followed was a pogrom. People were targeted irrespective of standing and political colour. Asked if violence would not beget violence, Dilip Trivedi, state VHP general secretary said: “We hope not. We hope that after what has happened, a lesson will have been learnt.”


TALL AND SHORT OF A BORDER STORY


Border at 14,400ft opens with tussle over height
- Chinese, Indian guards conspire to gain inches on each other as VIPs make speeches in the rain
SUJAN DUTTA

Nathu-la, July 6: An Indian policeman and a Chinese soldier standing shoulder to shoulder at 14,400ft today crafted the tall and short of a story of how borders go soft despite provoking tempers in South Asia.
Constable Harish Solanki of the Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and a corporal identified as Chang Yeoh played out a quiet drama for several hours in the rain and blustery cold winds on the pass that continued through the official ceremonies to mark its opening for trade.
They stood in the middle of the pass as silent sentinels of each other’s countries with the Line of Actual Control demarcating India and China passing between the one’s left shoulder and the other’s right.
Solanki was deputed to be the honour guard on the line from the Indian side. The ITBP has been posted here to secure the 7-km corridor to the Sherathang market, the point inside India till where Chinese traders will be permitted to go.
In posting Solanki at the pass, the Indian side was also complying with a UN convention by which countries agree not to post armies on international boundaries. Viewed from New Delhi, this is a near-final resolution of the issue of Sikkim, whose accession to India in 1975 was objected to by the Chinese. The ITBP is a paramilitary force. The Chinese, however, kept a PLA soldier on the line.
Solanki, a strapping beanpole of a Haryanvi from Palam near Delhi is an imposing 6ft 3in.
When Solanki took his post, he found that a Chinese soldier from the PLA, who would have otherwise been just at chest-height for him, was standing on a stool. Without a murmur, the Indian side decided to get Solanki also a stool. Neither was in the script.
“What they (the Chinese) have done is against the drill,” said Raj Kishore, commandant of Solanki’s battalion. “So instead of asking them to remove their stool to avoid last-minute hitches, we have got one ourselves.”
This restored Solanki’s (and India’s) stature. But it dismayed the Chinese. They too decided to take genteel action. Their border guardsman was substituted by a taller one ? this was Chang Yeoh. The high-heeled jackboots pushed him closer to six feet.
Solanki’s ITBP colleagues decided that the Indian was still taller and if the Chinese believed that they had scaled the right height in Nathu-la, they were welcome to harbour that optical illusion. Solanki and Yeoh put shoulder to shoulder and locked eyes for a millisecond. Then both became statuesque.
The Chinese PLA now did a reassessment. There was little time left, Sikkim’s chief minister Pawan Chamling had arrived, as had the Chinese ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi, and the governor of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Giangba Puncog.
The VIPs met warmly, shaking hands and pleasantries in the open despite the wind and the rain, prompting an Indian army officer to remark in Hindi: “When frozen relationships melt, conditions will be wet”.
During this exchange, Yeoh’s stool was replaced by a small table. The Chinese soldier displayed no emotion as he took his perch. Unlike his predecessor he was not looking sideways intermittently and jostling to look taller. This was clearly a happier state of affairs. India’s Solanki, too, accepted the enforced equality and his turban still rated him several inches higher than Yeoh’s peaked cap.
Chamling was concluding his speech. He hoped that the opening of Nathu-la was a new beginning and that border trade would pave the way for transit and tourism. Sun Yuxi said: “Border trade is a way of resolving the outstanding issues between India and China.”
Now another PLA soldier goes up to Yeoh, wipes his jackboots off water and adjusts his epaulettes. The rain gets stronger. Constable Solanki has a problem. His imposing turban is getting wet, he confides to his colleagues. Another stool is conjured up and placed behind Solanki. A fellow constable takes his position behind him and holds up an umbrella for Solanki’s turban. Water trickles off the umbrella and on to Yeoh’s shoulder, wetting his uniform.
By this time the ceremony is over and the bands have struck the Indian national song and a Chinese number. A total of 89 traders from Yatung region of Tibet are to cross into India and 100 Indian traders from Sikkim will go over to Rinchengang in China.
In the Chinese delegation there is Sonam Tashi from a village in Yatung who speaks a smattering of English and is attired colourfully in a traditional Tibeta Chhuba (robe).
What does he thinking of the reopening of Nathu-la on Dalai Lama’s birthday? “Communist, yes, communist,” says Tashi, walking off.
Behind the Chinese delegation, the atmosphere on the LAC where Solanki and Yeoh stood is now more relaxed. They have been replaced and the new border guardsmen are not on perches and are not standing frozen in attention any more.
Solanki asks for hot tea. He smiles and says “chhotu” was only up to his ears. It was difficult to gain PLA soldier Yeoh’s confidence. When it was sought, one of his comrades curtly said: “Discipline, please, discipline.” But then he also offers a cigarette, perhaps knowing plains Indians do not smoke in the rarefied air of these mountains.
That is the long and short of the Nathu-la story. The skirmishing has stopped, the jostling has not but the border went soft today.


Break in 22-year routine
- Army calls Nathu-la international boundary, postman awaits orders to cross it
SUJAN DUTTA

Nathu-la, July 6: One man stands out in Nathu-la today. Postman Bhim Bahadur Tamang, 48. Every Thursday and Sunday for 22 years, Tamang has been crossing Nathu-la by foot to deliver the post.
But as of this afternoon, he has not been able to go through the routine, though it is a Thursday. The reason is what is happening here today is not routine. Therefore, it has upset Tamang’s schedule.
He does not know till late whether he will go across today. He is waiting for his orders even as the weather is packing up.
“I just go up there,” he says, pointing at a building on a bluff across the border in China no more than 300 metres away. “Sometimes it is with just one letter, sometimes two or three. I can’t remember when I had a bag full of letters to deliver.”
Despite the skirmishing and tension since the border was closed in 1962, India and China have been exchanging post regularly twice a week through Nathu-la.
Tamang has been on the job, he says, “from before 1980”. He lives in Sherathang, where the Sikkim government has built the trade mart for exchanges with Chinese traders. It is seven kilometres from Sherathang to Nathu-la and Tamang then just walks across.
“It takes me no more than three minutes in that office,” he says. “In fact, I have to leave that office in three minutes and then get back here.”
Why so few letters?
“Not many people use the postal department these days for international postage here,” he says.
Next to Tamang, an Indian wants to photograph him and wants to hang his umbrella on the barbed wire fence that demarcates the border. An Indian soldier quickly marches in and says the umbrella has to be removed.
“Why?” asks the would-be photographer.
“You ask why?” the soldier shoots back. “The world has been holding its breath for this, India and China have been at odds over this, we are posted here for years for this and you want to hang your umbrella on it?”
Tamang hears the exchange. He has no role to play in this. Neither can he leave. He is waiting for orders to go across.

Pass seal on Sikkim
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Nathu-la, July 6: Indian government organisations involved in the opening of this pass for border trade are consistently referring to this point as the “international boundary”, conveying that whatever residual issues on resolving China’s acknowledgement of Sikkim as a part of India have been resolved.
Nathu-la is on what has been technically called the “Line of Actual Control” between India and China in east Sikkim. Such a recognition from Beijing ? if any were warranted since the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao presented a map showing Sikkim in India during his April 2005 visit to New Delhi ? comes on the birthday of the Dalai Lama, whose Tibetan government-in-exile enjoys Indian hospitality.
“Despite the trade, the Indian Army will continue to man the international boundary including Nathu-la. The security concerns in carrying out our primary tasks have been adequately addressed in light of the trade activity across the pass,” the Indian Army said in a press statement here.
“The relations between the two armies continue to be cordial and regular border personnel meetings are held twice a year. Issues of concern are promptly addressed through the telephone hotline or through flag meetings between the two military garrisons,” the army said.
The Border Roads Organisation (BRO), headed by the army, also has a new description for Nathu-la. An official brief by Dantak, the BRO project that maintains the road, says: “Project Dantak of the Border Roads Organisation was tasked last year in July 2005 to execute all work to join the Jawaharlal Nehru Marg (as the road is named in India) with the Chinese road at the Nathu-la international border”.
Sikkim’s chief minister Pawan Chamling did not use the words “international boundary” or “international border” in his speech at the ceremony to mark Nathu-la’s opening but said he expected the event to lead to more liberalisation of Indian and Chinese border policies.
“The re-opening of Nathu-la trade route also augurs well for the entire Northeast region of India. This is the way to realise the larger goals of India’s ‘Look East’ policy and consolidate sub-regional groupings like South Asia Growth Quadrangle and (the) Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Techno-Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC),” he said.
He said Sikkim was “honoured” to be a land-bridge between India and China. “Please be assured that this rare honour bestowed upon us would be respected, maintained and operationalised in the best Indian tradition of keeping the national interest aloft for ever and ever.”
The Nathu-la experience today is a rare instance of a state government having a say in shaping foreign policy.


IRAQ 2003 AMERICA & ANARCHY MARCH IN


Liberated with chain of hunger
SUJAN DUTTA

Safwan, Southern Iraq, March 28: Ten metres, just 10 metres to go, the Iraqi urchins and youth hang desperately to the container of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society on the trailer as the driver releases the accelerator to take a right turn, the doors swing wildly, a trench, a gate, the no-man’s land, a couple of mangy dogs, a watchtower and Iraq will end and Kuwait will begin.
Then the gunshots. Three at first, five, then nine.
The trailer is across the border, the buses in which journalists have been taken from Kuwait City are into Kuwait. Who fired: the British troops, the Kuwaiti army?
The sliver of Iraq across the sand shelf that demarcates the border was the first to be “liberated” when the military machine of the coalition forces rolled in a little over a week ago. At Safwan, the closest Iraqi town on the border, two container-loads of aid from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society are at Junine village.
At first the Iraqis come in a trickle, it builds up to a crowd in minutes and suddenly into a mob. The mangy dogs are looking for morsels. Ela Salah Waheli, a woman in purdah, has come to ask for medicine. Her diabetic husband is short of insulin. She cannot even get near the container. Ela has a family of six. Syed Hammdi, 11, who used to go to the Fayat Hammdi Madarsa, displays an Iraqi dinar with Saddam Hussein’s portrait. He is displaying the picture, not the currency note.
Hediya, who says her name means “gift”, raises her forefinger and cries insistently: “Just one, just one carton, please”. She is elderly, cannot push her way through. Just three in her family. The Red Crescent volunteers are dumping the cartons, the cartons are snatched, grabbed, torn apart. Inside there are tetrapacks of whole milk, bread, some grain.
On the far side, the coalition military machine rolls. Trailers, armoured personnel carriers, trucks with machine gunners and fuel for them. Farther east, a column of smoke rises from a wellhead in the Rumaila oilfields.
Fuel for a war over fuel.
“Are you Arabic?” Abdul Aziz comes up and asks. He knows a smattering of English.
“No, Indian. Do you live here?”
“I do. You Muslim?”
“No.”
“Which country?”
“India.”
“Oh, all India Muslim.”
“Does that matter?”
“I no follow. Saddam salaam.”
“You don’t need food.”
“No. I have food for two months.” His Datsun half-truck is being used by others to load the cartons. The mob has raised a little dust storm. All around, there is frenetic shouting, hands reach out, pull down others near the containers.
Then there is a scream. Fellow traveller Yolanda Monge of the Spanish newspaper El Pais runs across to a bus, some 10, 15 youth chase her. She jumps into the bus, the driver, a Bangladeshi, Shaheen, speeds away.
Then the mob explodes. Abdul Aziz was distracting me as a boy unzipped my backpack and put his hand inside. Run, flee. All around, the others are doing the same. The bus screeches to a halt in front of a machine-gunner’s nest. British troops.
“I say,” bellows the sergeant. “We have a situation here, will you please get your asses off here?” It is a situation. How many times in India is relief “distributed” to the hungry after cyclones, droughts, wars?
This is supposed to be a publicity exercise for Kuwait, that it is concerned for the Iraqi people. Somebody has made a snatch at the cameras, somebody’s mobile phone is missing.
Junine, the village, doesn’t give a damn. This is the first village in liberated Iraq. The war is “young”, but this is where it is oldest. This is also southern Iraq, where a popular revolt by Shias was to aid the coalition military. No sign of it yet.
Safwan, Iraq’s tomato-growing town-cum-village, has about 23,000 people. Roughly half are Sunni, half Shia. Ravaged by war, denigrated as a people, Safwan can barely conceal its desperation.
The containers leave, earlier than scheduled, still some cartons inside them that the desperate youth snatch for, the buses follow and the gunshots.
Miraculously, the mangy dogs are across the border, too.

Mesopotamian treasures get extreme care
SUJAN DUTTA
Kuwait, April 6: To many in the Arab world, the speed with which the American invasion of Iraq has reached Baghdad is an example of brute force by the most powerful military.
The American forces’ command itself says that so far Operation Iraqi Freedom has proved to be a precise, surgical, culturally-sensitive, armed expedition.
Authoritative casualty figures are not available yet. In the years preceding the war, Iraq was impoverished. With a war like the one that is taking place, there can be little doubt that we are witness to an artificial humanitarian disaster in the making.
The Telegraph presents here two versions of the way in which the war has been carried out.
The first by officers of the “coalition forces’ land component command”. The second by a spokeswoman of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Major Christopher Varhola and Lieutenant Colonel John Kuttas are on the civil affairs staff of the US army. It is their job to contribute to the US strategy on “military targeting of cultural heritage centres”.
The assumption here is that if the forces are so sensitive about targeting monuments and places of worship, they must be acutely conscious of not taking civilian lives.
“Priceless,” says Major Varhola. “Priceless,” he repeats when asked to estimate the value of the treasures of Mesopotamia, the world’s oldest civilisation bounded by the Tigris and the Euphrates.
He was in the field of combat a week ago. “Iraq has tens of thousands of archaeological sites. I am a cultural anthropologist, not an archaeologist, but I can tell you how sensitive we are about carrying out operations in such places.”
At Najaf and in Karbala, US forces angered local people who thought they would enter the mosques.
“There is an intentional use of archaeological and cultural sites by the Iraqi forces to target the US army,” says Varhola. “Our troops will never enter a mosque. There are exceptions for Muslims among our soldiers.”
“We do everything humanly possible,” adds Kuttas. “We rely heavily on precision-guided munitions. We only take out that portion used by the Iraqi forces and insist on positive identification. We do not believe in shooting in the dark.”
An example cited is from the 1991 war. US forces saw a military target in a jet aircraft parked next to a ziggurat. The ziggurat was not touched.
Commanding officers of the US forces in the field, they say, are adequately briefed and familiar with the ground that they tread.
Has there been any conflict between what the commanding officers on the field have wanted to do and what the civil affairs officers have advised? “I do not accept that we represent the good intentions of the army but we are unable to prevent damage. It is not a one-shot deal,” says Kuttas. “I cannot comment on specifics of operations.”
Does he mean that in a combat situation, the leader of a platoon caught in a firefight with the Iraqi forces is actually able to make an assessment on whether a site is of historical and cultural value?
“Yes” is the answer. “The commanding officer makes a split-second cost-benefit analysis. Sometimes it is even putting our own troops at risk.”
In the Shia uprising of 1991, the officers say, the tomb of Hussein and the mosque at Karbala were partially destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s forces.
What will the American forces do if, say, they are being fired at from a minaret? “The commanding officer decides. We are always concerned about not what we may do but about what we may cause Saddam Hussein to do,” says Kuttas.
Women & kids fill hospitals
Tamara Al-Rifai, a Syrian, is spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross. She is waiting for a clearance to get into Iraq since the war began.
“I am able to tell you that we do have six international workers and about 25-30 workers in Baghdad. In Basra, we have four international workers and about 20 Iraqis working with the Red Cross. However, for the last two days, our workers in Baghdad have not been able to venture out.
“I do not know the situation in Basra where the battle has intensified today. The only other city where we have access is Erbil in North Iraq. We are not in a position to make a complete assessment of the situation either in Baghdad or Basra and certainly not in the other cities like Najaf and Nasiriyah,” she says.
Baghdad has 33 hospitals. The Red Cross team led by Marcus Dolder was able to reach four of them.
“Our team in Baghdad is very very worried. In the four hospitals that they could visit, more than 80 per cent of the casualties were civilian. A big number of them were women and children.
“In Basra, in the first week of combat, each of the three hospitals was admitting at least a 100 casualties every day. Last week, this figure was between 50 and 100 in each of the hospitals. This week, fighting is bitter. We do not know what is happening.”
How do Red Cross workers travel and access hospitals? “We refuse any escort. We seek clearances independently from either side and only then we can go in. We have been working in Iraq for 23 years -- since the time of the Iran-Iraq war — and are fairly familiar with the processes.”
In the run-up to the war, the Red Cross had pre-positioned stocks in warehouses in Iran, Jordan, Syria and Kuwait. About 30 workers of the Red Cross in Kuwait have been waiting for a fortnight to gain access to Iraq.
There is enough food in Baghdad and Basra. Basra needs blankets and water. The water supply pumphouse is up and running but pipelines are choked.
“The Iraqi population is much weaker now, more vulnerable now than it was in 1991,” Al-Rifai says. “We need to get intravenous fluids and anaesthetics in quickly.”
The US forces have been claiming that civilians were not being deliberately targeted.
“We cannot give figures. Our teams are very worried. In Baghdad, they are very worried. Our main worry is that the hospitals are full of non- combatants, of civilians,” she says.
After being given the impression that the invaders of Iraq comprise a sensitive faculty of learned archaeologists, anthropologists, social scientists and humanists, Al-Rifai’s worry sounds alarmist.


Battles for Baghdad and bonus
SUJAN DUTTA
Rumaila oilfield, March 30: In the desert darkness as black as Iraqi crude, the smell of oil carries farther than the light from the fiery spouts. In daylight, the roar of the fires rises above the noise of heavy military traffic crossing the border to the east.
Daylight completes a story, too: camels by wellhead fires, US marines and firefighters from American firm Boots and Coots International Well Control.
The war in Iraq has gone beyond camels, cowboys and contracts, and, says the Central Command, is nearly at the gates of Baghdad. The battles in one of the world’s most fertile petroleum fields, though, are far from over.
The South Rumaila Oilfields were taken by the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the first night of their thrust into Iraq. The oilfields were guarded by an Iraqi army battalion that fled and while retreating was suspected to have set wellheads on fire.
The US force took over the oilfields without a great fight. But this is still a battlefield which is why Texan Bud Curtis should have been an oddity here.
In the company’s regulation pink overalls and silver helmet, the dry brown of the desert marks him out from a mile. “What brought me to this job? Back home in Texas, there was a blowout when I was 12 years old or so. I wanted to put it out.”
“I’m 47,” he says. “But god is kind on oilmen, so I look younger.”
There are 190 wellheads in the South Rumaila oilfields, 290 in the north. Nine fires raged in the south — four from wellheads and five from exhausts or pipelines. The saboteurs apparently fixed charges to the valves and the spouts and detonated them by remote control. The wellhead fires are more difficult to control.
Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), Boots & Coots and Joe Bowden have been sub-contracted the jobs by the company, Haliburton. Curtis is from the Houston-based Boots & Coots. The oil-well firefighters had been camping in Kuwait with all their equipment for nearly three weeks before the war began. So far, KOC has put out one wellhead fire and Boots and Coots another.
“I can only assume that it was set on fire by the Iraqi army,” says Major Jorge Lizarralde. “We didn’t see them. There was a battle here. If not by the Iraqis, who else?” Lizarralde is from the Marines.
His job now is to safeguard the infrastructure “so that it is kept for the benefit of the Iraqi people.”
“We found charges, we have found a couple of minefields to the north and caches of rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. We’ve also found detonators and charges.”
A unit of the Marines and a battalion of the British Army’s Royal Irish now patrol the oilfields. The desert here is not as dry as in the north of Kuwait. Apart from small mounds of sand and stone, it is mostly scrubland — fodder for the one-humped camels that come to graze. Any other movement and the machine-gunner atop the military Humvee signals his officer; both scan the desert with binoculars. The fires roar.
“It could take four days to nine weeks to put out a wellhead fire,” says Curtis.
“This fire here,” and he points to the fiercest, “I would say is burning up less than 4,000 barrels a day. The magnitude of the fires is less than what we saw in Kuwait in 1991. I was there too.”
The firefighters will either stop the flow of fuel, stop oxygen flow or separate the fuel from the oxygen. At one wellhead, they were working to let off such explosions within a 50 feet radius of the fire that it would suck in all the oxygen from the air.



Supply ‘snake’ in line of fire

SUJAN DUTTA
Safwan (Iraq) and Abdaly (Kuwait), March 29: This here is the “tail” of the “snake”, the long supply line that feeds the military, moves reinforcement and material deep into Iraq.
“The snake will be cut off at different points at the right time,” Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed Al-Saeef has promised.
Between Abdaly in Kuwait and Safwan in southern Iraq, military convoys roll past one after the other, seconds separating them. There are 16, 18, 28, 32-wheeled trailers, trucks, military Hummers and Humvees.
There are bulldozers, wood, lots of planks and beams of wood piled high on trailers; there are huge containers with the label “Property of the United States Army”. Explosives. Bowsers, huge bowsers — “Potable water”, “Caution: Inflammable Material, Smoking Prohibited within 50 feet”.
There is a lot more traffic coming into Iraq than there is coming out. M1A1 Abrams tanks on trailers, armoured personnel carriers on their tracks; Bradley Fighting Vehicles; monstrous vehicles you never needed to know existed until now. In Abdaly, an office complex of the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission has been converted into what looks like a supply depot. The air is thick with the smell of oil and gasoline.
Just inside Iraq, in Safwan, it is evident how potent the threat to the supply line is. Yesterday, a near riot broke out when the Kuwait Red Crescent Society sent aid. The Iraqis were fired on.
“Safwan, yes, we came straight through Safwan,” said Colonel Chris Vernon today, the spokesman for the British Army division that is in charge of these parts. “Now we are going back and across, strengthening rear area security. We’ve just slightly not looked to our rear. Safwan is on our main supply route. So there is a very, very strong reason to look at Safwan.”
For the coalition command, there could be no better reason for a “pause” in operations.
Safwan is on Route 80, an eight-lane expressway. Surprisingly, it would appear, the expressway was not mined in the run-up to the war, as if Iraq was extending an invitation.
Today, as a mob shaped a riot over aid in Safwan, urchins displayed currency notes bearing Saddam Hussein’s portrait.
Chinooks, helicopters the US Army uses for air attack if they are not transporting troops, fly into Iraq and back. The rocket pods of Apaches and Blackhawks, flying out of Iraq into Kuwait, have fired their loads. Just inside Kuwait, through the long-vision lens of a television camera, a Patriot missile battery.
Route 80 snakes to the north and the west, towards An Nasiriyah and An Najaf and Karbala, and to the east, towards Umm Qasr. In Najaf today, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a checkpoint manned by the US Army. Five soldiers were killed.
As at the border, so is it on the road from the Shuaikh port in Kuwait, on the Persian Gulf. Convoys are lining up. “They’ve been coming for so many months now. They keep coming, keep coming,” the driver says. The war is guzzling men and material, critics would say. Look at the positive: it is generating industrial demand.
Yesterday, the US government decided to send 1.3 lakh more troops to the war theatre. The re-deployment of the 4th Mechanised Infantry Division, a more armour-heavy formation compared to the 3rd Mechanised Infantry that is an estimated 70 km short of Baghdad on the southwest.

Little wars by the river of fire sap superpower
SUJAN DUTTA
Kuwait-Iraq border, March 31: At the British Army’s divisional camp in north Kuwait, there is news that an English-speaking Iraqi woman in Basra had “crossed the line” and was telling officers to keep probing.
The British forces have stopped short of the Basra suburb of Al Zubayr for over a week now. The artillery keeps bombarding the city’s outskirts. The coalition force is fighting to capture Iraq’s second-largest city with a combination of military tactics, mobile attacks and incitement to revolt.
“She has been telling us that the people want confidence,” Colonel Chris Vernon says. “They want the confidence that they will not be let down like in 1991 when Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed the Shia revolt.”
West of Basra, in the South Rumaila Oilfields where a battalion of the British Royal Irish is securing the wellheads, Lieutenant James Mitchell says they have been combing the villages, not that there are many here in this expanse of scrubland.
“There is essentially a huge language barrier,” said Mitchell. “We’re kind of sorting that out now.”
At Safwan, the first Iraqi settlement just across the border through which the 3rd Mechanised Infantry went in the dash to the periphery of Baghdad, there have been retribution killings. Villagers suspected to have helped the Americans with intelligence have been “taken out” by Iraqis loyal to the regime.
At An Nasiriyah, the crucial crossroads on the Euphrates in central Iraq, a unit of the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force has been detailed to “cleanse” villages from where Iraqi irregulars carry out attacks on the road to “ambush alley”. Iraqi forces are seeking to extend the “alley” from the twin bridges on the Euphrates to Al Kut on the Tigris.
Almost the entire British army component in the coalition land forces has been tied down in the south, in Basra province. “Essentially, we are launching counter-insurgency operations on a military platform,” says Vernon.
Minus the incessant bombarding of Baghdad, the battles in Operation Iraqi Freedom are more reminiscent of Kashmir and Chechnya than the Mesopotamian wars waged for centuries by the Sumerians, the Assyrians and the Ottomans.
The front line — if that is what it can be called — is a small arc 100 km south-southwest of Baghdad. But the Euphrates is the river of fire. Along its banks and right through to Basra, the coalition forces and the Iraqis are engaged in combats that are little wars in themselves.
Indeed, the biggest miscalculation of the coalition’s invasion could be in the christening of the war itself. There are few signs that the Iraqi populace has been crying freedom at the sight of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. It is only to the north of Baghdad, north of the Kirkuk and Mosul oilfields and the highlands, that the coalition forces have enough support from the Kurds to bolster military strength.
The upshot of this is an inevitable phase of consolidation that has been erroneously described as an “operational pause”. Most modern wars, even the last one on medieval Afghanistan (that continues till this day), have gone through such phases of mid-course correction.
The train of convoys that passes through this border checkpost into Iraq bears out that the coalition command is desperately short of men and munitions despite the long build-up. They are a testimony to the Iraqi resistance, to its ability to create little wars to take on the big one. The big one has the technology and the force, the little one its home territory.
The arithmetic of the war in Iraq is at the moment against the invading army. The Republican Guard is estimated to be about 3.5 lakh strong. The coalition forces in Iraq number 90,000.
This does not leave the coalition forces with figures of a good teeth-to-tail ratio. (“Teeth to tail” is military jargon for number of troops in combat to number of troops guarding the rear and giving supplies.) Another miscalculation made, probably, on the assumption that close-air support and high-tech warfare will see the coalition through.
Add to this the shortage in supplies. A Japanese journalist embedded with a Marines unit sent a dispatch and told his colleague of the Asahi Shimbun in Kuwait that the soldiers were down to having just one meal a day.


First to be liberated and first to loot
SUJAN DUTTA
Umm Qasr, southern Iraq, April 9: Tariq Abdul cannot watch Baghdad fall from this first town of Iraq that the American and English army took 20 days ago en route to the Iraqi capital. He does not have a television set. It was looted.
In all of Iraq, he is one of the first of its people to be “liberated”. Umm Qasr, Iraq’s port town, is just across the border from Kuwait. As of yesterday, the Abrams tanks had still not rolled into Baghdad’s Firdaus Square — the Americans were on the west of the Tigris — but Tariq Abdul in Umm Qasr had no doubt that they would go across.
His dirty distasa hanging loosely from the shoulders to the feet, Tariq Abdul ambles up to the general hospital because another convoy of aid is being delivered. By the time he has left his two-room tenement in house 24, street 10, the hospital compound is already a mass of people.
The crowd is getting habituated, after three weeks of war and its aftermath, to the ceremony and the symbolism associated with “gifts from the people of Kuwait to the people of Iraq”. The youths know instinctively that when there is a posse of television cameramen, it is time to break out into a dance and shout “Down Saddam, down, down”.
Umm Qasr is easy to access, if allowed. It was easily accessed and by now more soldiers, more journalists, more aid and more foreign feet have been through its dry and dusty streets than in any other settlement in Iraq.
On the first day of the war, the British and the Americans announced the town had been occupied. On the second day, they said the port was being reopened. On the third day, fighting broke out. And on day four, Umm Qasr threatened to rob the coalition of the warring its insta-victory. The evidence so far is that Umm Qasr put up a stiffer resistance than did Baghdad. That show of rebellion has largely quietened. This morning, a shell landed on the outskirts.
For Tariq Abdul, slow to get to the hospital because of his 58 years, 30 years of living in Umm Qasr has wearied him down. He lives close to the general hospital, works — or worked — as an electrician in the port, married Salma, 54, fathered nine children. He has also been through three wars — from 1980 to 1988 with Iran, in 1991 and now, the first that claims to have “liberated” him.
“Only thieves and looters,” he is saying, not of the British soldiers but of the free-for-all in the war-ravaged town ever since the blackening of Saddam’s poster at the gates to Umm Qasr. “It was bad during the Iran war but Umm Qasr was not really hit. 1991 was worse and this is the worst. People are turning mad.”


Freedom, to taste fruits of handouts
SUJAN DUTTA
Umm Qasr, southern Iraq, April 9: In Safwan, aid convoys spark riots. In Basra, looters run amok in the wake of British armoured vehicles. In Baghdad, television footage shows, an old man in his frenzy is beating a poster of Saddam Hussein with a shoe. Mobs cart away furniture and tyres and tubes. People fight amongst themselves over the share of loot.
This is the picture across Iraq’s towns touched by the forces of liberation. Lawlessness spreads like a pandemic.
“A man comes with his daughter, hurt in a firefight somewhere, weeps and cries with rage and says I want that medicine and picks it up and threatens to break everything. What do we do?” the paediatrician at the hospital here says. (The doctor does not want to give his name because he has this to say: “Saddam gone, good. Now British and American go.”)
After three weeks of war, that lawlessness is evident even if it is not as much on camera as it has been.
The nation of Iraq is teetering on the brink of statelessness. In Baghdad today, Iraq’s capital was being pillaged by its own shellshocked townspeople, a crazed lot after the incessant pounding from the air and the crossfire that claims innocents day after day after day.
It cuts across the population, this statelessness of the mind. Doctors and engineers and technicians and electricians and railway workers.
Tariq Abdul, a electrician here, admits that his sons might have been involved to in the looting that followed the invasion.
Isam Abdal Hasan, 37, with a daughter in his arms knows a smattering of English.
“There is no authority. People do what they like to get water and medicine. No food shortage. But water wanted.”
Isam, a ticket collector with the ‘Republic Railway’, has calculated that his family of seven — five children — has been getting water “donated” by the people of Kuwait through a new pipeline. “250 dinars for one bucket,” he said.
Abdul Hasin Manhal, 40, has two wives and a 10-member family. He is a crane operator in the docks for 25 years. But he is without work for a month.
“Some Baath Party people ran away to Karbala and Basra after we pointed them out. Now no fighting. But no water. No nothing. Everybody loot, everybody rob.”
In Umm Qasr now, the population is dependent on handouts. Its children beg; its men and women want telephones — to call relatives abroad — watches, pens, even the empty PET bottles. Water.
For 20 years under Saddam Hussein, the people Umm Qasr were denied the right to live with dignity. Now they are stripped of their dignity as an independent people that can fight for itself. They have been promised liberty by the American and the British forces. They seek deliverance.


Govt-in-waiting can’t wait
- American nominee in a hurry to move into Iraq
SUJAN DUTTA
Kuwait, April 6: They camp at the Hilton in Kuwait, rarely publicise their presence and the security at the beach resort on the Persian Gulf here discourages wanderers and tourists. The nucleus of America’s government in Iraq to be headed by Lieutenant General Jay Garner is here.
Even before the fall of Baghdad, the “government” is likely to move to southern Iraq, possibly to Umm Qasr, and then on to the Iraqi capital.
Garner (picture left), a former three-star general, is not alone. His teammates who may find slots in the interim administration to be run from the Pentagon could be a former American official who worked in Sudan, Timothy Carner; a former director of Voice of America radio, Robert Reilly; and a former US ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine. The interim administration may also co-opt some British officials.
Indications are the interim administration will be planted in Iraq even as the war rages. The most “secure” of Iraqi territory is in the south of the country where the British forces are in command.
General Garner has been designated director of the Pentagon’s ‘Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq’. The ‘coalition forces’ land component command’ is understood to be working out a meeting with the media for him shortly, possibly as early as tomorrow.
The anointing of the interim government is not contingent on the fall of Baghdad or the demise of Saddam Hussein. Even in Afghanistan, during Operation Enduring Freedom, the interim government of Hamid Karzai was installed while the war continued (and continues). The difference, however, is that in Iraq, the head of the administration is likely to be an American. Washington is not yet unanimous on appointing leading Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi to the post.
Garner is 64 years old and since retiring from the armed service, worked with a defence contractor, L-3 Communications. He was in charge of protecting Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war. This time, he will be in charge of everything that the military is not.
However, he and the interim arrangement would report to General Tommy Franks, chief of the US Central Command. Garner’s immediate task will be to provide a semblance of civil administration in ‘liberated’ Iraq’s war-ravaged and lawless land.
Though it is not yet confirmed, the possible location of the interim administration in Umm Qasr — to begin with — has been made because it is close to the border with Kuwait and is also Iraq’s only port, where large quantities of military equipment and humanitarian aid would be landing. The seat of the interim administration may be moved to the renamed Baghdad International Airport if and when it is secured.

BETWEEN THE DIJLA AND THE FURAT

Baghdad stews in poison of self-hatred
- A capital in ruins, caught between America and Alibabas
SUJAN DUTTA
Baghdad, April 20: Television will show what the camera can see. Words can describe all that is in the line of vision. Only the mind can try to grasp 4,000 sq. km of this city.
Between the Furat (Euphrates) and the Dijla (Tigris), Baghdad has another name: Devastation.
The Tigris and the Euphrates are closest in Baghdad. The Tigris flows through it. The Euphrates is just beyond its eastern outskirt.
What is devastation? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? A fireball has not swept through Baghdad. By that standard, Baghdad is doing fine.
But let’s take Delhi, for instance.
Rashtrapati Bhavan: bombed; Connaught Place: bombed; Parliament House: bombed; Race Course Road: bombed; Nehru Place: bombed.
Would you say Delhi is devastated? Probably.
By the same token, Baghdad is in ruins.
It isn’t over yet. Columns of smoke rise from the east bank and the west bank of the Tigris. The supermarket at 28 Nisan is smouldering. Not from the bombing; from the looting and the pillaging. In Karada Tamarian, traffic was passing through in the morning. Two hours later, the road is blocked. Doctors and mortuary staff are digging up the big garden by which the road passes. They are exhuming bodies. Days ago, some 15 youths of the Saddam Fidayeen were buried here. Now their families want their bodies.
At Yarmoukh General Teaching Hospital in Al-Mansour district, the biggest hospital west of the Tigris, the casualty ward is overflowing with patients. “When we came here four days back, there were bodies on the floor, I would say at least 25,” says senior surgeon Mohammed Sultan.
“Just look out the window, into the garden.”
There is a lawn in the centre of the hospital. All the wards on the upper storeys overlook it. It’s where more bodies have been buried.
“They were burnt, charred, impossible to recognise. That is where the stench is coming from. We lifted the bodies. I lifted the bodies and buried them so that we could work here.”
Sultan went to Meridien Hotel and met the American major-general.
“I told him: ‘You attacked our country, shot our people. Now give us medicines. Give us protection. We don’t have benzene for our ambulances. Medicines — we are working with what we had stored. The hospital is looted.’ I think the Americans incited the looters to make us go to them and plead ‘please protect me’, to show to the world that Iraqis are thieves.”
Self-hatred sweeps through the citizenry. Hatred for what has been done to Baghdad and hatred for not being able to stop it.
Eleven bridges span the Tigris in Baghdad. They are all intact. There was no real prolonged battle in Baghdad itself after Saddam International Airport.
In Khillannee Square, the building housing the ministry of trade is smouldering. The ministry of youth in Abu Nwase street is bombed. The Shorjaa Shopping Centre is bombed and burnt.
Inside the mohallas, residents have put up barricades — not to fight the Americans but to deter looters. “Alibabas,” says Jamal, the driver. “Alibaba” is the word for ‘looter’. Alibabas set fire to the Mustansiriya Shopping Centre, raided the Al Qindi Hospital.
Alibabas are carting away loot from the debris of the Iraq Olympic Association building. Just opposite is the garden called Al Jundial Majhool, now an American military encampment.
Baghdad has wide streets. It is easy to drive around the city and its people have given it fond names, like Al Firdaus, the Square of Paradise — a permanent feature on television screens during the war.
In sprawling Baghdad University, students and teachers cannot enter, let alone outsiders. The campus is on the west bank of the Tigris, along the river. Huge gates, square buildings, lawns, laboratories, Abrams tanks, armoured personnel carriers, Bradley fighting vehicles, gun positions, American soldiers, photograph and you risk being shot by a sniper.
“Hulaku”, says Jamal, the driver shaking his head. He has not travelled through the city in weeks, having stayed indoors.
“Hulaku”.
Chengiz Khan’s grandson, Hulagu, sacked the city of peace built by the Abbasid Caliphs. Baghdad is 1241 years old, built a 1000 years before the USA was created; 950 years ago Scheherazade spun the Arabian Nights for Haroun al-Rashid in celebration of the Caliph of Baghdad.
Rusafah, the district on the east bank of the Tigris, has taken the worst of the bombing. The district on the west is Kharkh. From the hotels Palestine and Sheraton in Kharkh, journalists watched the Americans rolling in from the far bank. When the regime abandoned Baghdad, the war machines rolled into Kharkh, to the Al Firdaus square.
Then they brought down Saddam Hussein’s statue for a Hollywood-style climax to television’s biggest reality show.
Baghdad is not pretty. It is beautiful, like Chandni Chowk, Delhi, is beautiful, like Hazratgunj, Lucknow, is. Its buildings are in colours of the desert. Most doors are arched and pointed at the pinnacles. The Al Mustansirya University by the Tigris — entry forbidden, again — is a shairi in sandstone.
And Baghdad is about people. More than five million of them, crazed, driven into frenzy, numbed by shock through decades of a pulverising regime, by years of sanctions, by weeks of bombing, days of pillaging.
All because of one man who was everywhere a few days ago and is now nowhere.

Why did you do this? A mother asks Bush
- My husband is not Saddam, my children are not Saddam: Karina cries out in Baghdad hospital
SUJAN DUTTA
Only the dead have seen the end of war — Old Arab saying
Baghdad, April 21: Israa Abdul Karim is five years old. Her brother Saif Abdul Karim is seven. They are in the Al-Mansour Hospital for Children — earlier called the Saddam Hospital for Children — with their mother, Karina Ali, 35, and grandmother Shukriya Mahmoud, 66. They are patients of Dr Abdul Hamid al-Sadoun.
The doctor’s story
Come here, come with me and take a look. Ok, you don’t want to meet all the patients? But we have to live with them. You are a sahafi, a journalist, and you can’t bear to look at them?
Ok, this here is Israa. (He takes Israa from her grandmother Shukriya’s hand.)
See here, look at her buttocks. See, see the whole skin has peeled off and the muscles are torn. She cannot sit, she cannot lie down. She wants to be in her grandmother’s arms, but every time Shukriya picks her up Israa howls with pain.
I know I’m talking too much, that I’m being cruel. But what do I do? I don’t sleep for nights. I have no money, no salary to buy khabbus (bread). All of us doctors are doing the work of nurses.
The nursing staff has fled. We are only nine doctors. There are 500 beds in this hospital. We try to keep patients in 100 but we cannot manage more than 60. If I don’t go mad, who will?
Come here to this bed. This is Saif, Israa’s brother. See, his left leg is plastered to the thigh. There are multiple fractures on the tibia and fibula. There is heavy internal bleeding. He needs blood, lots and lots of blood. We are sending him to another hospital.
And this is Saif’s mother, Karina Ali. She is swathed in her black chador and you can’t see her injuries. But there are pieces of lead shrapnel in her bloodied back.
What happened, you ask? Why don’t you ask her?
Karina Ali’s story
We lived in Abu Ghraib, north of Baghdad. That night we decided to leave. For two nights there was a lot of bombing. I’m told Baath Party people were in the locality. My husband Abdul Karim Abbas, 40, was a veterinary assistant in the ministry of agriculture. He got a salary of 54,000 dinars ($18, about Rs 900) but we had food rations. Saif goes to school. Israa will go to school next year. I have another son, Salman.
That night, around 9, we left Abu Ghraib in our pick-up. My brother, Mahmoud Ali, drove. His wife, Ferozia, and their children, Noor, Mohammed and Saifuddin were in the front seat. I was in the seat behind them with my husband and children. My sister Sarah was also with us. Our belongings were in the back. The children were on our laps.
Even when we left Abu Ghraib, we could hear the noise of aircraft. We were between Abu Ghraib and Al Rashdiya when the old pick-up hit a rough patch. Mahmoud was worried and afraid the tyres would not hold. He stopped the car and checked the undercarriage with light from a cigarette holder.
It was too dark. Then he talked to my husband and they decided to switch on the headlights for some time till the rough road was over.
We started again. Then I don’t know what happened. There was a flash of light that I saw through the windshield. The car swerved to one side. And there was an explosion. Salman and Saif and Israa were on my lap. I crouched with them, holding them tight. I felt myself being thrown away. Allah, what was happening! There were more explosions and flashes. My ears had locked. I was shouting but could not hear myself.
My back was hurting. I realised I was on the ground with the children still holding on.
There were two pick-ups behind us. I don’t know how long it was but we were put in another car. Where was my husband? Where were Mahmoud and Ferozia and Sarah? Allah, where is my family?
(Mahmoud Ali and Ferozia and their children, Noor, Mohammed and Saifuddin, and Karina’s husband, Abdul Karim, were killed in the bombing.)
Karina is unstoppable. Her face is covered by purdah till the bridge of her nose. Tears roll down from the eyes, wetting the cloth that masks her face. She is wailing and shouting and cursing. She lapses into rhetoric. The language of propaganda has been drilled into her mind and in this hour of tragedy it rolls out of her. Words spray like shrapnel.
“I want to ask Bush — why did you do this? Because of Saddam Hussein? My husband is not Saddam. My children are not Saddam. My brother is not Saddam.”
For so long, Israa and Saif have seen their mother concerned only for them. Now her defences are breaking down. Israa and Saif stop sobbing because their mother is weeping. They are frozen still by Karina’s gestures and loud wailing.
Doctor al-Sadoun wants the ward cleared of outsiders.
[Yesterday’s report had referred to Baghdad as a 4000-sq-km city. It should have been 400.]


Family with war as companion
- Mohammed Ibrahim has lost three sons, but the bombs still follow him and his clan of 24
SUJAN DUTTA

Baghdad, April 22: Faroukh, shot in Amara.
Faisal, killed in Basra.
Fareed, also in the army, sick and dead in Baghdad.
That was in another war. None of the others in the family dared go into the army after the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The wars came to them.
In house No. 5, Mohalla 604, Zokak 14, Qadisiyah, the family survives, has survived, another bombing of Baghdad. Head of the family Mohammed Ibrahim Rahim Baksh, 76, speaks Urdu. His father had come to Iraq from Karachi with the British Indian army in 1914, the year World War I broke out.
Faroukh, Faisal and Fareed were Mohammed Ibrahim’s sons. With wife Khadija Ishaq Baqub, he has three more sons — Faras, Fowzi and Faoud — and three daughters — Fauziyah, Fariyal and Fatin. Khadija can speak rudimentary Punjabi. Her father was from Ferozepur.
“When we sit down to dinner, there are 24 of us,” says Mohammed Ibrahim, who retired 24 years ago from a storekeeper’s job in the Dora refinery near Baghdad.
The three-storeyed house holds them together. Faroukh’s widow, Intesaar, with her three children, and Mohammed Ibrahim’s daughter Fariyal, her children, and even her ex-husband, Hamid — an army officer who remarried and divorced again — are part of the extended family. Fariyal teaches Arabic to a class of 40 at the government school in Al-Julan.
Dinner comprises khabbus (bread), a soup of chicken or lamb or beef or fish, adas, a hot and spicy preparation of lentil, and batinjon, a gruel of tomatoes and potatoes. Fish for the family costs 7,000 Iraqi dinar, 2 chickens 4,000 dinar ($1 = 3,000 Iraqi dinar).
“We stocked up for the war like everyone else,” says Fariyal. “We stored food and water because we knew our locality Qadisiyah will be bombed but we had nowhere to go. There is the Baath Party office here. Along the river (the Tigris), every house is in ruins.”
Tamara, Mohammed Ibrahim’s 14-year-old granddaughter, turned religious during the bombing. She rarely steps outdoors and is always in her chador and with the sipha — the beads by which the faithful remember Allah.
“Tamara was praying and crying all day and all night but the smaller ones, Sarah (6) and Omar (10), could not figure it out,” says their father Faras.
The family was surprised that American soldiers were suddenly in Baghdad. How did it happen? Baghdad was predicted to be a bitter battle. But the only real fight, barring the skirmishing that continues, was in the Saddam International Airport. Umm Qasr and Basra fought so much. Why not Baghdad?
A patter of conversation in Arabic breaks out in the assembled family.
“I think it was the bombing,” says Mohammed Ibrahim. “There were thousands and thousands of bombs.”
Fariyal: “We don’t know what happened. We saw soldiers and everyone prepared to fight. Then suddenly one afternoon they simply vanished.”
Faras: “But people saw Saddam fighting.”
Did he? No.
Fowzi: “Yes, they said Saddam was on a tank here on the Qadisiyah Expressway.”
The Qadisiyah Expressway is another of Baghdad’s wide roads. The wail of ambulance sirens wafts into the house every few minutes.
Marwah, 19, and Meena, 14 — Fariyal’s daughters — say they have heard too from their friends that Saddam was on the streets, rallying his troops.
Amal, Faras’ wife: “We were sure it was going to be a long war. We believed Saddam when he said everybody will fight till the last drop of blood. I think someone betrayed him.”
Fariyal: “Yes, how could Baghdad be surrounded in two days and fall so suddenly?”
Fariyal wants to leave with her mother, Khadija, and the women. Two days ago a neighbour was killed accidentally. The local boys had turned vigilante to guard against looters. The neighbour was driving and met with an accident while trying to avoid the firing.
Fariyal: “I think our soldiers had weapons that were too old. They pulled the trigger but the shots did not fire. We can’t sure of what happened. Some of our friends say there was an order to the soldiers to get out of their uniforms and go home.”
Fariyal’s school is closed for weeks. She earns a livelihood by stitching kaftans for women. Faras and his brother Fowzi look for work as drivers. They have two old Chevrolets. Faras bought his second-had in 1990 for $1,500.
Away from the house, Faras and Fowzi say that Fariyal is a very strong woman and that she is in effect the head of the family. Her husband, Hamid, was a “very senior officer” in the Iraqi army.
They divorced several years ago. Hamid studied in Russia, says Faras, drawing the insignia of Hamid’s rank on a sheet of paper. In the Indian army, it is the equivalent of a colonel. Hamid was in air defence. Did he fight this time?
“We don’t know,” says Faras. “Very senior officer but very weak man. Twice talaq. He is a philanderer.”
It is getting dark and past curfew time. The crackle of gunfire to the left is from this bank of the Tigris. Faras and Fowzi offer a ride. Across the July 14 Revolution bridge, the only light is from the single sharp beam of an armoured personnel carrier.


American sore thumb in Iraq
- Vietnam veteran in group of protesters against war
SUJAN DUTTA

Charlie Liteky is America’s embarrassment. He sits on a Baghdad pavement in front of the Al Fanar Hotel, near a tight security cordon of US soldiers and war machines, just wanting people to come and talk to him. He would then go on and on about why “this is an illegal, immoral war”.
A small group of activists against the war has been camping in the Al Fanar Hotel. Banners strung across its balconies read “Peace”, “No to War”.
“I was thinking of giving up my American citizenship but I have been energised by the reaction of so many people in the US to this war. The insensitivity that the US government has developed is absolutely incredible,” Liteky says.
Liteky is one of a group of eight “Iraq Peace Team” activists who have stayed through the war. He was ‘guarding’ a water treatment plant in central Baghdad that serves a hospital complex. The plant was not bombed. He wears a cap with the words “veterans for peace” and announces his intentions to all and sundry. Liteky is 72 years old.
He came to Baghdad last November, went back home to San Francisco and returned to stay on February 17, a little more than a month before “Operation Iraqi Freedom” started.
“This experience here took me back to Vietnam. The big difference — I was at the receiving end of the bombs and therefore had more to fear here than in Vietnam. We could feel the ground shake when the B-52s flew in. I was always against this war,” he says.
“I keep repeating what the historian Howard Zinn once said: ‘There is no flag big enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’”
Having been in Baghdad for so long, he should know what the people feel.
“Some seem to be happy,” says Liteky. “I was getting a haircut at my favourite barber’s here the other day. I am a familiar face in the locality. A youth came in, laughed and said ‘America go home’. I think the majority of people are happy that Saddam is gone but they say it is America that should be gone now.”
Back in 1967, Charlie Liteky was a chaplain in the US army serving in Vietnam.
Part of the citation accompanying his Medal of Honour read: “Chaplain Liteky distinguished himself by exceptional heroism… He was participating in a search and destroy operation when Company A came under intense fire from a battalion-size enemy force. Momentarily stunned from the immediate encounter that ensued, the men hugged the ground for cover. Observing two wounded men, Chaplain Liteky moved to within 15 metres of an enemy machine gun position to reach them, placing himself between the enemy and the wounded men…”
Charlie Liteky renounced the medal in July 1986.
[This report was written on return from Baghdad]


India in history’s dustbin
- Tanks outside looted museum, burnt books inside library
SUJAN DUTTA

Mazin al Wattar and Camarin al Jaff wait at the gates of the Iraq Museum because they have been denied entry into Hotel Palestine where journalists from all over the world and the US Marines have set up camp.
The two believe that they have lost their jobs — Mazin in Baghdad University and Camarin in al-Mustansiriyah University — and are looking for work as interpreters. Mazin was teaching biotechnology, Camarin computers. Three days after news broke of the looting of the Iraq Museum, Mazin and Camarin decided to take a look themselves.
The gates to the museum are barred. Soldiers guard its perimeter. Lieutenant Erik Balascik says director Donny George is inside but will not meet anyone. Only employees will be allowed in. It is a day after three Abrams tanks rolled into the campus to guard the museum. The first tank to roll in had the words ‘With the compliments of the USA’ scrawled on its body.
Mazin says they will try again, later. They really want to have a look inside.
So Mazin and Camarin leave, and head for Bab al Muadam where Iraq’s National Library is.
It is a wreck, each one of its floors. “The library had different sections divided period-wise and country-wise,” says Camarin. The walls are covered with soot, the edges of photocopiers have melted, as have the edges of the metal containers on the catalogue shelf along one wall. Miraculously, the bigger wooden containers along another wall are mostly intact.
Inside the building, it is warm from the heat and the fire. The floors are a pile of charred debris comprising containers of microfilm, half-burnt journals, a copy of the November 11, 2002, issue of the Iraq Daily with a tribute to the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, and hundreds and hundreds of cards from the catalogues.
Camarin picks a few up and turns them over. Typewritten uniformly, they are references to:
1)823 T 737: London, George. Towards Democracy. Allen & Unwin 1915. 519p
2)923.254 A 991: Azad, Abul Kalam, India Wins Freedom, New Delhi, Sangam 1978
3)823 I 54: Ingram, John H; The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, England, Adam and Charles Black 1883
4)378.013 I 39: Indian Council for Social Science Research, Social Sciences in Professional Education, New Delhi 1976.
“Allah ho Akbar, Allah ho Akbar, Allah ho Akbar,” Mazin mutters as he picks his way through the damage from room to room. The windows are smashed, the doors have been taken away, there is a lot of film lying in what used to be the reading room on the ground floor.
“Even my university has been looted,” says Mazin. “They have taken away scientific instruments and computers.”
There is the sound of feet crunching in a room they have just crossed, and voices in Arabic. Mazin and Camarin suspect danger. A youth comes in, followed by five others, two carry guns that look like AK-47s.
“Who are you, what are you doing here?” they ask gruffly. They speak in Arabic. Mazin and Camarin are given two minutes to leave. Walking through the front, Mazin says these boys claim they have come to guard what’s remaining of the library but he suspects otherwise. Just outside the compound, a large container-truck is parked in the lane leading into the library building. The vehicle does not have number plates.
In the city, the US forces are just beginning to settle down and guard “important” structures. Some, like the oil ministry, were secured immediately after they took the capital. Mazin says he has heard that the Americans have appointed a new mayor for Baghdad but has no idea where his office is.
They head back to the museum, may be the officer, the lieutenant there, can help. The museum is in Salhiya, a 20-minute drive through scanty, but cautiously moving, traffic. But the lieutenant has gone inside on work and there is another soldier in his place standing sentry at the locked gates that are opened only to let employees in.
Who do Mazin and Camarin turn to?
One museum employee says he is rejoining for the first time since the pillaging and cannot help. He has to go. What about the museum, how is it? “Before the war, we had packed a lot of artefacts into boxes and had made arrangements for their safekeeping. I do not know if those boxes have been looted. I’ll have to find out,” he says.
Mazin says that despite the years of hardship, Iraqis are actually very proud of their history. Even Saddam Hussein encouraged archaeology. He opened regional museums.
Once, he reconstructed a palace in Babylon, normally an hour’s drive south of Baghdad. A notice near the site also announced that the palace was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein “protector of civilisation (who) rebuilt this palace belonging to Nebuchadnezzar II”.
Looting of museums is not new in Iraq. Which is why the looting of the Iraq Museum is such a shock. There was the experience to learn from: it had been looted in 1991.
The saving grace is that Iraq’s treasure troves of historical riches are inexhaustible. There is Baghdad and Babylon and Nineveh and Ur and Hatra. Through the centuries, there was Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Abbasids, the Mongols, the Persians and the Ottomans.
When the US marines were still coming into Baghdad and the museum was being pillaged, an employee had gone up to them and sought help. But the American forces were too busy elsewhere.
Later, a heartbroken Donny George laments the loss. “We are still assessing and evaluating. I will know only after some time.”
Till then, the Iraq Museum will have three massive displays in its front yard: each about 32 feet long, 12 feet wide and nearly eight feet high; each running on tracks and boasting highly mobile firepower: M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks.
(This report was written on return from Baghdad)

Op-ed The Telegraph June 16 2003
SURELY MORE THAN CANNONFODDER
By sending its troops to assist US forces in Iraq, India stands to gain little, but could lose the goodwill it enjoys among the Iraqis, writes Sujan Dutta
The day Saddam Hussein’s statue was being toppled in Baghdad by American-inspired Iraqis, an old man in Umm Qasr, southern Iraq, was telling an Indian journalist what a fan he is of “Mitabh”.
“Before the Iran war there were so many Indians here”, he pointed in the direction of the tall cranes that marked out where Iraq’s only deep-sea port is. “They worked there with us.”
Talal Ahmed, 58, is a port worker who had lived in Umm Qasr through three wars. The last of the Indians he had seen before he came across this sahafi — journalist — was towards the end of that eight-year-long war. But with his other friends in the town, he had continued catching up with Mithabh and Mithun — Amitabh Bachchan and Mithun Chakraborty — the best known Indian celluloid heroes in Iraq on video cassettes that still do the rounds.
A little north of Umm Qasr, just across the border with Kuwait, is Safwan, the first town to fall the night American and British forces rolled into Iraq. Some two weeks later, as a convoy of Kuwait Red Crescent Society vehicles carrying aid entered the town, something close to a riot broke out. This time an old lady, spotting a man from “al Hind” — India — in the crowd, guided him away from the violence and into safety.
In Baghdad, a week after the Iraqi capital had fallen to coalition forces, a group of taxi drivers offered to escort a shelterless Indian to their homes just so that they will have a “friend” to talk to and show him how they lived and how they survived the dreadful bombing of the city. Faras, whose forefathers had migrated to Iraq, now wants to migrate to India with his family. Many of the taxi drivers believed that Saddam Hussein was still alive and the day was not far when he would inevitably return.
Also in Baghdad, the caretaker of the deserted Indian embassy building recalled how a youth convinced his comrades of the Saddam Fedayeen not to attack the mansion that housed the al Hind offices. That was when the forces of the United States of America and the Saddam Fedayeen were skirmishing in parts of the city and the chatter of machine gunfire and columns of smoke from bombarded buildings continued to embattle Baghdad.
Despite a decade and more since the last Indian expatriate left Iraq, Indians enjoy a goodwill among Iraqis that is easily evident. There are Indians in Kuwait who still recall that they were largely untouched by the Iraqi army when Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait in 1990. The Iraqi army had in fact helped Indians to escape from the Gulf region through Iraq and Baghdad.
As pressure mounts on New Delhi now to despatch military forces in aid of the Anglo-American occupiers of Iraq, India is in danger of frittering away a goodwill that has been cultivated over many years of business, social and, indeed, even military ties. Engineers from Indian public sector companies have built dams and barrages in Iraq. Iraqi army officials were trained in the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun.
The American request to India to send troops is also understood to have come accompanied with the promise that any contingent of the Indian military that may be sent there will work under its own flag and not under the Stars and Stripes. While that is of some comfort in Delhi in that it will be a sign that India is not kowtowing to American interests, it raises the prospect of an alienation from Iraqis that any foreign force will find difficult to contend with.
Late last month, just after the Americans restored a World War I cemetery of the British in Al Kut, eastern Iraq, as a mark of respect to their colleagues from England, Iraqis desecrated the site. They were angry that an alien force should hoist its flag in their country. The cemetery — as coincidence would have it — was of a British Indian force of “Hindoos” and “Sikhs” that was vanquished in 1916 by the Turks.
Even now in Baghdad, the memory of the American flag masking the statue of Saddam Hussein minutes before it was toppled is a symbol of national humiliation for many Iraqis who have no love lost for Saddam Hussein.
The team from the Pentagon that reaches New Delhi next week will be seeking to answer Indian queries on just what it would mean for New Delhi to send troops to Iraq. The Americans have indicated, too, that they would also welcome a noncombatant force from India. India was aware of the American request since early May. The Americans had invited India to participate in a “working group” briefing of about 14-15 countries in London on May 8. India did not send a representative, but the government was given a detailed briefing.
Since that meeting, Poland, Spain and Italy have sent, or are in the process of sending, troops to Iraq. Given the goodwill that India enjoys among the Iraqis, an Indian presence will no doubt give legitimacy to the stabilization force. That, however, could be at the cost of a people-to-people relationship that has withstood governments and wars.
Critics of the occupation of Iraq have already raised the possibility that the foreign forces could be entrapped in a “permanent war”. It is more than two months since Baghdad has fallen, but there is no sign yet of a government taking shape that will be able to administer Iraq even with American help. Ahmed Chalabi, who was paratrooped into Iraq in the wash of the invasion, does not enjoy any credibility. The Shias — the largest religious sect in Iraq — who were expected to join in the American war effort against Saddam Hussein, have threatened to turn against the Americans. And the Kurds are interested enough only in establishing their own homeland in the north.
The American ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, said on Friday that Indian forces in Iraq will not be warring alongside the Americans. In a war-ravaged country where lawlessness rules, it is difficult to see what a military force can do apart from putting down mobs. A non-combatant Indian team of doctors and engineers would be a token presence, and not enough for the military demands that the occupation of Iraq is making on the Americans and the British.
Some 1,30,000 troops of the American 3rd Infantry Division and more from the US Marines, and about 40,000 British troops were involved in the war in Iraq. It was assessed as the war progressed towards Baghdad that elements of the 3rd Infantry Division would be able to head back home by mid-June. That possibility is now slim. Since the fall of Baghdad, the US forces have been reinforced by the 4th Infantry Division, one of the largest US army divisions equipped with the most modern military hardware. But that is neither enough to soothe Iraqi tempers, nor are they so intimidating that dissenters will be scared away.
Early last week, the US forces launched their biggest post-war strike codenamed Operation Peninsula Strike. Some 40 Americans have been killed in the last month and a half and the strike on Friday killed 70 Iraqis who are alleged to be “remnants of the Saddam regime” in Balad, northwest of Baghdad.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war”, goes an old Arab saying. Iraq and west Asia are fraught with possibilities of a “permanent war” that can see the Americans trapped in the region for much longer. That is why, militarily — and not just diplomatically and economically — an Indian troop presence is so sought after. Just so that the pressure on India mounts, it is being pitted in a competition with Pakistan. Musharraf intends sending about two brigades — nearly 6,000 troops — to Iraq, and this is being interpreted for India as the possibility that Pakistan may yet prove to be a better friend of the US.
The Indian military’s long experience in counter-insurgency — essentially a policing role for any professional army — is among the more important reasons for which the US wants India’s presence in Iraq. With an army such as India’s — with its vast experience in civilian-military duties — to provide it with “rear area security”, the US force can be freer in their combat role. That will reduce the Indian military to being cannonfodder. A self-respecting army deserves better.