LOYAL OR LEAVING?

After days of watching U.S. warplanes batter the city and seeing all his neighbors flee their New Baghdad neighborhood, Raymond Khalil decided he had had enough. So he piled his extended family into a rickety 12-seater bus, an ancient Peugeot and an orange-and-white taxi and took them ... downtown.

He’d like to have gone farther, he acknowledged, but the tires on his vehicles were too threadbare and the engines probably wouldn’t have lasted much beyond the city limits.

The 42-year-old electrician was making the decision that all of Baghdad seemed to be wrestling with on this crunch-time Saturday: Fight or flight? With U.S. bombing runs intensifying and the first foray of U.S. troops into the city proper, people were increasingly choosing flight, streaming out of the city on foot or in whatever vehicles they could find.

But government loyalists were digging in for a fight. For the first time, black-suited members of the Fedayeen Saddam -- those willing to sacrifice themselves for President Saddam Hussein -- were spotted inside the city. At the same time, dun-colored Republican Guard tanks appeared on city streets, and artillery emplacements appeared near some intersections.

The detritus of urban warfare may have further spooked residents. After a two-hour firefight in the Doura district of southern Baghdad, about a dozen burnt and twisted Iraqi vehicles -- including at least one tank, armored personnel carriers and pickups mounted with machine guns -- still littered the road near a highway overpass on the west side of the Tigris River late Saturday.

The mass exodus from Baghdad reflected thousands of individual decisions. Khalil said he initially had intended for his family to stay in their houses in New Baghdad, a working-class suburb on the southeastern outskirts. But another night of terrible bombing Friday and the sight of most of his neighbors leaving convinced him that he should take his family, and those of his two sisters and their husbands, to a relative’s flat in the center of Baghdad.

For Moustafa Kamel, 33, the location of his residence in the Bayaa district was key. It is near the airport.

Kamel, a goldsmith, took his wife and children to the small town of Heet in western Iraq -- “almost a village,” he said, where heavy fighting is unlikely.

“Baghdad is not safe now,” he said. “For men, it is OK, but not for women and children.” Kamel and his brother rented a 100-year-old house and transported their extended family -- 27 people in all -- 120 miles to their temporary abode Friday. He returned to Baghdad on Saturday to close their house. Of the eight families on his street, he said, only two had chosen to remain.

“War seems to be never-ending here. I ask myself why and I can’t find a logical answer,” said another traveler, Sumer Abdel Jabbar, a 41-year-old engineer, as he packed up belongings from his house in the Mustanseriya neighborhood of central Baghdad, preparing to head north.

“I decided that we go because of the children,” he said. “We cannot stay here and expose them to shock and fear every minute.”

One man who requested anonymity said he didn’t know when he would return. “It is up to Bush and Saddam Hussein. We are on the other side of the curtain, and we don’t know how this movie ends.”

Officials at the Information Ministry press center in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad twice Saturday promised to take journalists to the airport to verify Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf’s claim that it had been retaken. But the trip never materialized and instead journalists were driven in two buses around the city.

The tour yielded a few insights, however, showing freshly destroyed buildings from U.S. bombings and new defensive lines being thrown up here and there, with sand berms, tanks and artillery pieces appearing for the first time on city streets.

Many armed men appeared to be rushing to the new defenses, but also striking was the number of positions in the city that appeared to have been abandoned. And outside the main bus station, there were signs that some men of military age were trying to flee.

Although most city streets were empty, on the northern edge of Baghdad thousands of cars, trucks and minivans full of people streamed out of the city heading north. They had packages and bales of all sizes tied on roof racks, and bags and blankets spilling out of open trunks.

On the southbound side of the street , there were a dozen tanks and armored vehicles.Dozens of soldiers carried rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and Kalashnikov rifles, and were singing songs and chanting pro-Hussein slogans.

As the tightly controlled tour by government functionaries continued, the fighting spirit was much in evidence also among activists of Hussein’s Baath Party in the Shaheed Adnan neighborhood in central Baghdad.

The local party chief, Faeh Hamid, 58, was accompanied by seven party fighters from the neighborhood: a fisherman, machine operator, engineer, book publisher, stationery trader, house painter and law student. All had drawn 24-hour shifts of guard duty for the neighborhood (including four hours for sleep).

“Here we watch all the cars that cross the bridge and drive into our area,” Hamid explained. “All the party fighters live in the neighborhood, and they know every resident. One of our main tasks is to spot strangers. If we see a stranger ... we approach him and politely but firmly inquire about the nature of his business here.”

The party men must be ready to fight.

“We have enough small arms and ammunition to conduct serious street fighting for a long time,” he said, adding that he and some of his men recently had attended a special course on guerrilla and street fighting, and “we have a lot of men with rich combat experience from the time of war with Iran.”

One of the fighters, Abdullah Fahmi, 45, a round-faced engineer, even described a chance meeting they had had with the son of the president.

“We were on night patrol, a jeep went [on] the bridge, and we signaled for it to stop. It was midnight. The jeep pulled over, and you know who came out? ... Uday Saddam Hussein himself,” he recounted.

“He was personally checking the patrols in the city ... [and] thanked us for good work,” he said. He was smiling and beaming and in high spirits. He asked us whether we need anything and then drove on.

“It was so good to see him.”