Dread on Arrival

When U.S. troops roared into the chief palace compound of President Saddam Hussein early Monday, Walid Murad was one of the Special Republican Guard soldiers whose job it was to stop them.

He failed, but in a post-battle interview from the hospital where he was awaiting treatment for a leg wound, he gave a rare account of what it is like to be on the receiving end of American firepower.

He said his unit had been dug in at the palace compound on the west bank of the Tigris, along with a squad of the Fedayeen Saddam, another elite formation, when the American tanks and armored personnel carriers appeared.

“This was the first time that I saw the Americans not as planes, but as men,” he said. “They kept us under heavy bombardment for about an hour.”

He said that the two guns close to him were destroyed in the first minutes of fighting, and his companion was wounded. Murad said he took over firing a heavy machine gun, “and when I ran out of bullets I shot with a Kalashnikov.” Over the course of the next hour, he said, he used up 10 clips of ammunition -- all seven of his own, then three of his wounded colleague’s.

After the battle, many wounded soldiers like Murad and injured civilians were taken to Al Kindi Hospital, one of the city’s two main trauma centers, where interviews were conducted in the presence of Iraqi government representatives. Every few minutes, ambulances would tear into the parking lot, and attendants would rush over to pull out the wounded -- and in some cases, the dying -- from the U.S. assault on Baghdad.

Dazed relatives, their clothing soaked in blood, watched helplessly as the nurses pushed their family members up the ramp into the receiving ward. Then the gurneys would be returned to the parking lot, hosed down and readied for the next.

In back, by the overflowing morgue, six bodies wrapped in black polyurethane corpse bags tied closed with white string lay unattended on the sand-and-oil covered pavement while flies flew around them. The bags were unmarked except for one with a driver’s license stuck in the string with the man’s name -- Hamash Hussein Mohammed. “Yesterday was worse if you are talking about dead,” said Kabil Khazael Jamal, a nurse. “We were stacking bodies in the refrigeration, and it was hard to keep them in order.” By Monday, the cooling mechanism had broken down, he said, so they were removing the bodies as quickly as possible and giving them to the families for burial.

“Speaking as an Arab and an Iraqi, this is a brutal war,” he said. “Won’t you plead with the presidents and the kings around the world to stop this?”

Many of the wounded civilians said that they had been in the Doura district, which the U.S. forces passed through on their way to the presidential compound Monday morning. But others reported being injured in other parts of the city where the unrelenting American advance was felt -- Shaab in the north, New Baghdad in the southeast and Zafraniyah in the south.

The injured soldiers reaching this civilian hospital are thought to be only a small percentage of Iraq’s military casualties. Most soldiers go to Rashid Hospital, on the Rashid Military compound, or Yarmouk, on the west bank -- a civilian hospital that a government official confided has now been turned into a strictly military facility.

At Al Kindi, hospital deputy director Usama Saleh told journalists that only civilians are being treated. But as he spoke, two ambulances drove up and soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders removed two injured comrades.

The stocky Murad held his Kalashnikov as blood soaked through the red-and-white checkered keffiyeh he used as a bandage on his leg. He was agitated as he waited to be treated, smoking one cigarette after another. His camouflage uniform was covered with dirt, sweat and blood.

As he recounted, the U.S. soldiers sprayed the riverbank with heavy machine-gun fire. “I think I saw four tanks,” he said. “I was shooting at the soldiers and I saw some of them fall.”

He said the Fedayeen Saddam had remained hiding, waiting for the tanks to get closer so that they could spring up and fire at them with rocket-propelled grenades. “They were ready to give up their lives,” he said.

But then “we receive an order to retreat and let the tanks come into the facility so that our artillery could fire at them there. I saw the tanks go in, and then our guns began to work.” After nearly two hours, he managed to crawl away, he said, dragging his companion, who was shot in the stomach and had passed out.

Lying on a bed at the hospital was a Saudi jihad volunteer named Raja Itabi who had lost both legs below the knee, now bloody, bandaged stumps. He said he had been in the Doura district Sunday night and was told to watch out for a U.S. armored convoy.

“We lay in ambush, behind a deserted house,” he said. “When we saw the [armored personnel carriers] we started shooting at them. They stopped and retreated. Then in a few minutes, the plane came.... I heard at least three bombs falling around us before something hit me very hard, and then I woke up in the hospital.” Itabi could not seem to let go of the fact that he was hurt by a bomb instead of in direct combat.

“Americans cannot fight on land, they can only fight with planes,” he said through his tears, his voice trembling with anger. “They can’t fight like men.... They are only capable of dropping bombs.”

Late in the day in the streets outside the hospital, the city had assumed an air of doom, echoes of gunfire filling the area. Iraqi soldiers holed up near the Information Ministry and inside the 18-story Rashid Hotel fired shots toward the U.S. troops still in the New Palace, near a bend of the Tigris, and took machine-gun fire in return.

Even on the east side of the river, where the U.S. troops had not yet arrived, homes and businesses looked abandoned. Drivers sped as though fearful that a bomb could drop on them at any time. Under several overpasses the army had hidden artillery pieces, their long brown barrels pointing nowhere in particular, to try to save them from being destroyed from above. Only armed men were on the streets. Long lines formed at gasoline stations as more people prepared to leave the city before the next round of the fighting -- even though U.S. troops reportedly were holding all the main roads out of town.

U.S. military spokesmen had said the raid was meant to send a psychological message, and there was no doubt that this city felt it Monday.

War had come to the center of Baghdad, terrible and awesome, and the alarm and dread were almost palpable.