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For Some Who Stayed, a Rare Glimpse of a Myth

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Times Staff Writer

Cars laden with belongings, their trunks half-open and suitcases piled on the roofs, were streaming bumper to bumper out of the capital. But Iraqi television showed a different kind of mob scene Friday: Saddam Hussein having some quality time with his people, beaming at adoring crowds and kissing a curly-haired toddler.

In the video, the man who is more myth than man -- whose picture stares down from every office and whose shape, right down to his small paunch, is portrayed in most public statues -- rides through at least three Baghdad neighborhoods, alighting from his black sedan and accepting the embraces of ordinary Iraqis.

“How are you?” he addresses various people.

“May God protect you, president,” one man replies.

At one point, Hussein is on the hood of a car, slapping outstretched hands.

While it could not be concluded that the person accepting embraces was indeed the president, the 12 minutes of footage seemed designed to lay to rest suggestions emanating from Washington and London that Hussein had been killed or seriously injured in the first day of the allied bombing March 20.

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Aware that they are engaged in a political war as well as a military war, many of the country’s propaganda officials have devoted themselves in recent days to trying to show that Hussein is alive and in control of the country even as U.S. and British forces take over more of it.

The apparatus of government control was very much in evidence on gridlocked streets heading out of the capital, where all sorts of vehicles -- run-down family cars, filled-to-the-windows minibuses, battered orange-and-white taxis -- were crammed with everything people could get their hands on, including live chickens.

When a journalist asked whether he could stop to interview one group of travelers, his government-appointed guide refused. “They are traitors,” he said. “They are deserting us. They are leaving the city.”

The evacuees were mostly headed away from the U.S. advance south of town. Long lines of vehicles were spotted to the north and northeast of the city. One such traffic jam extended for six miles, with the people fleeing saying they were going to the province of Diyala, in the direction of Iran.

Roads south out of the city, meanwhile, were reportedly blocked by Iraqi soldiers.

In the south, wave upon wave of American bombs pounded Iraqi positions, and Saddam International Airport was now home to U.S. troops.

Nonetheless, the sight of Hussein apparently alive and well and walking the city streets sent a frisson of excitement surging through the drivers and government minders huddled in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel here, where reporters were being kept on a tight leash. (Because of the hotel’s generator, it was one of the few places in this city without power where the video could be seen.)

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Most days, state television shows Hussein at meetings with senior officials, and there has been a spate of announcements attributed to him and read by Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf exhorting the people to fight to defend their country.

In Friday’s footage, Hussein is in his green field marshal’s uniform and black beret, with a holstered pistol at his side. He gets out of his car, walks across the street as traffic passes, and greets passersby, who are clearly astounded to meet their leader.

Soon people are running toward him, racing to kiss his hand, and crowds of people form. One man in a track suit embraces him.

Several start pro-Hussein chants as the president smiles broadly, saluting them with an uplifted right arm. A boy, 2 or 3 years old, with curly black hair is handed to him for a campaign-style kiss.

The black smoke in the background matches that seen around the city for nearly two weeks, the result of fires set to confuse allied pilots. In the background, bomb-damaged buildings are seen, another suggestion that the filming was done in recent days.

Hussein -- famously careful about personal security -- rarely appears in public. The last time he did a similar walkabout among ordinary citizens was during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

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It was unknown whether the near-jubilant scenes around Hussein’s appearance could remove the sting of the loss of the airport and the heavy casualties inflicted by U.S. forces in the battle there that began Thursday night and continued well into Friday.

At Yarmuk Hospital, one of the city’s two main trauma centers, military and civilian casualties flowed in all day from fighting in the neighborhoods around the airport, about 10 miles from the center of the city.

Jeeps and ambulances caked in yellow dust were driven by burly men in military fatigues stained with sweat. They pulled out comrades on stretchers and raced into the emergency room.

Outside the hospital Friday morning, at least 20 soldiers stood in full combat gear, their uniforms covered with grime and the fronts of their fatigues stained with blood from carrying fellow fighters.

The soldiers treated foreign journalists harshly and told them to leave. But a quick tour of the emergency room showed at least seven soldiers on gurneys -- three of them with severe burns on their uniforms and flesh, and multiple wounds, apparently from shrapnel. Soldiers moved among the doctors, frantically helping them tend the wounded, several leaving their Kalashnikov rifles leaning against a wall.

There was a similar scene at Shadid Adnan Hospital a short distance away.

“We are operating round the clock,” Dr. Muthana Kassab said. “This is the first time we have ever admitted soldiers.”

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He said the injured mostly had severe burns and shell injuries, not bullet wounds.

One big Republican Guard fighter, who gave his name only as Ahmad, was wounded in both legs and was accompanied at his hospital bed by a similarly tall comrade. He said they had been positioned in Radwaniyah, a neighborhood near the airport, when they heard at 3:30 p.m. Thursday that the Americans had dropped troops near the airport.

They got into pickup trucks and hurried toward the scene, Ahmad said, and “almost ran into four [U.S.] tanks. I managed to shoot twice with my rocket-propelled grenade before there was a huge explosion. I flew up in the air and fell down, and then I came to in the ambulance,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to the others.”

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

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