We had wanted to go to Mosul because we wanted to see joyful scenes there, of residents destroying giant images of Saddam. It was the liberation of a great city from decades of a tyrant's rule. Shouldn't they be ecstatic?

Sion reappeared and got back in the car and we drove to the source of the sound and movement, down a broad avenue toward the crowd. Rashad parked across from the Mesopotamia Bank. There was no statue of Saddam, no celebrations. Armed men stood on the bank's steps; they milled around, while others ran and smashed their way into buildings. The men on the bank steps were not peshmerga; they were armed men, possibly former Iraqi soldiers or villagers -- we didn't know who they were. At first we thought that the men were guarding the bank, but that wasn't true -- they were locals, and they were looting it in a furious way. Thirty seconds after we arrived, they started shooting. It was 10 o'clock.

I watched as Iraqis ran out of the bank with burlap sacks of currency over their shoulders, like thieves in a cartoon. Other men staggered from the bank with money in their shirts; their bodies melted into lumpy spare tires of cash. They wandered around with stupid grins on their faces. Another man fainted in the bank, and his friends revived him by placing sodden bundles of currency on his face. An old Arab man watched the looting from down the street and wept. The air was snowy with shreds of paper, like a tickertape parade; the paper was five-dinar notes with Saddam's face on them. All the notes have Saddam's face on them.

The men near the bank surged and ran in packs -- not well organized, but organized enough to do the job, which was to gut the place. The bank men had rifles and rocket launchers and stood on the steps in a proprietary way. They kept other armed groups at a distance by firing entire clips of ammunition into the air. Men in red kaffiyehs ran straight down the steps of the Mesopotamia Bank to getaway cars and leveled their rifles at the onlookers as they peeled out. As soon as they were gone, another armed gang took their place. If two groups wanted to get in the bank at the same time, they fended their rivals off with automatic weapons -- this was why they were shooting. A rumor that the bank had gold in it swept the gangs' caution away, and they worked faster at tearing the place to pieces. The looters were leaving with millions of dollars in a dead currency. Most of it was worthless.

Every second was a year. Time stuttered. It was perfect weather for a picnic. I looked at the men on the bank steps and tried to observe them in a clinical way, but I couldn't get the pattern. Who was running the city? Where were the peshmerga, where were the Americans? They were manifestly not around. No one had really taken the city; it had been abandoned. The U.S. soldiers Rumsfeld mentioned must have hunkered down in some secret place, observing and sending reports back to the big men. What else could they have done? A city this size needed thousands of soldiers, an occupying army -- and instead it had nothing. This is just speculation, but it's possible that the U.S. government told the peshmerga to stay out of the city, because the U.S. was already having problems with the Turks from the fall of Kirkuk a day earlier. We looked for Kurdish soldiers, and we didn't see them. I saw only one peshmerga during the hours we were in the city: He was stealing a truck, and he was leaving town in a hurry.

While the armed gangs looted the bank, I walked down the street and stood with the onlookers. An angry crowd of Iraqis formed around me. Baravan stayed nearby for translation, and kept it together under the most uncertain and screwed-up circumstances I've ever put a translator through. He told the angry crowd who I was. The Arabic word for journalist is sahafi, and Baravan said it many times to convince them I was not a soldier. But it didn't matter -- only the country of origin mattered to them. They wanted to know where I was from, so I told them the truth. When they heard it, they leaned in, and when new men joined the circle, the others told them I was American.

This new information changed everything, and the men in the back rows grabbed my arms to get my attention. They became more urgent, and all spoke at once. The first man said, "Look, the peshmerga are destroying my city"; he wanted to show me what they had done to his home. Baravan told him in Arabic that it was not true. A young man named Rafiq was panicking in a terrible way and said in a broken voice, "Where are the American forces? We want to stop this situation. There is stealing and looting and we need safety. WHERE ARE THE AMERICANS?"

Rafiq was pleading with me, desperate, and I said they were coming. "When are they coming, what time?" I told him that I didn't know exactly. The crowd just shouted more questions and reached out to grab me, pointing at my notebook. Panic spread. Baravan stood his ground and tried to calm them down. Another man shouted, "Stop the killing. Stop the killing." A long burst of gunfire from the bank quieted everything for a moment. The crowd took the moment to check and see if it was time to run away. We looked to the street and saw gunmen throwing sacks of money into a car and speeding down the road. They kept their weapons leveled at the crowd to make sure they wouldn't have any problems.

"This isn't freedom, this is bullshit," a kid said to me. It was like the report of a rifle.

Next, a fighter fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the air, and the horrible, instantly recognizable sound it made as it tore out a piece of a building -- imagine the tympanum in an orchestra played with an explosive charge -- sent the hundreds of men near the bank running for their lives. They poured down the street in a great wave. The questions were over.

We decided to keep moving around the city, because staying in one place for longer than a few minutes wasn't working out. We found Rashad near the car, started driving around and found quiet residential areas unshaken by violence. Shopkeepers sat in front of their stores to protect them; neighborhood people milled around. Fathers took their kids out for a walk. As we circled back toward the center and the locus of all the looting, we found a burning police station. We didn't do much there, but while I was waiting for Sion to take pictures, a man came up to me and pointed toward the Tigris River. Baravan told me that the man was directing us to a particular place in the city: "You should go to the museum." We took his cue.

Mosul is one of the oldest cities in the world: it is where human beings invented cities, then developed writing so they could write about them. As we drove to the museum, I had the feeling I always have when it's time to visit a museum in a great city. I felt it despite the looting and burning going on around us: curiosity, and awe.

We parked in front of the museum in the place where human memory begins -- a building of red stone, built in a simple but old style, like the lower levels of a zigurrat. A kid with a gun sat in front of the side entrance. The space inside was black. There was no electricity, and we walked inside over a sheet of water, because someone had already taken the water fixtures. In the research and archiving part of the building, the library had been looted, and files were on the floor. Sion found a room full of artifacts smashed on the floor. Clay tablets covered with cuneiform writing were scattered around like refuse. The larger display artifacts were in another wing, and we walked outside to find the main entrance. We crawled through a broken window to see the exhibits.

Inside, we saw a sign that said "Assyria" in printed letters with an arrow, so we followed it. Rows of shattered glass cases had been emptied of smaller artifacts. Some cases were not shattered, but they were empty as well. Either the curators had placed the artifacts in safekeeping, I thought, or officials had stolen them.

We walked until we found the main exhibition hall. The room was sepulchral; the windows had been blacked out with sheets of felt. When our eyes adjusted, we saw the great stone lion that guarded the Ishtar temple at the Nimrud Ziggurat, three thousand years ago. The ghost of an ancient history teacher shouted in my mind, "Look!" The large hall had been built to hold the lion and the graceful winged form on the massive slab next to it: another lion, this one with wings sprouting from its back. Cuneiform covered every inch of its body, and its mouth was open in speech.

We stared at the walls of Nimrud, and we spoke quietly, because we were in a museum.

At the lions' feet were large square beds of sandbags the curators had placed there, in case the bombs knocked the huge stone slabs over. They did it to keep them from shattering when they fell.

I saw a plaque next to the slab with the winged lion. It read, "These stone statues represent the power located at the entrance of cities. They are guards to ward off demons and spirits."

The lions must have been sleeping. On this day, they had failed.

[For a directory of Phillip Robertson's past stories from Iraq, click here.]

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