In Baghdad, a Catharsis of Fury and Fear : Scene: On second anniversary of Gulf War start, the sirens sound again in Iraq’s capital. A defiant celebration becomes a litany of curses.

The air raid sirens wailed outside Baghdad’s Rashid Hotel at 10:05 Sunday night. Almost instantly, Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries exploded in yellow bursts and red tracer fire, ringing the city.

And before Dr. Ahmad Rashed could put down his food in the restaurant, an explosion tore through the hotel’s cavernous lobby, shattering floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows and sending thousands of glass shards ripping through leather couches, the ceiling, a grand piano and a young female receptionist.

The Iraqi woman, named Amira, was killed. At least 15 others were injured, and the state-run hotel that was packed with hundreds of delegates from throughout the Arab and Muslim world for a three-day International Islamic Conference quickly became Ground Zero for the fury of not only the Iraqis but their potential supporters from throughout the world.

It may not have been clear to the outside world just what made the 25-by-10-foot crater that gaped right next to the hotel after an American missile attack on the Iraqi capital. But amid the rubble and wounded inside the hotel, it was painfully clear that the blast would only serve to deepen the Islamic world’s mistrust of the United States and its allies.

“We believe they (the Americans) targeted this Islamic conference,” Rashed, a Palestinian delegate from Jordan, calmly concluded as he stood in a half-inch of water, glass and bloodstains in the hotel’s lobby within minutes of the explosion.

As Iraqi soldiers carried wounded young women in stretchers through another section of the lobby, another Palestinian delegate, Sheik Kamal Nasser Ainkawi, shouted: “They knew there was an Islamic conference here. The hotel was targeted. This is a dirty, filthy American plot--to hit at all people who sympathize with the Iraqi people and their leadership.”

Nearby, an Egyptian hotel employee was screaming. It was spontaneous--and furious. Youssef Hamad Youssef swore and shouted curses in Arabic against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a key U.S. ally in the 1991 Persian Gulf War coalition that drove Iraq out of Kuwait. And over and over he kept shouting: “Amira is dead! Amira is dead! She is just a bride!”

A German tourist at the hotel seethed with fury, saying he was saved when the blast blew the window of his room into his bed only because he had gone to brush his teeth at the time.

“I want to kill the first American I see,” he told a reporter at the scene, adding that he had been one of the thousands of foreign “guests” taken hostage by Baghdad after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, 1990, and that he had returned to Baghdad only the day before “to meet old friends.”

“It was an intentional attack, because there was this conference here,” said the German, who did not give his name. “Now, all these sheiks will go back to their mosques and tell their people what happened here. This is criminal.”

Although there was no direct evidence conclusively linking the explosion at the hotel to the U.S. cruise missile attack, Iraqi soldiers and technicians at the scene were loading a truck with pieces of burnt metal recovered from the crater, among them at least one charred piece with gears bearing the name of an American manufacturer.

At Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital, the destination of the wounded, there was a steady parade of injured women, men and children. One woman wailed as her uncle described how his mother was killed and his niece was wounded when a missile hit their house. Amar Ismail said that his house and those of three neighbors were destroyed in Baghdad’s Karada neighborhood.

When asked why his house was hit, Ismail shrugged. “Maybe they did it because we were near a suspension bridge.”

President Saddam Hussein personally visited at least one of the city’s hospitals. At the bedside of Peter Brinkmann, a reporter for Germany’s Bild newspaper who is a guest at the Rashid Hotel and suffered a head wound in the blast there, Hussein said: “Now you see it. Tell the world that they are always bombing civilian targets.”

Hussein then put his hand on the reporter’s shoulder and told the doctors to look after him.

Back at the Rashid, Iraqi guests, employees and government workers registered the climax of an anger that had been building throughout the day, the second anniversary of the beginning of the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War effort that drove Iraq from Kuwait.

“Bush is a dog,” one Iraqi hotel worker shouted as a female colleague was being wheeled past in a stretcher. “Let him fight the men--not the women.”

An Iraqi bellhop whispered more quietly. “OK, Kuwait was a mistake. But does that mean they have to kill everybody?”

The missile attacks on the capital were something of a catharsis of anger, fear and pain at the very grass roots of a city that had spent the day in defiant celebration to mark the moment Jan. 17, 1991, when so many more bombs and missiles had targeted their capital.

At 8 a.m. sharp Sunday, the girls at Aqeeda High School gathered in the morning chill inside a courtyard for nearly half an hour of songs, slogans and speeches of “victory.”

“Bush is gone! But Saddam remains!” chanted nearly 1,000 smiling Iraqi teen-agers, some hoisting color portraits of Hussein and others bearing placards labeling President Bush “a war criminal.” “Iraq has won!” they continued. “Saddam has won! Bush has lost!”

Across town, the same message resounded in the streets of the residential Mansour neighborhood all afternoon as tens of thousands of citizens blew trumpets, thumped drums and danced in the streets with banners declaring, “Saddam Hussein, your picture shall remain in our souls and our eyes.”

The day of celebration appeared to many outsiders to be a largely stage-managed affair.

Traffic police, backed by soldiers carrying assault rifles, helped enforce an official five minutes of national silence to mourn tens of thousands of Iraqi war casualties, stopping cars in mid-rush-hour at intersections throughout the capital. Tight controls were evident at the official parade and rally down Mansour’s main street. At Aqeeda High and thousands of other schools throughout the nation, students were carefully led in each chorus by a loyal supporter of Hussein and his ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party.

But such trappings are hardly unusual in the authoritarian society that is Hussein’s Iraq, and much of the emotion on the streets Sunday was authentic nationalist pride among a people increasingly consumed by frustration, poverty and confusion amid their nation’s continuing ostracism and isolation.

Much of that pride is grounded in an extraordinary, regime-sponsored reconstruction program in which the Iraqis restored their nation’s devastated power plants, water supply, telephone system, factories and vital petroleum industry, thrusting Iraq back into the modern world in two short years.

And with Washington and its allies again threatening another round of bombing runs on those facilities that Iraqis so painstakingly restored in what Washington casts as an effort to force Hussein’s compliance with the U.N. cease-fire resolutions, most Iraqis marked the anniversary of what the Americans called Operation Desert Storm with as much anger as pride this year.

Also, and in part through the tightly structured teaching at schools such as Aqeeda, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis believe that oil-rich Kuwait was historically a part of Iraq and should return to Iraqi sovereignty.

When a Western journalist visiting the school suggested that the allies’ ultimate goal was to drive Hussein from power, she nodded knowingly and said: “This is not their business. This is the decision of the Iraqis.” Besides, she added, Hussein is perhaps more popular in his own nation now than at any time since the Gulf War ended.

Indeed, in interviews with many Iraqis in the streets, shops and office buildings here Sunday, it was clear that even among critics of the Iraqi leader, the present showdown between Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition has sharply boosted Hussein’s popularity at home, not only on the streets but also within the armed forces that protect his regime.

“The whole confrontation has given a boost to the morale in the Iraqi army,” one diplomat here said. “He has stood up to the Americans, the British and the French, remained defiant and strong. . . . It has won many points inside the army.”

Among Iraq’s nearly 18 million civilians, it has also served to distract them from economic hardships and isolation, projecting the nation’s condition once again into the center of the international stage. According to several Iraqi intellectuals, who ask not to be named for fear of retribution, it has redirected growing popular unrest from the regime to Bush and the West.

The intellectuals say that neither sanctions nor Western military threats will ever engender enough opposition inside or outside the ruling party to oust Hussein.

“Believe me, you simply cannot get rid of this man,” said one. “He now has a force of 100,000 soldiers who would die for him (the well-trained Republican Guard divisions within an army of an estimated 450,000).”

Action in Iraq

A) U.S. downs Iraqi fighter and strikes air defense installation.

B) U.S. ships launch Tomahawks at nuclear fabricating plant.

C) Kuwait reports that Iraq began dismantling six disputed police posts.