Baghdad Hears the Roar From the South and Seethes

They have come, just over the southern horizon. No one in the city has seen them yet, but the steady drumroll of bombs, the steady thunder of artillery and the impunity with which allied airplanes roamed the sky all day left no doubt that the long-expected U.S. forces had reached almost to the city’s edge.

News reports, none carried by Iraqi television, put the American soldiers only 20 miles away by Wednesday night after days of pounding reportedly broke the Republican Guard formations guarding the southern approaches along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

In the mysterious way that information flows even when censorship reigns and telephones do not function in a city at war, all seemed to understand without being told that the battle for Baghdad is about to begin.

For the last few days, there has been a subtle shift in the demeanor among government officials here. Simultaneously, they sound more strident but look less confident.

At a briefing for foreign reporters held Wednesday at the Palestine Hotel press center in downtown Baghdad, Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf as usual denounced the U.S. troops he calls “mercenaries” and rejected as “more lies” and “illusions” the claims that the Americans had reached Baghdad’s doorstep.

But his own ministry’s morning excursion south to the city of Hillah, near Babylon, showed a landscape of burnt Iraqi tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers and bunkers exploded into craters just outside the city limits.

Inside Baghdad as well, the bombings have left more and more buildings damaged, with some destroyed after having been struck multiple times -- contributing to a creeping feeling of helplessness among the city’s population. Nonetheless, people still say they intend to put up a fierce fight when the Americans show up on their streets.

“We will not leave the city,” said Salah Ahmen Said, a 53-year-old tailor taking in the late afternoon air just outside the small Abu Ahmed Restaurant. He stood with a group of friends from his Sadoun neighborhood.

“If they [the Americans] are brave and courageous, let them come into Baghdad,” Said told a reporter in the presence of a government representative.

But under questioning, he acknowledged that many have already left the city.

“They are concerned for their lives. But these are mainly women, children and the elderly,” he said. “It is understandable -- you have thousands of kilograms of gunpowder being hurled at flesh and blood, real bullets and real bombs.”

After two weeks of bombing and fighting by U.S. and British troops to the south, food and fuel supplies in the capital remain adequate.

Families say they still have enough of the basic rations given by the government that are meant to last about six more weeks.

However, schools and most businesses have been closed since the war began, and in those shops that remain open, prices have risen dramatically, turning simple items like eggs and tomato paste into luxuries.

The value of the Iraqi dinar, meanwhile, has plunged, from 2,300 to the dollar before the war to about 3,500 to the dollar now.

Phone service has been cut by U.S. bombing, making people feel isolated. But electricity still works and most neighborhoods of Baghdad have running water -- except in rare spots where bombs or missiles have broken water lines.

Moreover, people for the most part also have access to wells.

Those who could afford it dug them for themselves before the war; and in poorer areas, civil defense authorities had them installed on street corners to allow people to draw water with hand pumps in an emergency.

There is, however, strong anger in this city at the number of civilian deaths and injuries that have occurred almost daily in the last two weeks in spite of U.S. efforts to minimize such casualties.

In the latest incident, a bombing apparently meant to strike a security installation near the Baghdad International Trade Fair caused damage across the street from the fair at the Red Crescent Maternity Hospital.

Two missiles struck at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, smashing cars that were driving by and creating a storm of jagged shrapnel and broken glass at the outpatient hospital that injured about 25 people.

On Wednesday afternoon, smoke still rose from the trade fair site, but a big truck bearing the slogan “The most professional vacuum loader in the world” already was clearing the pavement like a giant Hoover.

In a chair amid the debris of her family’s flower shop, Umm Mohammed, a heavyset woman who has lived a half-century of Iraq’s troubled history, was frantic with worry for her husband, who had been seriously cut in the explosions and was in critical condition at a nearby hospital.

She asked a question to anyone who would listen that has been on the tongues of many Baghdad residents in recent days. “Is this their humanity?” she said angrily. “Is this the humanity that they talk about? This is a flower shop, not a missile factory.”

Authorities here seek to exploit that anger and have been stepping up their efforts to convince Iraqis that President Saddam Hussein, his government and his Baath Party loyalists remain as much in charge as ever, so that residents will join the armed forces in fighting the advancing U.S. “criminals.”

“Fight them so that Iraq, the bastion of religion and principles, will be secured and our [Islamic] nation will come out of this crisis glorious,” said a statement attributed to Hussein that was read on state television Wednesday. “Victory is at hand, God willing, although we have only utilized a third or less of our army while the criminals have used everything they brought in.”

Outside the Abu Ahmed Restaurant, Said and his friends said they would fight and scoffed at the notion that the United States and Britain were mounting the military campaign in order to liberate them from Hussein.

“Did the Iraqi people ask the bastard Bush for that?” said Karim Omar, a 44-year-old taxi driver, as a U.S. B-52 flew high overhead, recognizable by its twin white contrails. “Is this supposed to be salvation for us?”

The men spoke of their love for their native city and pledged to defend it.

“We were born here,” said Said. “We have eaten the fruit of this land. It is the city of civilization, and we will do everything for Baghdad.”

Said said all of his friends were willing to die for the sake of the country.

“We don’t want it to happen, because a human life is precious,” he said. “But what can you do if someone comes to your house and tries to take it from you? Can you allow that to happen?”

On the road south of the capital, leading to Hillah 60 miles away, the signs of the warfare coming could not be missed. The journalists on the Information Ministry bus tour passed three blackened round fortifications with still-smoking antiaircraft guns in them. In one palm-tree grove, they spotted a bomb crater with three burnt military trucks tossed around it. Later, they saw a gasoline tanker that had exploded.

Along the road, armed Iraqis were walking. And in the distance, one could hear the explosions of more bombs, as the U.S. armed forces advanced toward the gates of Baghdad.

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