Ten years ago today, Patrick Cockburn was
one of just a handful of journalists to stay on
at Baghdad's al-Rashid hotel as the first
allied planes flew in. Here, he recalls the
terrifying night the air war in the Gulf began
16 January 2001
As the allied planes flew towards Iraq on the first day of the
Gulf air war, I sat waiting for them by the open window of my
room on the fifth floor of Baghdad's landmark al-Rashid hotel.
The UN ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to pull his army out of
Kuwait had expired on 15 January – and now, down in the
lobby, expectation was turning to panic as people realised that
after months of waiting the bombing was finally about to begin.
Some American TV crews, fearing Iraqi retaliations, had
decided to flee at the last minute to Jordan, and were hurriedly
loading their equipment on to trucks.
The al-Rashid, a tall, modern building used by the Iraqi
government to house official guests, had double-glazed
bullet-proof windows. This was comforting in a way, but as I
waited for the bombs to fall, I worried that an explosion close
to the hotel would shatter the heavy glass, turning the shards
into lethal pieces of shrapnel. I decided to keep the window
open that night, though it was bitterly cold outside. Kneeling on
the floor, wrapped in a blanket for warmth, I gazed out over the
silent city, gripped by a mixture of fear and exhilaration.
I got used to the whooping of the air-raid sirens in the coming
weeks, but on that first night they sounded peculiarly
menacing. A few minutes after their first warning note, at about
3am, anti-aircraft guns opened up across the city, sending
streams of yellow tracer into the night. Shells from other guns
sparkled like white daisy-chains as they exploded overhead.
The Iraqis were clearly not short of ammunition. Then, from
behind the hotel, there began the staccato roar of a battery of
anti-aircraft guns perched on earth mounds above the river
Tigris.
At first I mistook the Iraqi AA missiles exploding on the horizon
for the first US bombs or Tomahawk missiles. But then a huge
pillar of flame seemed to erupt from the top of a
telecommunications building a mile or so away, on the other
side of the park that housed Baghdad zoo. More bombs and
missiles followed, silhouetting buildings against the
explosions. My windows survived the attack, but a few
seconds after each blast I felt a gentle puff of air against my
face.
I was in Baghdad covering the crisis for The Independent –
and I recall worrying that elsewhere in the al-Rashid, Peter
Arnett of CNN was giving a blow-by-blow account of the
bombing to viewers around the world. This meant that
whatever I wrote might seem old hat to readers who had
stayed up into the night when it was published the following
morning. And I was eager to find out more about the damage,
in case the Iraqis locked the remaining Western journalists in
the hotel or kicked us out of the country.
So, in the early dawn, with Baghdad still shrouded in a chill
white mist, I set off from the al-Rashid with Maggie O'Kane,
then of the Irish Times, and headed first for the
telecommunications tower on the opposite side of the river
from the Mansour Melia hotel, where British hostages had
been held after the invasion of Kuwait the previous August.
From a distance, the building looked undamaged, but as we
got closer we could see that its outline was more jagged than
usual. Laser-guided bombs had blown holes in the third and
fifth floors and had melted the satellite dishes on the roof.
Elsewhere in the city, the smart bombs and cruise missiles
had hit ministries and security headquarters. The building
housing the ruling Baath Party had a large bite taken out of its
roof. The Ministry of Justice looked normal but a missile had
ripped apart its insides. There was smoke rising from
Saddam Hussein's presidential compound and the military
intelligence headquarters looked as if it too had been hit.
But the destruction had less impact on the Iraqi government
than appeared from television pictures. This was not the first
time Baghdad had been attacked in recent history. The
Iranians bombarded the city during the Iran-Iraq war in the
1980s, and ever since government institutions had alternative
locations to which they had already transferred.
I later asked an Iraqi intelligence officer in exile where
Saddam and his key officials had been during the bombing. "I
can tell you where we weren't," he replied. "We didn't hide in
any underground command bunkers. We assumed the
Americans knew about them and had the bombs to penetrate
through the reinforced concrete." Saddam himself turned out
to be living mainly in a middle-class suburb called al-Tafiya,
moving house every few days. He travelled in cheap,
inconspicuous cars, sometimes accompanied by only a
single bodyguard – a colonel who himself wore no insignia of
rank.
But though the government had survived the first day of the
bombing largely intact, ordinary Iraqis were in a state of
collective shock. Six months earlier, many had favoured
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait (on 2 August). But the last thing
they wanted was another war. Several hundred thousand
Iraqis, from a population of only 18 million, had died or been
wounded fighting Iran. As the allied armies assembled in
Saudi Arabia, they knew they could not fight the whole world.
"We didn't expect a war," an Iraqi general sent to Kuwait later
recalled. "We thought it was all a political manoeuvre."
On the last day of peace I had toured Baghdad. There was an
ill-attended protest rally of school children outside the British
embassy organised by the Baath party. Horses were still
being exercised by their trainers near the al-Mansur race-track.
The largest public gathering I could find turned out to be a
meeting of pigeon fanciers.
It was not that the Iraqis were ill-informed about what was
happening There was little on Iraqi television and radio but
people spent hours listening to foreign radios in Arabic,
switching from the BBC to Radio Monte Carlo to Voice of
America. "Our main hobby is listening to the radio," said one.
But if people in Baghdad did have qualms about Saddam's
refusal to pull out of Kuwait, there was nothing they could say
or do about it, apart from voting with their feet. There was a
pervasive fear that Saddam would fire a Scud missile, armed
with a biological or chemical warhead, at Israel – and that the
Israelis would respond with a nuclear strike on the Iraqi
capital.
Among those who stayed in Baghdad, mostly too poor to
leave, on the first day of the war the mood was fatalistic. Some
made formal declarations of defiance towards the US,
probably thinking this was the only safe course when talking to
a foreign journalist. But in a dilapidated cafe near Nasr
Square, one old man stopped drinking tea to relate a story
about how divine intervention might yet save good Muslims.
He repeated the old tale from the Koran of how the Abyssians
once "brought elephants to conquer Mecca. At first the
Bedouin warriors were frightened by the beasts, but God sent
birds to Mecca who dropped stones on the elephants and
killed them". Saddam had recently told the same story, adding
the significant fact that he had recently learned that the
elephant was the symbol of President Bush's Republican
Party.
But the way the old man told the story, with exaggerated
gestures and to the sound of giggles of others in cafe, it
suggested a different, more dissident, message: unless God
could come up with magical birds, Iraq had no hope against
the allied elephants.
Over the next few weeks, the decline in the living conditions of
our small band of journalists in the al-Rashid reflected the
collapse of civil life in Baghdad. The previous year, the menu
had boasted lobster cooked three different ways. By the first
week in February, breakfast consisted of a fried egg sitting in a
pool of jam.
But it seemed tasteless to complain, since everyone else in
Iraq was so much worse off. The hotel at least had a small
generator, not powerful enough to work the lifts, but it provided
a flickering light on the stairs. In the rest of Baghdad, after the
first bombs fell on the morning of 17 January, there was no
electricity at all. Many wealthier Iraqis had prepared for war by
stocking their deep freezes with meat.
But without power, the meat was rotting, producing a
penetrating stench which hung over entire districts.
In poorer districts, garbage collectors noticed a sinister
change. Before the war a third of all garbage consisted of food
scraps. Now, thanks to the war and sanctions, these had
disappeared; food was too precious to throw away. Everything,
even melon skins, was being eaten.
This abrupt return to the living standards of the Middle Ages
came about because of an astonishing oversight by the Iraqi
leadership. It should have been obvious to them that their oil
refineries would be high up on the allied target list. Despite
this – and the fact that Iraq was entirely dependent on
motorised transport – they had not stockpiled any petrol. In a
few days the fuel started to run out. I bought a bottle in what
was known as "the thieves market" in a vast working class
slum on the far side of the Tigris. It turned out to have been
laced with water, so my car periodically ground to a halt. The
petrol famine crippled Iraq far more effectively than the allied
destruction of roads and bridges.
It had been obvious from the start of the war that any journalist
who stayed in Baghdad was going to be portrayed as a
catspaw of Iraqi propaganda. The White House and the
Pentagon believed they had lost in Vietnam because of a
hostile media – and they were not going to let it happen again.
Peter Arnett was pilloried for querying the official line that all
bombs and missiles hit their targets. The British journalists
who stayed in Baghdad were less vulnerable. But the Iraqis
had introduced a lackadaisical censorship, whereby an official
– often with an uncertain grasp of English – would stand
beside us as we dictated our copy over a satellite telephone.
Not unreasonably, italicised health warnings began to appear
at the bottom of articles, saying they had been censored by the
Iraqis.
I did not quite realise that the US and its allies were
presenting the air campaign as an entirely new type of war in
which only military and government targets were being hit. It
was true that the laser-guided bombs and cruise missiles
were very accurate, but videofilm showing them demolishing
large buildings rather missed the point. Accuracy only matters
if you know your target. Armies and security forces are good at
hiding themselves. General Wafiq al-Samarrai, the former
head of Iraqi intelligence, now in exile, told me later that in the
entire air war "the Iraqi army didn't lose a single officer over the
rank of brigadier".
On the ground in Baghdad, one could sense as the days went
by that the allied airforces were getting to the bottom of their
target list. They hit the ruins of the Baath party headquarters
half a dozen times. Iraqi Information Ministry officials took us to
see the bombed-out remains of a factory. The Pentagon
claimed it was a biological warfare plant while the Iraqis said
it produced baby milk. It seemed likely the Iraqis were telling
the truth. Drifts of milk powder were heaped against the walls.
In a desk in an office in the factory, I found detailed letters from
foreign consultants about the financial problems of producing
powdered milk.
The drama of the air war over Iraq masked a simple truth. The
allied elephant, as the old man in the Baghdad café had
hinted, was always, barring divine intervention, going to crush
little Iraq. This would have happened even without the air
campaign, which destroyed much of what the Iraqis had built
over the previous 50 years. The only real surprise of this war
was that Saddam Hussein survived his defeat.
Patrick Cockburn is the co-author with Andrew Cockburn of
'Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein',
published by Verso (£17)