Looters Bring Baghdad New Havoc

Outside the Canal Hotel, former headquarters of the United Nations here, scores of men waited like vultures Thursday and eyed the fleet of white four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers.

Maybe it was the lure of the unobtainable -- the Land Cruisers were among the few prizes left in this city not already grabbed. They were being protected by 2nd Battalion, 23rd Regiment Marines. And the Marines weren’t letting the vehicles go.

In this city no longer under Saddam Hussein’s control, but not fully under anyone else’s either, plunderers have swept in like a plague of locusts, brazenly breaking into government offices, diplomatic residences, banks, even hospitals, and carting off whatever they can.

In contrast to the celebrations of a day before, Baghdad seemed like a lawless frontier, as U.S. forces chased down pockets of resistance from Fedayeen fighters and tried to protect themselves from sneak attacks such as a suicide bombing Thursday night in Saddam City that seriously wounded four Americans.

Although the Marines have now been given orders to stop the looting, there was no sign that order had been implemented. With all the thievery, barely a shop or business dared to open. Residents of some neighborhoods set up barricades to try to protect their streets. Many people stayed at home, peering out their windows in fear.

At the tiny Gardenia supermarket in the Zayouna district in east Baghdad, proprietor Ali Abbas, grizzled in white skullcap and long, gray robe, accosted a pair of American customers and pleaded: “Please, we need our peace and security. These are not good people, and they are stealing everything. We cannot sleep at night because they are really bandits.”

The U.S. forces’ hands-off policy had encouraged the looters to commit more and more thefts, such as when they broke into the vacant German Embassy on Karada Street, helping themselves to chairs, desks, fans and air conditioners.

One looter was so eager to get inside that he tried to climb through concertina wire and got himself hopelessly hung up.

Hamid Hilla, a 35-year-old computer technician, said he hopes that the U.S.-British alliance quickly imposes martial law to stop the pillaging.

“They could ask the police to come back to work, and many of them would,” he said. “They could ask the electricity workers and the water workers as well. We need these services. These services are very important.”

So far, few private homes have been broken into, he acknowledged. “Not yet,” he said, “but maybe they will try when they get done with the government buildings. This is why we are afraid.”

There were scenes of looting on almost every street.

Crowds of people looted the Higher Education and Industry ministries. In Nidal Street, which runs by them, people were carrying off chairs, sofas, frames, mirrors, ventilators. Men, women and children got into the act.

“I think we can use this in the house,” said an 8-year-old boy, Ayad Umar, struggling down the road with a huge floor lamp. “Why shouldn’t I take it? Everybody is doing it. Look.”

Hospitals and clinics were not spared, causing even some of those vital facilities to lock their doors.

“At night, some bad people came and they took away a lot of medicines and drugs and they stole two of our ambulances,” said Safaa Hashemy, a surgeon at Al Kindi Hospital. “We can’t really operate properly without medicines and drugs, and we need the ambulances to send out to help people.”

An Iraqi soldier, Hiethan Faisal, 28, pulled up outside the Industry Ministry in a military truck that had been badly repainted white. “I took this truck from the barracks,” he explained. “Everybody ran away. Why leave it there to be destroyed? So I repainted it yesterday and now I am a truck driver.”

On the opposite side of the Tigris River, a robed woman fresh from the Al Mansour Hotel, where smoke still billowed from an outbuilding, held a jar of orange marmalade in one hand while dragging a mattress down Haifa Street.

Deeper into the neighborhoods on the west bank, which quickly dissolve into dilapidated slums, residents broke into the National Museum with its rare antiquities and plundered tiny, rundown restaurants and stores.

In one scene, a disappointed looter held a ceiling fan and a blow-up Santa Claus doll, taken from a government-owned shopping complex. His path to what appeared to be a massive public-housing project was studded with empty boxes and the smashed marble of dropped floor tiling ripped from ministry buildings.

In another, mothers held children while fathers pushed away cars and motorcycles from the parking lots of the Information Ministry. Inside, the marble fountains were dry, biographies of Hussein lay scattered and a 6-foot-high bust of the dictator stared impassively.

Still, there was a methodical discipline to the looting. There were no fights over goods, and no apparent rush to get away. Residents waved and smiled at reporters and soldiers, at times asking “OK?” and pointing to their plunder in a bid for official sanction of their crime.

Meanwhile, hungry residents weary of war clamored to cross bridges blocked by tanks and the twisted wreckage of cars, some of them with charred corpses still sprawled on the seats.

As the only visible source of authority, Marines and Army soldiers at checkpoints often had to become judge and jury.

The bloodied, beaten and accused were turned over by angry Iraqis to confused U.S. troops who could not decide whether they had the right to detain them.

Those same troops, desperate to keep a mob from rushing the bridges across the Tigris, for a while threatened to fire at journalists trying to cross into U.S.-controlled areas from their hotels on the east bank.

While U.S. checkpoints saw tense standoffs and even a few warning shots fired, many troops for the first time also heard words of praise coming from Iraqis for toppling the Hussein regime.

“I had one kid come up to me and say, ‘I love America, Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A.,’ ” said Jerry Duvall, 20, of Columbia, Ky., from Cyclone Company of the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment.

Residents often approached checkpoints with heartbreaking pleas. One family that had been allowed to pass a checkpoint to take a diabetic relative to a hospital Wednesday returned to say the man had died because the hospital had no insulin. They then pleaded to pass through to retrieve a family car. Troops showed them side streets to bypass the checkpoint.

As Gen. William Wallace, commander of the U.S. Army 5th Corps, toured the Cyclone Company checkpoints, examined battle scars on tanks and listened to war tales, a man with a bloodied face and wet pants tried to explain to soldiers a few paces away that he had been beaten by four Iraqis and wanted to cross into Saddam City, on the east bank.

Instead of allowing him to pass, the troops led him away handcuffed with a plastic strip.

“He’s wet, and we don’t know where he came from,” said Staff Sgt. Charles Wooten, 36, a Cyclone Company tank commander from Meridian, Miss. Overnight Wednesday, troops nearby had fired on and sunk a 25-foot boat trying to slip across the river, saying it was filled with militiamen.

“I tell you what, you don’t know who’s good and who’s bad,” said Sgt. Arnoldo Spangaro, 29, of Cape Coral, Fla., who stood nearby.

At another bridge a mile away, troops puzzled over a gap-toothed man in ragged clothes who was identified by several fellow Iraqis as a Baath Party henchman. One of those who pointed him out to soldiers showed whip scars on his back and indicated that the man was somehow responsible.

Talking through a translator, the man said he had been robbed by a business partner, who had killed his wife and kidnapped his children.

The story did not convince an Army interrogator, who nonetheless turned him loose.

“Without any military ID or a weapon, we can’t detain him” as a prisoner of war, Sgt. Spencer Willardson said.

As he was led back to the bridge, the man wept and continued to plead his case, apparently terrified of his fate on the east bank.

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.