Baghdad’s a Ghost Town, Fleeing Journalists Report : Iraq: In the bomb shelters, the mood among residents changes literally overnight. Some feel betrayed.

After nearly 48 relentless hours of surgical cruise missile strikes and bombing runs, Baghdad resembles a ghost town, its inhabitants having fled or in hiding, its sprawling residential districts largely intact but empty.

According to more than a dozen journalists who fled the embattled Iraqi capital and arrived in Jordan by land Friday, the regime of President Saddam Hussein still appears very much in control, despite more than a dozen direct hits on key government installations throughout the city.

The president’s main palace was destroyed in a cruise missile attack that Hussein survived, several of the journalists said. The Soviet ambassador to Iraq, Viktor V. Posuvalyuk, said he met with the Iraqi leader in his command bunker Friday.

The journalists, virtually all of them television journalists and the only Western eyewitnesses to leave Baghdad since the war began, confirmed that Hussein’s Defense Ministry has been demolished and that the satellite dishes on his main communications tower have been disabled. At least two military airfields in the city were also taken out of operation.

The eyewitness accounts, more than likely the last independent and uncensored descriptions of the scene inside Baghdad for days to come, went beyond picturing a city under siege and psychologically devastated by pinpoint destruction. Their sketches also hinted at the prevailing mood among the Iraqis themselves: a mixture of dread, despair and, in some cases, a sense of outright betrayal by a leader once viewed by most as invincible.

“Even in the bomb shelters, the mood changed literally overnight,” said Nigel Baker, a producer at Britain’s Independent Television Network, who spent nearly 15 hours crossing the Iraqi and Jordanian deserts in a mini-convoy to reach Amman on Friday morning.

“When the attack began early Thursday, the (Iraqi) parents in the shelter were leading their children in handclapping chants of ‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs, Kuwait belongs to Iraq.’ But in the morning, after hours of explosions outside, they ended the night frightened into silence, their children clinging to them and crying.

“Another Iraqi friend told me almost in tears, ‘I never thought this would happen.’ It was as if they’d suddenly become so afraid, realizing perhaps for the first time that this wasn’t going to be another great victory for Saddam.”

Anthony Massey, a British Broadcasting Corp. producer who left Iraq on a similar desert road journey Friday, added: “The city appears virtually undamaged because of the accuracy of the cruise missile . . . but it is completely deserted.

“This is really the final straw” for many of Baghdad’s 4 million residents. “They’re leaving as fast as they can.”

Larry Doyle, a veteran producer for CBS-TV, drove through several hours of antiaircraft barrages and was forced to spend the night at the Iraqi border after it was closed just after midnight Friday. He illustrated the resignation and despair in Baghdad with the case of an Iraqi friend who works as a civil servant in a government ministry.

“This is a 33-year-old guy who spent all eight years of the Iran-Iraq War as an antiaircraft gunner in the Iraqi army,” said Doyle, who has worked in Baghdad on and off for several months since the crisis began Aug. 2.

“Once, this guy was in a foxhole when an Iranian bomb landed 10 feet away and didn’t go off. He thought he was truly blessed. But in the days before the war started, I reminded him that this war is going to be a whole lot worse than his last war.

“He said, ‘It doesn’t matter to me. I have no life. The eight years I spent in the army reduced my life to nothing.’

“Then, he came to see me Thursday morning after that first night of bombing. He was pretty shaken up, but he just stuck out his hand and said, ‘1956. Good-by.’ That was the year he was born. He had just been called up to the army again.”

Such accounts from inside Baghdad may be the last until the 40 or so Western journalists who remain in the capital decide to pull out as well. The Iraqi government impounded all cameras and other video equipment Friday from the foreign television crews.

Strict censorship was imposed, and the television reporters who have been the world’s only independent eyes and ears at the front lines since the first missile hit were barred from leaving their government hotel. In many cases, they were forced to remain for hours in the basement bomb shelter by police guards carrying assault rifles.

“This will probably be the last uncensored broadcast that we make from here,” reported John Simpson, the BBC’s foreign editor, whose graphic accounts from his fifth-floor window at the Al Rashid Hotel have riveted listeners around the world since the attack began. Simpson then reported the day’s events, including the destruction of Hussein’s palace and the fact that his cameraman filmed a cruise missile speeding along the main road outside the hotel at about the height of his room. Finally, he closed his dispatch by saying all future reports would be heavily censored by Iraq’s propaganda machine.

Indeed, the reports by state-run Baghdad Radio and the Iraqi News Agency cast a far different tone for Hussein and his people than those related by the Western television crews that got out.

Declaring that the war had only just begun, a Baghdad Radio announcer insisted in a report monitored here that “it will not be a short one, as (President) Bush imagines. Iraq’s final decision is confrontation. It will be a long-term confrontation.”

It was unclear, however, whether Hussein is still capable of operating Iraqi Television, a critical weapon in his regime’s propaganda arsenal during the five-month political stand-off that preceded the war.

In his final broadcast, Simpson described how the satellite dishes of a key television facility were simply “dangling” from wires after a Friday morning U.S. attack. And there was no Baghdad footage on national television in neighboring Jordan, one of Hussein’s few allies in the war, after Thursday’s film of Hussein meeting with commanders in his bunker and small clusters of people on the city’s otherwise deserted streets.

It was chiefly the fear of imminent censorship, communications cuts and restricted movements that persuaded most of the journalists who fled Baghdad in the past 24 hours to leave. Most also had been ordered out by their home offices.

But all of them stressed that a key factor in their decision was an unofficial warning to American networks in Baghdad, purportedly from Administration sources in Washington, that a U.S. attack was about to take place on the Al Rashid Hotel, where all but a few of the journalists were staying.

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said reports of such a warning were “a fabrication.”

“There was no targeting of the Rashid Hotel. I so informed the presidents of ABC, CNN and NBC, and those reporters should have all known it was not a target. If they left, they left for other reasons.”

Although key sites near the Al Rashid were hit a few hours later, the hotel emerged unscathed, and several of the reporters who left said they now suspect that the U.S. warning also was a subtle, but effective, propaganda device by the U.S.-led forces to end all reporting of the war from the Iraqi side. Iraqi propaganda included, for example, Friday’s claims that Iraq had shot down scores of American jets and captured at least two pilots.

Still, most of the television reporters, cameramen, producers and technicians who reached Amman on Friday said they probably would have left even without the American warning. In addition to the looming Iraqi crackdown, all said that the Americans’ sustained, high-tech military assault on Baghdad brought war correspondence to danger levels that even the most experienced of them had never before witnessed.

“I expected the censorship, because I went through it all in the Iran-Iraq War. They’re very good at propaganda management,” said Brian Hulls, the BBC’s veteran combat cameraman who traveled frequently to the front-lines of Iraq’s last war. “But there was also the high-tech aspect of this war. I’d never seen anything like a cruise missile before and it’s really quite frightening.”

Through it all, though, there were lighter moments, particularly during the hours that led up to the U.S. attack, Hulls said.

On Wednesday, “there were all sorts of bizarrely normal things going on--like the races,” Hulls said. He explained that just hours before the first missiles slammed into Baghdad, thousands of Iraqis poured into the city’s racetrack for an afternoon of sport, gambling and drinking.

“The Information Ministry wouldn’t let us film it, of course. Later, I learned that they felt the hard-core gambling and other un-Islamic behavior might cast them in a bad light,” Hulls said.

ITN’s Sebastian Rich, another seasoned combat cameraman who left Iraq on Friday, said that on Thursday, he had a conversation that contrasted starkly with the afternoon at the races. It was a moment that illustrated how even the staunchest supporters of Hussein, in rare bursts of openness, suddenly began voicing disdain for their leader.

“A very close Iraqi friend, who had continued to boast that Saddam was great and Bush was a devil on the very day before the attack, came to me the day after and said he was running away from Baghdad to his family.

“ ‘This Hussein is mad,’ he told me. ‘He’s crazy.’ Just overnight, he had completely changed.”