U.S. Moves to End Chaos in Baghdad

U.S. forces moved to restore order Saturday in a capital city that has teetered toward anarchy in the days since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Marines began to interview local police to find suitable candidates for joint Iraqi-American patrols -- a search complicated by the knowledge that many police officers were agents of brutality under the repressive regime.

As that effort went forward, looting appeared to taper off, perhaps because the thieves were running out of fresh targets and Baghdad residents were increasingly taking the law into their own hands. But the capital was by no means orderly, and the sound of gunfire peppered the air as U.S. forces continued to find spots of resistance.

In another development fraught with political significance, Hussein’s science advisor surrendered to U.S. military authorities Saturday, a day after he was placed on a list of the 52 most-wanted officials in the Iraqi regime.

In an interview with German television, which helped arrange the surrender, Gen. Amir Saadi insisted that he had been telling the truth before the war when he said Iraq had eliminated all weapons banned by international sanctions.

“I know the programs for weapons of mass destruction and have always told the truth about these old programs, and only the truth. You will see, the future will show it, and nothing else will come out after the end of the war,” a relaxed-looking Saadi told the ZDF television network before he was detained.

U.S. intelligence officials, however, described his surrender as a breakthrough and speculated he would be able to provide valuable information about banned weapons programs. The United States’ stated goal in Iraq is to strip the country of illicit weapons, and President Bush has said he will not declare victory until that is done.

Militarily, the goals of U.S.-led forces appear mostly complete, and Bush used some of his most triumphant language yet in describing the war in his weekly radio address.

“The conflict continues in Iraq and our military may still face hard fighting. Yet the statues of the dictator and all the works of his terror regime are falling away,” the president said.

“The nightmare of Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq is ending,” Bush said. “Soon, the good and gifted people of Iraq will be free to choose their leaders who respect their rights and reflect their character.

“In all that is to come, they will have the goodwill of the entire world. And they will have the friendship of the people of the United States.”

Fighting continued on the ground in some places, and Marines sent out probing missions to assess the strength of resistance in Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown and the most significant remaining stronghold of the fallen regime.

Marine officials said an initial reconnaissance patrol encountered stiff resistance Saturday.

This morning, CNN reporter Brent Sadler drove into Tikrit, broadcasting live as he passed dozens of abandoned tanks and armored personnel carriers on the outskirts of the northern city.

“We’re hearing that CNN has taken Tikrit,” joked a spokeswoman at U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar.

However, once in the city, CNN’s convoy came under fire, apparently from Hussein loyalists, some of whom chased the news team out of Tikrit. Sadler said CNN guards returned fire as they fled. There were no U.S. military forces in the area.

The Marines had said they were organizing a beefed-up reconnaissance unit, dubbed Task Force Tripoli, to try to take out pockets of resistance in the city.

Allied warplanes had conducted airstrikes in Tikrit overnight, officials said this morning. Among their targets were sites where senior leaders -- including Hussein, if he is alive -- might be hiding.

As fewer troops are needed to fight, U.S. and British commanders are increasingly turning their attention to maintaining order. It is not a role with which most are comfortable, but they recognize it as a necessary one to maintain any goodwill the allies have garnered for driving out Hussein’s regime.

The U.S. Justice Department intends to send 26 police, justice and prison advisors to Iraq soon as part of the interim administration being established by retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, according to State Department spokeswoman Amanda Batt. They will be the vanguard of more than 1,000 U.S. advisors who will be deployed by a private contractor to help Iraqis revamp their police and justice system, Batt said.

In the meantime, Marines in Baghdad have begun taking steps to establish U.S.-Iraqi patrols to police the city. They also have begun recruiting other municipal workers to carry out the mundane but necessary tasks of keeping a major city running.

It is an initiative that has exposed one of the biggest challenges of regime change: how to form a new government when nearly everyone with expertise is associated with the old, discredited regime. It is the same problem that faced former communist states in Eastern Europe, but they had the advantages of building the new governments themselves, in a climate of relative peace.

Broadcasting Friday night on radio, the Marines asked anyone who had been employed in any service that helped run the city to report to the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad the next morning. By 10 a.m., a crowd of several hundred men had assembled.

The constant chatter and the din of excitement subsided when a man in an Iraqi military uniform, his beret tipped sideways on his head and the stars of a colonel on his shoulders, approached. His name was Ahmad Zaki Abd Razaq, an assistant to the former head of police. He offered to help U.S. forces reactivate the police force to patrol the streets.

The reaction from the crowd illustrated the emotional and practical difficulties U.S. planners face as they try to rebuild the country: Those who had ties to the regime are not trusted by those who didn’t.

“If they are retired men and people expelled from the army and public sector, that is great,” said Munther Gaheb, 38, who joined a protest across the street by people demanding a new Iraqi government to bring order to the country. “But if it is people who were working a few days ago for the regime, the principles and ideas of Saddam will be repeated again and again.”

Those who answered the call to help were crowded against a rope boundary, and Marines asked an Arabic speaker to order them into lines. One was for police, another for electrical workers, and others were for water, sanitation and health workers.

“We’re trying to use the people who turned the valves at the water plant, cranked up the generators at the electric plant,” said Sgt. John Jamison, 33, of the 1st Marine Division. But he acknowledged, “It does become complicated when you are talking about police.”

Other Marines saw that the problem may be wider than that. When Maysoon Musawi, a former television personality on Iraqi state media, tried to help the Marines communicate with a crowd of men, they began to shout back at her: “You were making pictures for Saddam!”

“Wait,” Musawi said. “I told the Americans yesterday they should stop all the looting.” The men nodded and quieted down.

Among those volunteering to help with police patrols was Khalis Ibrahim, 45, who said he had been a major in the Iraqi police until he was jailed in 1995 for a year and then again in 1998.

He said he was jailed for his political views and probably would have been jailed again if he had not fled in 1999. He returned to Baghdad just four days earlier and was ready to help.

“I want to bring order and security to the people,” he said.

British troops have faced similar challenges in Basra in the south, the first major Iraqi city to fall into allied hands.

In the country’s third-largest city, Mosul, U.S. troops largely stayed on the outskirts Saturday, one day after capturing the city, leaving the job of imposing order to two competing Kurdish factions.

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and its main rival, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, have been patrolling different parts of the city, a predominantly Arab community in far northern Iraq whose people are wary of the Kurds. The frenzied looting seen Friday dropped off sharply Saturday.

Another aspect of restoring order to the country is its political administration. A senior Bush administration official provided details Saturday of a meeting set for Tuesday in the city of Nasiriyah.

The meeting, the first of what administration officials envision will evolve into a kind of constitutional convention, will be dominated not by exiles from the country but by so-called liberated Iraqis experimenting with democracy for the first time, the official said.

“This isn’t a decision-making meeting at all. It’s just a way to start a dialogue,” the official said. “It is definitely not a meeting to anoint the future leaders of Iraq.”

A significant development Saturday was the surrender of Saadi, the science advisor who was the seven of diamonds in a pack of playing cards that the U.S. military began distributing Friday in an effort to track down the most wanted officials of Hussein’s government. Saadi, whose wife is German, reportedly called the German network ZDF Saturday to say he wanted to surrender. He said he had spent the war in his cellar and emerged after he saw a British TV report that he was being sought.

Saadi’s assertion that Iraq has no banned weapons is consistent with the denials he has made in the past.

He also said Saturday that he did not know the whereabouts or fate of Hussein or other Iraqi leaders.

U.S. intelligence officials, however, clung to the hope that he knows more than he is saying about banned weapons and may be willing to talk. Saadi, who is the first senior Iraqi official to surrender to allied forces, was one of the most visible members of Hussein’s regime. A cultured, British-educated scientist, he was the public face of Iraq’s interaction with U.N. weapons inspectors.

In February, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accused him of personally leading an effort to conceal Iraq’s weapons program from the monitors, a charge he dismissed as “absolute nonsense.”

The United States has begun to mount a concerted effort to find evidence of banned weapons in Iraq -- a goal that would be of huge political value as the Bush administration confronts countries in Europe and the Middle East that strongly opposed the war on the grounds that U.N. inspections were working. So far, no such weapons have been positively identified, although some suspect substances have been sent for testing.

U.S. forces did make finds of another sort Saturday.

Soldiers guarding the western gate of Hussein’s Baghdad palace compound said they confiscated more than 1,000 weapons, ranging from handguns to Russian-made antitank rockets. The discoveries of two caches in the same neighborhood in the space of two days may indicate that Hussein had planned to arm the populace and raise militias, military sources said. Both caches were found in a wealthy residential area bordering the palace. One had been looted.

Elsewhere around Baghdad, Marines hunting for weapons caches discovered suicide-bomber vests rigged with explosives and hidden detonators.

Members of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, a reserve unit from California, discovered dozens of the vests, filled with ball bearings, at an elementary school where the Iraqi army had ousted the students and stored thousands of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of rockets, handguns and other weaponry. Also found were large quantities of plastic explosives.

The discovery heightened concern among Marines about terrorist attacks by forces loyal to Hussein. On Saturday, four Marines and a Navy corpsman were injured when a suicide bomber walked to a Marine checkpoint and detonated his bomb.

“The longer we stay, the more vulnerable we are to this kind of terror tactic,” said Capt. Aaron Robertson, the unit’s intelligence officer.

Such fears have kept U.S. forces on edge and have led to a number of shootings of civilians who refused to heed instructions to stop before approaching checkpoints. Military officials have acknowledged that many of these deaths have apparently been of innocent people who misunderstood the instructions or panicked.

In another such incident Saturday, Marines opened fire on a car whose driver refused to stop at a checkpoint near a soccer field in eastern Baghdad. The driver was wounded and his wife, a schoolteacher in her 30s, was killed.

Marines said later that the two had a knife and some bullets in the car, but no other weapons.

One Marine was shot to death while standing guard outside a Baghdad hospital Saturday. The Central Command later said the gunman, who was shot and killed by other Marines, was carrying documents that identified him as Syrian. Many people in Syria and other Arab countries have made their way to Iraq in the past month, stirred by calls to take up arms against the United States.

Three Marines who had been listed as missing in fighting near Nasiriyah were declared killed in action, raising the number of American dead in the war to 114, according to Associated Press.

Also Saturday, U.S. Central Command said Iraqi resistance in and around the city of Al Qaim, near the Syrian border, had been largely defeated. U.S. officials had reported unusually tough fighting there.

While saying they didn’t yet know why the Iraqis there were putting up such a fight, they have said the region was used to launch surface-to-surface missiles during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

U.S. special operations troops searched a train station, an air defense headquarters, a phosphate plant, a cement factory and a water treatment plant in Al Qaim, according to Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, spokesman for Central Command. He said he didn’t have any information on what they found.

Brooks also cited the detention at a checkpoint of a bus carrying 59 men of military age toward Iraq’s western borders to try to leave the country.

The men had $630,000 in hundred-dollar bills and letters offering rewards for killing American soldiers, Brooks said. He did not say where the men were detained, nor could he say whether they were Iraqis or foreign volunteers.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Casualties

Military (as of 5 p.m. Pacific time Saturday)

*--*

U.S Britain Iraq Killed 114 31 unknown

Missing 5 0 unknown

Captured 7 0 7,300

*--*

Civilian

* Iraq has said at least 1,261 civilians have been killed. In addition, nine journalists and an aid worker have died.

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Times staff writers Geoffrey Mohan in Baghdad; Mark Porubcansky in Doha; Paul Watson in Mosul; and Greg Miller, Robin Wright, John Hendren and Maura Reynolds in Washington contributed to this report.