3 Months After Gulf War, Scars Abound in Baghdad

Pungent black smoke rose from the charcoal pit at Fish Seller No. 5, a favorite among the strip of barbecue cafes on the banks of the Tigris.

There’s only one item on the menu, masgouf, a river carp roasted over the coals, split in half and eaten Arab style, with the fingers. Here, in the cafes of Abu Nuwas Street, the men of Baghdad gather after dusk to take in the Tigris breeze, swap news and fill their bellies.

And here, for six hellish weeks in January and February, they watched the war in the skies over Baghdad.

“The masgouf places never closed. Crazy!” said Tarik al Samarrai, a driver who more sensibly spent the nights of allied bombing at home with his wife and 11 children.

This was a war the Baghdadis will never forget. And three months after the last bomb fell, they need no reminders. Still, there are plenty in the Iraqi capital, such as:

* The knock on the door in neighborhoods throughout the city of more than 4 million. The callers are military police with a truck at the curb bearing flag-draped coffins of Iraqi soldiers. The return of bodies from the battlefields to the south has increased in recent weeks, people say, probably because transportation is improving. Government officials do not release figures and may not know the toll of the fighting in the south. Diplomats can only guess; their estimates range from 20,000 to 80,000.

* The snarling of daily cross-city traffic. The chief cause of this has been the loss of two key bridges over the Tigris: the 14th of July Bridge, a suspension span that collapsed in the river when the cable standard was bombed, and the Jomhuriyah Bridge, with a section blasted away on each bank.

Ten other Tigris bridges were not attacked. But Baghdadis cannot understand why even the two were taken out. “Why did the Americans do this?” demanded one woman. “What was the military value here?” No ventured explanation will satisfy a populace dependent on driving to get anything done in a city still largely without telephone service.

* The widely visible evidence of air raids. The primary allied targets--the buildings that housed communications facilities and the various headquarters of President Saddam Hussein’s military and governmental machines--offer a remarkable sight.

From the rooftop restaurant of the Babylon Hotel on the outskirts of the city, Baghdad looks untouched, the gold-and-blue domes of its main mosques gleaming in an afternoon sun.

It does not look like the Dresden, Stalingrad or London of World War II--it is nowhere close.

“The precision of the bombing was amazing,” said a diplomat who remained here throughout the war.

Indeed, no traveler can cross the city without seeing the proof. Targeted buildings have fallen like chessmen on a crowded board, collapsed or shattered--but without moving the neighboring pieces.

Some targets were old buildings, such as the post, telegraph and telephone offices. They are now piles of bricks and mortar. Others were modern high-rises whose steel skeletons held but whose offices and equipment were gutted by the force and fire of explosions.

The list adds up to a comprehensive blow to Hussein’s organs of state power: his palaces, secret police headquarters, telecommunications towers (there does not appear to be an antenna left standing), Arab Baath Socialist Party offices, army depots.

Al Muthana, the old commercial airport since turned to military use, looks like a scrap yard. Saddam International, the new airport, is off-limits but reportedly suffered the same fate. The “collateral damage,” in the Pentagon’s antiseptic jargon, appears minimal.

“Bombs fell all around our house” near one of the targeted bridges, said a young man at a passport office. “But we suffered no damage, just a few cracked windows.”

The precision and deliberate nature of the bombing also can be seen at the sites of the two most disputed air attacks: the factory that the Iraqis claimed was making infant formula but that the United States said was a chemical plant, and the building in Ameriyah that the Iraqis asserted was a bomb shelter but the allies called a command-and-control center.

The factory, seen from a distance, stands alone in an empty field, its ceiling and walls blown out and a white powder still visible on the ground.

The Ameriyah building, in a middle-class area near Saddam International, has become part of a regular tour for visiting journalists, although Iraqi officials said the families of those killed in the building will no longer talk to reporters.

In the building itself, a young uniformed guard led the way, past a brass plaque that identified it as a bomb shelter built during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. The ground-floor room--which appeared to be about 40-by-100 feet--was dark. It would have been pitch black were it not for the large hole punched by a U.S. bomb through its 10-foot-thick reinforced-concrete ceiling. Electrical wires and air-conditioning ducts hung from the ceiling. The walls were scorched black by the explosion.

Steps led to a subterranean room, which the guard said was of similar size. But there was no light below and, the young man said: “The air is bad. They never got all the bodies out.”

Iraqi officials say 200 bodies were recovered; the estimated death toll was 800.

There was no way to verify the claimed fatalities, nor was there any visible evidence--coaxial cables, antennas--to support the oft-repeated American contention that the shelter had served as a communications center. The Iraqi government provides no figures on casualties in Baghdad itself, but diplomats estimate that the toll at Ameriyah, whatever it was, constituted the bulk of the losses here.

Reconstruction has begun on some of the bombed buildings, but it is at an early stage, mainly loaders shoving rubble out of the ground floors. The priority is on restoring communications.

Bombed-out government bureaucracies have simply taken over other quarters. The Defense Ministry, for instance, has moved from its gutted headquarters into the Oil Ministry offices.

As for the people of Baghdad, their memories of the ordeal of war remain vivid. Everyone has an account of coping, living through the daily concussion of the bombs. The Cuban ambassador sat in the embassy stairwell during the raids. The Soviets had a bunker, “just a slit, really,” a diplomat said.

The papal nuncio relishes his initiative in buying a generator the day before the bombing began. “My staff didn’t think the war was coming,” he recalled, “and despite my requests they never got out to get one. So, I went myself, and we were able to run our refrigerator and keep our food stocks from spoiling.”

A shop owner packed up her stock, locked the doors and moved to a family farm 80 miles north.

“My husband and I stayed there with our children,” she said. “At one point, I became quite sick, intestinal. My husband had bought medicine, and he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better. Then, he found the medicine bottle and saw it hadn’t been opened. He was furious with me, but I explained to him: ‘What about the children? If they get sick they will need the medicine.’ He made me take it anyway, and I was better in a day.”

After the war, the family returned to the city and reopened their shop.

Business is lousy, she said.

In postwar Baghdad, the fear of bombs has given way to despair over the economy. Inflation is soaring. Nearly half of Iraqi workers are on the government payroll--bureaucrats, soldiers, pensioners and laborers in state industry. Their paychecks are low, but they keep coming.

Meantime, too many Iraqi dinars are chasing too few goods. The result is postwar inflation. Chicken costs twice what it did before the war; rice and sugar cost seven times what they once did.

Prices are still low in government ration stores. But the shelves are often empty. Only the cost of gasoline has decreased from prewar levels--a government-controlled price that keeps vital public and private transport running.

As always in Iraq, the government and private elite still have more than enough to meet the high prices. At a men’s shop near the downtown Sheraton Hotel, a clerk said business is brisk for his Italian and German suits, which sell for the equivalent of $200 to $300.

Many of his customers are new, he said, adding with a wink: “There are always people who make money during a war.” Pressed for details, he hinted that food merchants made bundles by hoarding.

But elsewhere on the Sadoun Street commercial strip, clerks sat listlessly in deserted stores. They had goods but no customers.

Despite the air raids that sent U.S. planes over the city almost daily from Jan. 17 to Feb. 28, U.S. reporters working here meet little or no antagonism from the Baghdadis. “Hello. You are welcome,” they say. “Ahlan wa sahlan .”

It may just be traditional Arab courtesy--which disappears when the subject of the 14th of July and Jomhuriyah bridges comes up.