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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Abandoned by the Iraqi army and unprotected by Kurds or Americans, Mosul burns, as looters dismember its ancient splendors and its archaeological heritage is smashed to bits.
Apr 12, 2003 | A little girl in a red velvet dress stood in the middle of the street on the outskirts of Mosul on Friday morning, holding a box. Traffic zoomed past her in both directions. She was hesitating, uncertain about which way to go, because she was transfixed by everything that was rushing past her.
Beat-up taxis sped out of town, loaded down with every possible item -- light fixtures, teapots. A boy was trying to sell black electrical transformers to drivers through the window of passing cars. Men on donkeys carried impossibly tall heaps of office equipment down the road toward their villages. The road was jammed with madness and greed; drivers were barely avoiding their rivals in their haste to get to the free merchandise.
It was a violent scene, because in order to pillage, you have to break locks, smash windows, burn and threaten, and this was all happening because it had somehow become necessary. Tens of thousands in Mosul were helping themselves, climbing over fences and walls, while the rest hid in their houses. We saw that the cars coming from the city center were full of junk, while the cars going in were empty. Everything with wheels carried loot. What they couldn't carry, they put on the curb, and guarded it by sitting on it. Bedouin farmers brought their tractors in and loaded them up. The population armed themselves. Men with guns were everywhere, and they were looting, too, doing most of it in fact; and they were busy organizing themselves into criminal gangs -- but we learned that later.
We drove closer to the urban core through chaotic traffic, and it seemed to me we were moving through Dante's circles of hell. Automatic weapons fired in long bursts from the center of the city. Sections of town were covered by black smoke from burning buildings. Police offices, any buildings associated with the government, were alight; any structure that held things of value had the door torn from its hinges. There was no law, no order, no soldiers to secure the city from any nation or group. Mosul has existed for millennia, and we were watching it burn.
I saw the little girl in the street a second before the car in front of us ran her down. She must have been only 5 or 6 years old. The driver who hit her was trying to get his fair share of the loot, and because she was there in front of him, he hit her. She disappeared in the traffic for a moment, then -- miraculously -- stood up. The car had only knocked her down. She made her way to the median and looked shocked and sad; her parents were gone, or perhaps were busy trying to get something for themselves. Her mouth filled with blood. Behind her, a supermarket burned.
Early Friday, Donald Rumsfeld had said that Mosul was falling. I caught a few minutes of the BBC early in the morning and heard him say in his press conference, "Peshmerga and U.S. special forces are now entering the city of Mosul." It was a tip from an unusual direction, but we had expected the city to crack any time. Kirkuk had fallen the day before, and we thought that Mosul was next on the list because the Iraqi army had collapsed and Baath Party officials were on the run all over the country. The Iraqi checkpoints near Kirkuk were totally abandoned, and scores of military vehicles sat in fields with their doors wide open. Why shouldn't the entire northern army vote with their feet, we thought, and leave Mosul to the Kurds and the Americans to walk in without having to fire a shot?
As soon as I heard Rumsfeld mention Mosul in the news conference, I woke up my friend Sion, a photographer, and we found our driver and translator and then drove as fast as we could toward the city from Arbil. We passed several peshmerga checkpoints along the way, but at the last Mosul checkpoint, we got stopped. A uniformed fighter made a circle with his hand, saying, "Buru, buru" -- go.
We got out of the car and tried to work it out. A Kurdish officer told us that we couldn't go forward and yelled at Rashad to go back. But he didn't take it well and said something under his breath in Kurdish. We asked the officer if there were Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, and he told me that there were no Iraqi soldiers, but that there were no peshmerga in the city, either, which sounded strange and didn't square with Rumsfeld's statement. The soldier said that he couldn't let us go because he didn't know what was happening in the city. I explained who we were, and asked him again if we could proceed. He said that it was out of the question. A taxi driver crossing the checkpoint from Mosul yelled to no one in particular, "The city is burning."
While we argued with the officer to let us through, we saw cars coming from the direction of Mosul filled with celebrating peshmerga. They raised their fists and shouted, and that pushed us over the edge. We looked at a row of cars that were also being turned back. No one was getting through. The last checkpoint for Mosul was choked with people from the surrounding areas, desperately trying to get into the city. They were also coming from Arbil to get some, and the soldiers weren't having any of it. Their tempers were short; they thought everyone on the road to the city was on the make. I watched a soldier strike a driver with his fist to get him to turn around, beating him in the face with quick blows.
We gave up on getting past the checkpoint. Rashad knew another way into the city, so he turned the car around and drove us across a grassy field, then through an old Iraqi defensive position that was also probably a minefield. He stuck to the vehicle tracks and then got us back on the road to the city through an alternate route. The new road was empty, so he floored it. The bridges across the Khazar River had been blown up by the retreating army, but they did a bad job and left one partially intact. We drove over the shattered concrete that dipped into a steep V shape; somebody had patched it over with dirt. We were in the city by 9:00 in the morning. The sky over the road went from white through shades of gray to black from smoke as we came in.
Mosul's liberation was not an ode to joy -- it was an anguished lament. Iraqi troops abandoned the city; the ruling order dissipated; and now there was nothing holding the population back from their worst impulses.
Baravan and Rashad shook their heads and were ashamed when they saw what was going on. We crossed the bridge over the Tigris and saw graceful stands of trees and a lovely neighborhood on the hills overlooking the river; then we drove through the great stone gates of the city. We drove into biblical Nineveh.
When we reached the government electricity office, a river of water was pouring down the stairs, because the looters had taken the toilets. Men dragged metal desks down the stairs through sheets of dirty water. Someone was shooting a block away, yet no one was running, so we didn't run. We took our cues from the crowd. Sion went into the electricity office to take pictures; that seemed like a bad idea to me -- the idea of being in that building with the crowds made me nervous. Instead, we watched the street and waited for him to come out. Something was happening a block away -- disordered noises, a fitful roar, the sounds of things breaking.
