Time of Recovery for Baghdad

Shops and restaurants are reopening. Pockets of resistance by Saddam Hussein loyalists have all but died out. Though looting and lawlessness continue in the Iraqi capital four days after war in effect ended here, ordinary life is beginning to reassert itself -- though it’s suspended somewhere between normal and strange.

Dazed citizens are mourning their human and material losses. They’re celebrating the overthrow of a dictator, yet are aghast and fearful of looters who have taken over streets and set buildings afire. They’re anxious about when and how a new temporary government will be set up, and what form it will take.

At the same time, people are cooking kebabs on charcoal grills. Grocers are selling big piles of red tomatoes and purple onions. Some red public buses have started running again, and citizens are playing dominoes and drinking tea in cafes.

For many, the ouster of Hussein and the new taste of freedom outweigh the negatives -- even if they have their own perspective on the U.S. victory.

“We invited the Americans,” asserted one architect, sitting in his garden in a well-to-do part of Baghdad just off Abu Niwas Street, just yards from an American tank crew. “If we had liked Saddam, the Americans would not have managed to put their foot even inside of Umm Qasr. But we did not like him, so we did not fight. So really, we did invite the Americans.”

His only regret is that for so many years Iraqis “lived like sheep -- the best years of our lives.”

But if Iraqis had tried to depose Hussein themselves, said construction engineer Alla Fazel, there would have been a “colossal” number of victims.

“If you compare the casualties in the American bombings with the possible casualties that could result from a popular uprising, one could say that we got rid of the regime by a small price,” he said. Before the government disintegrated, Iraqi officials estimated that more than 1,250 civilians were killed in the fighting.

Many of the people most oppressed under the old regime now feel empowered. Thousands of men have gathered at Shiite mosques and shrines to exult in their new freedom to worship.

At the Kadhimiya shrine in north Baghdad, Shiite men were free Sunday for the first time in years to beat themselves, a form of prayer and praise to God banned under the old government, which was dominated by Sunni Muslims. In place of a large portrait of Hussein outside the shrine, the Shiites put up an equally large portrait of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad and the most revered Shiite leader.

At the headquarters of the military intelligence service, another attempt at catharsis was taking place: Hundreds of men and a few women thronged its gates, hoping to get inside to find an underground prison that they believed exists and still holds many of their loved ones.

U.S. soldiers, having searched for days, said they had found no trace of such a facility. But nothing could sway the conviction of the people.

“I am looking for my brother,” said Najim Mayub Salman, 40, a driver. “In 1980, our car was stopped in the street. There were three of them. They showed us their IDs. I remember the red stamp.... They kicked me out of the car and took my brother Hamed. He was 22 at the time, he was a student. Since then, we have not heard from him. I don’t know if my brother is still alive but if he is, this is where he must be in this underground prison.”

Gathamer Mohammed, 26, had served as a guard at the headquarters since 1998. He believes that many prisoners were brought in and then executed.

“They had a special machine, which chopped people in small pieces and their remains were washed into the river through a tube,” he said.

Lt. Col. J.R. Sanderson, in command at the site, said he felt he was “chasing ghosts,” but he patiently listened to the stories of the men who accosted him.

Speaking through an interpreter, he agreed to bring three petitioners into the compound to see for themselves if the rest would agree to stand outside the gate.

Unearthing of another kind was taking place at Saddam Pediatric Hospital, where people who had lost relatives during the fighting returned to exhume the corpses of those buried in the small yard. Fighting had been so intense that corpses had to be put in more than 250 temporary graves.

Omar Haider crouched inconsolably next to the makeshift graves, about half of which had already been opened, mourning his brother Khaled, a Baghdad University student killed in the bombing.

“My mother said to go to the hospital to look for him. I don’t know how she knew,” said Haider, fighting back tears.

“He was a student. He wanted to be a professor. Now he is dead.”

Asked who he blamed for the death of his brother, Haider said. “I blame the war. I blame the Americans.” Then, as a reporter started to turn away, he added, in a soft voice: “I blame Saddam.”

The hospital is one of the few health facilities that has avoided looters, thanks to volunteer armed guards like Ramzi Ahmad Anoun, 35. He held a Kalashnikov in this arm, with two full clips, and a Russian-made pistol in his belt.

“We are armed, and we shoot to kill,” Anoun said as he patrolled the hospital’s parking lot.

He said he had picked up his weapons after they were apparently discarded by fleeing soldiers. He volunteered to protect the hospital as “an act of love,” he said, adding that the previous night, he and other guards had fought off armed looters.

In the emergency room, the beds were mostly empty, in stark contrast to the carnage of early last week. The one new victim was a teenage boy who got caught in the cross fire between two gangs of looters apparently fighting over booty. A large chunk of glass had cut a tendon in one of his legs, and he moaned and cried from the pain.

A doctor on duty, Jawal Rashid, said the staff was finally getting some rest and returning to the hospital’s routine of treating sick children, not war victims. He said the question of how people would respond to the United States’ intervention in Iraq was still open.

“If the Americans achieve safety in the streets, of course, people will love America,” Rashid said. “It may take about a week, or maybe more.”

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.