Robert Fisk: Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin

It's going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined.

The army of "liberation" has already turned into the army of occupation.

The Shi'ites are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of "liberation".

At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles.

Even the individual US Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them.

"Go away! Get out of my face!" an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday.

I watched the man's face suffuse with rage.

"God is Great! God is Great!" the Iraqi retorted.

"F*** you!"

It is much worse than that.

The Americans have now issued a "Message to the Citizens of Baghdad", a document that is as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone.

"Please avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before the call to morning prayers," it tells the people of the city.

"During this time, terrorist forces associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as various criminal elements, are known to move through the area. Please do not leave your homes during this time. During all hours, please approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution."

So now - with neither electricity nor running water - the millions of Iraqis here are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn.

It's a form of imprisonment, in their own country. Written by the command of the 1st US Marine Division, it's a curfew in all but name.

"If I was an Iraqi and I read that," an Arab woman shouted at me, "I would become a suicide bomber."

And all across Baghdad, you hear the same thing, from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come only for oil, and that soon - very soon - a guerrilla resistance must start.

No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are "remnants" of Saddam's regime or "criminal elements".

But that will not be the case.

Marine officers in Baghdad were yesterday holding desperate talks with a Shia militant cleric from Najaf to avert an outbreak of fighting around the holy city.

I met the prelate just before the negotiations began. He told me that "history is being repeated". He was talking about the British invasion of Iraq in 1917, which ended in disaster for the British.

To gain entrance to the desert town of al-Ambar, US intelligence officers yesterday had to negotiate with tribal leaders in the best restaurant in Baghdad.

Everywhere are the signs of collapse.

And everywhere the signs that America's promises of "freedom" and "democracy" are not to be honoured.

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow the entire Iraqi cabinet to escape? And they're right.

It's the entire Saddam cabinet that has disappeared - not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two sons,Qusay and Odey, but Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan, deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser Dr Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade, even Mohamed al-Sahaff, the minister of information who, long ago, in the days before journalists cosied up to him, was the official who read out the list of executed "brothers" in the purge that followed Saddam's revolution - relatives of prisoners would dose themselves on valium before each Sahaff appearance.

Here's what Baghdadis are noticing - and what Iraqis are noticing in all the major cities of the country.

Take the vast security apparatus with which Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy which was its foundation.

President Bush promised that America was campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war criminals, would be tracked down and brought to trial.

Now the 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are empty; even the three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

I have been to many of them. But not a single British or American officer has visited the sites to sift through the wealth of documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners who are themselves visiting their former places of torment.

Is this through idleness. Or is this willful?

Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the river Tigris. It's a pleasant villa - once owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was deported to Iran in the 1980s - and there's a little lawn outside and a shrubbery and at first you don't notice the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room nor the fact that big sheets of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted over the windows to conceal the rooms from outsiders.

But across the floors, in the garden, on the roof, are the files of this place of suffering. They show, for example, that the head of the torture centre was Hashem al-Tikrit, that his deputy was called Rashid al-Nakib.

Ex-prisoner Mohamed Aish Jassem showed me how he was suspended from the ceiling by his torturer, Captain Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of the religious Dawa party.

"They put my hands behind my back like this and tied them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists," he told me.

"They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the ceiling, then they'd release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder when I fell."

The hooks in the ceiling are just in front of Captain al-Isawi's desk. I understood what this meant.

There wasn't a separate torture chamber and elsewhere an office for documentation. The torture chamber was the office.

While the man or woman shrieked in agony above him, Captain al-Isawi would sign papers, take telephone calls and - given the contents of his rubbish bin - smoke many cigarettes while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.

Were they monsters, these men? Yes.

Are they sought by the Americans? No.

Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly - indeed some of them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the US Marines' Civil Affairs unit.

The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad - pedestrians were forbidden to walk down the road outside lest they heard the screams - are all named on the documents lying on the floor.

They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Mohamed Fayad.

But the Americans haven't bothered to find this out. So Messers Alawai, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply for work from the Americans.

There are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the cupboards. What happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud? We shall not know.

A lady in a black chador approached the old torture centre. Four of her brothers had been taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened, she was told all four had been executed.

She was ordered to leave the building. She never saw or buried their bodies.

Ex-prisoners told me that there is a mass grave in the Al-Khedeer desert, but no one - least of all Baghdad's new occupiers - are interested in finding it.

One man told me his brother had been brought to this awful place 22 years ago - and never seen again.

And the men who suffered under Saddam? What did they have to say? "We committed no sin," one of them said to me, a 40-year old whose prison duties had included the cleaning of the hangman's trap of blood and faeces after each execution.

"We are not guilty of anything. Why did they do this to us? America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil belongs to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans must go."

If the Americans and the British want to understand the nature of the religious opposition here, they have only to consult the files of Saddam's secret service archives.

I found one, Report No 7481, dated 24th February this year - for the Iraqi "muhabarrat" security men were still working hard on their Shia enemies less than a month before the American invasion - on the conflict between Sheikh Mohamed al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada Sadr, the 22-year old grandson of Mohamed Sadr, who was executed on Saddam's orders more than two decades ago, a dispute which showed both the passion and the determination with which the Shia religious leaders fight even each other.

But of course, no one has bothered to read this material or even look for it.

At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and American intelligence officers moved into the defeated Reich to hoover up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaus across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone.

In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence that lies everywhere to be read.

For there's an even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad, the headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive grey-painted block that was bombed by the Americans and a series of villas and office buildings which are stashed with files, papers and card indexes.

It was here that Saddam's special political prisoners were brought for vicious interrogation - electricity being an essential part of this - and it was here that Farzad Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for questioning before his dispatch to the hangman.

It's also graced with delicately shaded laneways, a children's creche - for the families of the torturers - and a school in which one pupil had written an essay in English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett's "Waiting for Godot".

There's also a miniature hospital and a road named "Freedom Street" and flower beds and bougainvillea. It's the creepiest place in all of Iraq.

I met - extraordinarily - an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking in fear around the compound, a colleague of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr Sharistani.

"This is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will never return to it," he said to me. "This was the place of greatest evil in all the world."

But the Americans should pay a visit.

The top security men in Saddam's regime were busy in the last hours of their rule, shredding millions of documents.

I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of papers.

Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and re-constituted to learn their secrets? That's what the Iranians did with the shredded US embassy files in Tehran in 1980.

But even the unshredded files contain a wealth of information about this place.

There's a substantial pile of papers, for example, recording the existence of a new super-drug for cancer which a number of Arab doctors wanted to manufacture in Iraq and - according to one file - "to test on Iraqis".

It includes a personal letter to Saddam Hussein from Dr Ahmed Shehada who appears to be associated with the Saddam Medical Clinic in Baghdad and who appeals to Saddam to allow Egyptian and Syrian medical personnel to involve themselves in the 14 years of research on the drug.

"We have to cooperate with each other to break the (UN) embargo that is imposed on you by the United States and the British Government," Dr Shehada writes to Saddam.

"We beg God to preserve you, Your Excellency. Long life to you and long life to Iraq, our brother in Islam."

An Iraqi intelligence file attached to this correspondence states approvingly that Dr Shehada can be trusted.

Intriguingly, it notes that the doctor is a Jordanian "who also carries American citizenship".

But again, the Americans have not bothered - or do not want - to search through these papers.

If they did, they would also find the names of dozens of senior Iraqi intelligence men, many of them identified by the files of congratulatory letters which Saddam's secret policemen insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted.

Where now, for example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, Captain Saad Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohamed, Captain Majid Ahmed and scores of others? We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.

Surely the name of the intelligence service informer Abu Sulieman of the el-Doura suburb of Baghdad should be made known, not least because - according to the files - he betrayed his neighbour, a goldsmith called Nasr Khaled, to the secret police on February 26, 2001.

Or who betrayed Salam Naim for carrying false identity papers the same month.

All this is contained in the papers of Iraqi Baghdad secret police Directorates 49 and 52.

Iraqis are right to ask why the Americans don't search for this information, just as they are right to demand to know why the entire Saddam cabinet - every man jack of them - got away.

The capture by the Americans of Saddam's half brother and the ageing Palestinian gunman Abu Abbas, whose last violent act was 18 years ago, is pathetic compensation for this.

Now here's another question the Iraqis are asking - and to which I cannot provide an answer:

On the last weekend of the invasion, the Americans dropped four 900kg bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansour. They claimed they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would kill civilians because it was not, as one of the Centcom mandarins said, a "risk-free venture".

So they dropped their bombs and killed 14 civilians in Mansour, most of them members of a Christian family.

The Americans announced that they couldn't be sure they had killed Saddam until they could carry out forensic tests at the site. But this turns out to have been a lie.

I went to the site two days ago. Not a single American or British official - forensic official or soldier -- had bothered to visit the bomb craters. No western forensic experts have examined the mass of debris.

Indeed, when I arrived, there was a putrifying smell and families pulled the remains of a tiny baby from the rubble. No American officers have apologised for this appalling killing.

And I can promise them that the baby I saw being placed under a sheet of black plastic was very definitely not Saddam Hussein. Had they bothered to look at this place - as they claimed they would - they would at least have found the baby.

Now the craters are a place of pilgrimage for the people of Baghdad.

Then there are the fires that have consumed every one of the city's ministries - save, of course, for the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil - along with UN offices, embassies and shopping malls.

I have counted a total of 35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising.

Take the scene played out on Wednesday. I was driving through Baghdad when I saw a vast column of black smoke staining the horizon. So I headed to see which ministry was left to burn.

I found myself at the Ministry of Oil, assiduously guarded by US troops, some of whom were holding clothes over their mouths because of the clouds of smoke swirling down on them from the neighbouring Ministry of Agricultural Irrigation.

Hard to believe, isn't it, that they were unaware that someone was setting fire to the next building? Then I spotted another fire, just lit, three kilometres away.

I drove to the scene to find flames curling out of all the windows of the Ministry of Higher Education's Department of Computer Science.

And right next to it, perched on a wall, was a US Marine, who said he was guarding a neighbouring hospital and didn't know who had lit the next-door fire because "you can't look everywhere at once".

Now I'm sure the marine was not being facetious or dishonest - should the Americans not believe this story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd Regiment, 4th Marines and, yes, I called his fiancee Jessica in the States for him to pass on his love - but something is terribly wrong when American soldiers are ordered to simply watch vast government ministries being burned by mobs and do nothing about it.

Because there is also something very dangerous - and deeply disturbing - about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives.

For they are not the looters. The looters come first.
The arsonists turn up afterwards, often in blue and white single-decker buses.

I actually followed one of them after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town.

Now the official American line on all this is that the looting is revenge - an explanation that is growing very thin - and that the fires are started by "remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who feature in the Marines' curfew orders to the people of Baghdad.

But people in Baghdad don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I.

True, Saddam might have liked Baghdad to end in Gotterdamerung - and might have been tempted to turn it into a city of fire before the Americans entered.

But afterwards? The looters make money from their rampages. But the arsonists don't make money by burning. They have to be paid.

The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't have started the fires.

The moment Saddam disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the whole project, not wasted their time earning their cash post-payment.

So who are they, this army of arsonists? Again, we don't know.

I recognised one the other day, a middle aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt - you can't change clothes too often when you have no water to wash in - and the second time he saw me he pointed a Kalashnikov rifle at me. Looters don't carry guns.

So what was he frightened of? Who was he working for? In whose interest is it - now, after the American occupation of Baghdad - to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, along with its cultural heritage? Why didn't the Americans stop this? As I said, something is going terribly wrong here in Baghdad and something is going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States government.

Why, for example, did Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld claim last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction in Baghdad? His statement was a lie.

But why did he make it? The Americans say they don't have enough troops to control the fires. This is also untrue.

If they don't, what are the hundreds of troops deployed in the gardens of the old Iran-Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the hundreds camped in the rose gardens of the President Palace near the Joumhouriyeh Bridge? So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of their cultural heritage - their very cultural identity - in the looting of the archeological treasures from the national museum, the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State archives and the Koranic library and the vast infrastructure of the nation we claim we are going to create for them.

Why, they ask, do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burned, de-historied, destroyed? Why are they issued with orders for a curfew of millions of people by their so-called liberators? And it's not just the people of Baghdad, most of them Shia Muslims, but the Shias of the city of Najaf and of Nassariyeh - where 20,000 protested at America's first attempt to put together a puppet government on Wednesday - who are asking these questions.

Now there is looting in Mosul where thousands reportedly set fire to the pro-American governor's car after he promised US help in restoring electricity.

It's easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war which lacked all international legimitacy.

But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially for those who are false optimists and invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations like weapons of mass destrcution which are still unproved.

So I'll make an awful prediction.

That America's war of 'liberation' is over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin.

In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq war