Anarchy, looting rage in Iraqi cities

Koji Harada/Kyodo News

Looters cart away a sofa and chair Friday from a government office in Baghdad. Plundered items in the capital ranged from a hotel's computers to a hospital's beds.

Ministries, banks are set ablaze

Wire services
Apr. 12, 2003 12:00 AM

BAGHDAD - Anarchy swept Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul on Friday as vanquished battalions of Iraqi soldiers streamed home, replaced by fearless battalions of Iraqi looters who ransacked, dismantled and torched banks, government ministries and other establishments.

With turbulence convulsing those cities, U.S. military commanders turned their attention to Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, but even that city seemed ready to fall. Marine officers said reconnaissance flights spotted looters there, but no masses of troops loyal to a regime the United States declared dead Friday.

"The Saddam regime has ended, is over, and we will stay until there is a free government," U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks, the allied commander, said in an order read to unit leaders.

President Bush, in his first public comments since the collapse of the Iraqi regime, emphasized that the war will not be over until his objectives, including regime change and the seizure of weapons of mass destruction, are achieved. No such weapons have been found.

"When Tommy (Franks) says we've achieved our objective, that's when we've achieved our objective," Bush said after visiting wounded troops in two military hospitals near the White House.

Meanwhile, the fate of Saddam remains unknown. U.S. intelligence officials said Friday that they had intercepted communications in which former Iraqi officials said among themselves that they believed Saddam had been killed in a bombing raid in Baghdad.

Talk of Saddam's death

But the officials said they were not certain that Saddam had been killed, citing the lack of physical evidence. They warned that it is possible that the midlevel Iraqi officials discussing Saddam's death did not know the truth or were passing on disinformation, convinced U.S. intelligence would be listening.

Franks said Saddam and his sons are "either dead or they're running like hell."

Military commanders and the Bush administration said they expected the civil disorder to burn itself out soon.

"This is a transition period between war and what we hope will be a much more peaceful time," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of the disorder in Iraq, "If you go from a repressive regime in that transition period, there is untidiness."

There was plenty of untidiness Friday:

Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city and the last northern enclave outside Kurdish and U.S. control, fell when an entire Iraqi army corps, 30,000 troops, melted away. But U.S. special forces withdrew after they were fired at. No U.S. casualties were reported.

Meanwhile, Iraqis in Mosul hijacked city buses and garbage trucks, purloined books from a museum, took tons of rice from a U.N. warehouse, hugged stacks of Iraqi currency stolen from banks and dug up plants from one of Saddam's palaces.

In Kirkuk, Iraqis plundered supermarkets, burned government offices, balanced chandeliers on their shoulders and stripped a Pepsi-Cola plant of soda and a natural-gas plant of valves and wires.

In Baghdad, Iraqis took computers, refrigerators and tennis rackets from the Rashid Hotel, set fire to the Ministry of Planning and a bank, and rolled beds and operating room equipment away from hospitals.

In Basra in the south, television news services reported a fire at major hotel.

Red Cross worried

The International Committee of the Red Cross expressed profound alarm, saying Baghdad's medical system "has virtually collapsed." The widespread paroxysms of lawlessness, revenge and opportunism in northern Iraq followed the disintegration of Iraqi military forces and the nearly complete absence of a U.S. military presence there during the day.

Kirkuk settles down

By nightfall, a semblance of order returned to Kirkuk, where some Iraqi police officers reappeared on the streets. U.S. troops established positions in the surrounding oil fields and said they would begin patrolling the city today.

The Pentagon dispatched an additional 2,100 U.S. troops to northern Iraq to help restore order, a senior Defense official said. At the same time, considerable evidence suggested that widespread combat was coming to an end.

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, dressed in civilian clothing, barefoot or wearing slippers or sandals, carrying no weapons, walked south along local roads from Kirkuk, homeward-bound on journeys that could require up to a week.

That left Saddam's hometown of Tikrit as the only major Iraqi city still to be seized by U.S. troops. Some U.S. war planners expected a fierce battle there, but others believed intense airstrikes on Iraqi positions earlier this week cracked any remaining will to fight.

Myers said he expected fighting to end soon in Qaim, a town near Iraq's western border with Syria where Iraqis forces are suspected of defending an arms cache.

"There have been intelligence reports that the leaders ... want to surrender. And so, I think that's going to be worked out today, tomorrow," he said.

In Baghdad, Marines attempted to curb looting in some places Friday but said they did not have sufficient personnel or equipment to police a city of 5 million people, and they said they had no intention of serving in that role.

The U.S. military death toll stood at least 107 Friday, with many others wounded.

A senior administration official said the crime and chaos in Baghdad were complicating the search for U.S. and other prisoners in Iraq, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and efforts to locate surviving members of the Iraqi leadership.

Since the fall of Saddam's government, the International Committee of the Red Cross has lost all contact with the Iraqi officials it had been talking to about seven U.S. prisoners of war, the agency said.

Commanders believe some regime leaders have already escaped, some to Syria, and many more are trying.

U.N. envoy departs

In a further sign of the passing of Saddam, Iraq's U.N. envoy left New York for Damascus, Syria, saying that he hopes U.S. forces will leave Iraq soon and that there will be free elections in his country.

"I will see you, I hope, in a peaceful time with a good friendship between Iraq and the United States," Ambassador Mohammed al-Douri said.