Robert Fisk: Bombs destroying Baghdad's essential services

6.00pm

BAGHDAD - It's difficult to weep over a telephone exchange. True, the destruction of the local phone system in Baghdad is a miserable experience for tens of thousands of Iraqi families who want to keep in contact with their relatives during the long dark hours of bombing.

But the shattered exchanges and umbilical wires and broken concrete of the Mimoun International Communications Centre scarcely equals the exposed bones and intestines and torn flesh of the civilian wounded of Baghdad.

"Command and control centres"; is how the Centcom boys described the targets they zapped early yesterday morning - and zapped the exchanges most assuredly were.

The point, of course, is that it represents another of those little degradations which we - as in "we, the West" - routinely undertake when things aren't going our way in a war.

Back in "our" 1991 blitz on Baghdad, we started off on the presidential palaces and barracks, then moved on to communications, then electricity and then water treatment plants.

In Serbia in 1999, it was the same story.

First went the Yugoslav army barracks and arms factories, then the road bridges, then the phone system and then the electricity.

Now the same old story has begun in Baghdad.

The presidential palaces and barracks have been hit. So it's time to smash the phones again.

Obviously, "we" hoped it wouldn't come to this.

The Anglo-American armies wanted to maintain the infrastructure of Baghdad for themselves, after they had "liberated" the city under a hail of roses from its rejoicing people, because they would need working phone lines on their arrival.

But after a night of massive explosions across the city, dawn yesterday brought the realisation that communications had been sacrificed.

The huge Rashid telecommunications centre, destroyed in the 1991 bombardment, was struck by a Cruise missile which penetrated the basement of the building.

The exchange in Karada, where Baghdadis pay their phone bills, was ripped open.

Outside each of these blocks - as outside every government institution here - can be found a giant hoarding of Saddam, doing whatever is appropriate to the relevant ministry or department.

In front of Baghdad Central Station, for example, a Saddam in a felt hat is acting as signalman to speed an express on its way to Basra. Services to the city, by the way, are now officially suspended because of the British siege.

At the Mimoun exchange, Saddam is standing in front of the telecommunications mast.

At the Rashid offices, he is talking on a rather old fashioned black telephone while taking notes on a pad with a large brown biro.

No more.

Because "we" have decided to destroy the phones and all those "command and control" systems that may be included, dual use, into the network.

So yesterday, most Baghdadis had to drive across town to see each other; there was more traffic on the roads than at any time since the start of the war.

Down, too, went Baghdad's internet system.

Iraqi television, a pale shadow of itself since the Americans bombed the studios on Wednesday night, can only be watched between an increasing number of power cuts.

So what's next? Electricity or water? Or, since power runs the water pumps, both? Each day, of course, brings news of events which, on their own, have no great import but which, together, add a sinister new dimension to the coming siege of Baghdad.

Yesterday, hundreds of tribesmen from across Iraq met at the Baghdad Hotel before meeting Saddam.

The Iraqi tribes, ignored by the military planners and Washington pundits who think that Iraq is held together only by the Baath party and the army, are a powerful force, their unity cemented by marriage and a network of families loyal to Saddam who provide a force as cohesive as the Baath party itself.

Tribesmen guard the grain silos and some of the electricity generating stations around Baghdad.

Two of them were credited with disabling an Apache helicopter captured last week.

And yesterday, tribal leaders came from all over Iraq, from Ninevah and Babylon and Basra and Nassariyah and all the cities of Mesopotamia.

So much for Geoff Hoon's contention that Saddam has 'lost control' of southern Iraq.

They will return today and tomorrow to their cities and villages with instructions on how to oppose the American and British armies.

Saddam has already issued one set of orders which tells the tribesmen "to fight (the Americans and British) in groups and attack their advance and rear lines to block the way of their progress...If the enemy settles into a position, start to harass them at night..." Another sign of things to come.

At least 20 international "human shields" - hitherto "guarding" power stations, oil refineries and food production plants - decided to leave Iraq yesterday.

So did all Chinese journalists assigned to cover the war, on instructions from their government in Peking.

Not all the optimistic claims from the Iraqi government - a victory against US Marines outside Nassariyah was among them - could change their minds.

But the strange dichotomy between the Iraqi authorities - with their constant flow of statistics - and the barren, fact-free western military men in Qatar, continues.

Figures for wounded and dead civilians across Iraq over the 24 hours ending at midday yesterday -and there is no way of verifying these figures - were given out as 200 wounded and 48 dead.

Of these, 60 of the wounded and 48 of the dead came from the scene of the latest battles against the Americans at Najaf.

By way of contrast, only eight civilians were reported wounded and one dead in Kirkuk.

In Basra since the start of the American and British air bombardment and artillery attacks, the civilian wounded are listed as 659 and the total dead as 116.

Iraqis can no more check these figures than can journalists in Baghdad, although the numbers do not appear excessive when we remember that at least 20 civilians were killed in Wednesday's air attack on the Sha'ab district of the city.

The nightly attacks long ago spread into the daylight hours, so that the sound of aircraft and rockets - I have several times actually heard the missiles passing over the central streets - have acquired a kind of normality.

A few stores have reopened. There are fresh vegetables again in the city.

And like every blitzed people, Baghdadis are growing used to what has become a dull, familiar danger.

Is this "shock and awe", I sometimes ask myself? Or shock and bore?

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq