BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi officials expect U.S. forces to bring war to the streets of this sprawling capital. The country is slowly getting ready.
Thousands of civilians have undergone combat training in the wilting sun. Officials are issuing extra food rations so residents can begin stockpiling. The already familiar anti-American propaganda has intensified on television broadcasts and in newspapers. And the capital has seen a deluge of new consumer goods, apparently aimed at winning over ordinary citizens to the defense of Saddam Hussein.
He is using a new strategy to overcome what could be his greatest weakness: battling the world's biggest military force with an Iraqi army crippled by the 1991 Gulf War and years of international sanctions. This time, the Iraqi leader is calling on civilians to protect the regime that President Bush has vowed to change. There are signs that the tactic is finding some acceptance here.
"If American soldiers come onto our streets, I really believe there will be civil resistance," says Hamman Shamaa, 49, an economics professor at Baghdad University. The gray-haired chain-smoker hardly seems ready for combat. But he says he'll dust off the Kalashnikov rifle and three boxes of ammunition that he keeps at home and take to the streets at the first sight of Western soldiers in Baghdad. "People won't accept foreigners coming in here," he says.
It is unclear, of course, if ordinary Iraqis are candid in interviews with the foreign media. Under Iraqi censorship laws, reporters are accompanied by government translators. It is against the law to criticize Saddam or the government.
What the citizens of Baghdad do under attack could be critical. Street fighting — if it occurs — could entangle U.S. and allied soldiers in an ugly urban conflict in a city that is Saddam's power base. U.S. forces could easily capture other parts of Iraq, where the government's control is weaker. But achieving "regime change" in Baghdad could be difficult and costly, especially if armed civilians join the fray.
The push to take this bustling city could bog down Washington in a political and military quagmire, dragging out the war longer than the week or two Pentagon officials say would be ideal.
Iraqi officials admit privately that they cannot win a full-fledged war against the U.S. military. Asked whether they can defeat the enemy, an Iraqi diplomat in Europe said recently: "Of course not; we have to be logical about this."
They say they hope that if civilians and soldiers hold out long enough, American casualties might quickly erode support for the war back home. Iraqis point to the Somalia conflict in 1993, when television footage of a U.S. soldier being dragged through the capital led President Clinton to withdraw troops.
"We believe Americans want a war without casualties," says a Foreign Ministry official who asked not to be named. "There is a feeling that they will not come and fight us man to man."
For anyone arriving in Baghdad from the West, it is striking how relaxed the city seems. Residents say they have not been issued gas masks. Most believe a war will not erupt before the end of the year, when the blistering heat subsides. Daytime temperatures this week have reached 110 degrees.
Surprisingly, streets aren't sandbagged or barricaded. Soldiers and Saddam's elite force, the Republican Guard, are not evident.
However, more discreet security measures already are being taken: Government officials blocked USA TODAY from bringing a mobile satellite telephone into the country, apparently concerned that its global-positioning system could be used to identify targets for military airstrikes.
Families with weapons at home
In dozens of interviews across Baghdad during the past week, the talk has been tough. Residents say they'll reach for the nearest kitchen knife or firewood ax if U.S. soldiers appear on their block. In fact, many Iraqi families have weapons at home, often government-issue Kalashnikovs kept by former soldiers.
Iraq's regular forces number around 400,000. About 6 million Iraqis have completed military training and could be drafted. The country's military industries — headquartered in central Baghdad — are believed to already have produced missiles and anti-aircraft weaponry. Military analysts say Iraq still has some weapons stored from before the Gulf War. Other weaponry also has entered the country illegally over the years. A U.N. embargo imposed after the war prohibits sales to Iraq of equipment that could be used to rebuild its military.
In addition to the millions who already have been through military training, thousands more civilians spent their summer break taking intensive military courses.
Shamaa's 45-year-old wife, a high school principal, and his 20-year-old son, a literature student, spent all of August at a neighborhood sports center learning how to fire weapons and conduct basic urban warfare.
"Military training is going on in stadiums, schools — just about every open space there is," says a senior Arab diplomat here.
Officials will not discuss how many Baghdad residents have been trained. On Monday, a group of men crowded around the office of Saddam's ruling Baath Party in Baghdad's Bab Sheikh neighborhood. They said they had come to sign up for the military if there's going to be a war.
The other piece of Saddam's strategy is a plan to win Iraqis' allegiance by easing their deprivation and allowing them a little more freedom — perhaps to avoid mass defections during a war. Hungry and demoralized, thousands of Iraqi troops surrendered to U.S. forces in Iraq's southern desert during the 1991 war.
This time, even if Saddam falls, the Iraqi leader seems to hope U.S. troops will not be seen as liberators, as they were in the Afghan capital of Kabul after the Taliban government collapsed last year.
"Saddam knows how to appeal to the masses," says Wamidh Nadhmi, a senior political science professor at Baghdad University. "Remember, he was trained not as a military dictator, but as a politician."
DVD players and the Internet
Six years ago, the U.N. eased the postwar embargoes and allowed Iraq to trade oil for a wider range of goods. In addition, Iraq earns about $2 billion a year from oil traded outside the constraints of the U.N. sanctions system — much of it smuggled through back-door deals with Syria, Jordan and Turkey. Communities only recently began to benefit from the increased flow of money and goods. Iraqis still rely on Saddam's government for food rations, medicine and all social services.
In addition to providing more benefits to citizens, in recent months Iraqi officials have:
Granted about 10,000 prisoners early release.
Expanded a program to give free pieces of land to all civil servants and military personnel.
Relaxed restrictions on private businesses, allowing people to open stores and small enterprises and to import goods directly from abroad.
Liberalized some aspects of life, at least in the capital. Internet cafes have opened. E-mail is still restricted to one government-controlled server. But the cafes draw hundreds of Iraqis desperate for outside news or eager to conduct business deals by e-mail. Just this summer, people were allowed to access e-mail from home.
"The government wants to buy the contentment of Iraqis," says the Arab diplomat, who asked not to be identified. The tactic appears to have worked. "People aren't in the mood to criticize Saddam these days," he says.
"People are much happier now than they were five years ago," says Shamaa, the economics professor. "Things have improved an awful lot for the middle class."
Changes in Baghdad are evident since a visit two years ago. Roads have been repaved. The telephone system — barely functional for years after the U.S. bombing attacks in the Gulf War — works well enough to dial direct across the world.
Little more than a year ago, Baghdad's Saddam International Airport was still dark. It had been mothballed after an international air embargo was imposed after the war. The embargo on commercial flights was never officially lifted. But that began to crumble in 2000. Now the brightly lit terminal is buzzing with travelers flying in from Jordan, Syria and Russia. "Welcome!" a cheery passport official says.
In Baghdad, major roads are jammed with vehicles, among them new Mercedes-Benzes and Peugeots. They have been imported by the Iraqi Trade Ministry during the past few months and sold to residents at cut-rate prices.
In a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood, a jazz trio serenades diners in an Italian restaurant with Beatles and Frank Sinatra tunes on a weekend night. Shoppers buy computers shipped from Dubai and snap up bootleg videodiscs for their new DVD players
"I bought my video-disc player for 120,000 Iraqi dinars (about $60)," says Ayad Mujbil, 22, who sells digital video-discs in Baghdad's outdoor Shorja market. "Many people have players now." He adds that the biggest sellers at his market stall are movies featuring Mel Gibson.
Even so, most Iraqis outside Baghdad, and many in the capital, are still reeling from two decades of war.
U.N. officials here say unemployment is high and children suffer from malnutrition. There are no official figures. Despite some improvement since 2000, Iraq has never recovered from its wars. During the 1980s, the country had sophisticated hospitals and schools. The entire country had electricity and telephone lines. Iraq's currency, the dinar, is worth about one-six-thousandth of its 1990 value.
In the Bab Sheikh neighborhood, Ismail Rahem Zengena, 29, lives in one room with his parents and four siblings. Their sleeping quarters are off a courtyard with crumbling balconies. Eight families share the decrepit building. Cooking is done in unoccupied corners of the yard. The family's only appliances are a television and refrigerator left over from before the Gulf War.
Until then, the Zengenas lived in their own apartment nearby. Ismail's father, Rahem Mahmoud, supported the family by baking bread. The bakery closed during the war and never reopened. "We moved from our apartment after the war, because there was no money at all for the rent," Ismail says. "Now I earn 3,000 dinars a day (about $1.50) making tea in a cafe."
Ismail says he would help defend the neighborhood if the United States attacks. He went to the local Baath Party office to volunteer. "I gave my address to them in case there is a war," he says.
Many here blame U.S. hostilities rather than Saddam for their problems. It's a message driven home in almost every television broadcast and newspaper report.
"It would be hard to convince some people that things would be better under a different government now," says Rebecca Arias Flores, deputy resident representative of the U.N. Development Program in Baghdad.
"When people think about things being bad, the first thing they think about is the economic sanctions. Now they're asking: 'What kind of regime are we going to get? One that's better than this?' They have their doubts," says Flores, who is from El Salvador.
Siege mentality
Baghdad's residents also are preparing for a possible long siege. That could happen if American-led forces surround the city while U.S. jets bomb palaces, military sites and electricity and water plants.
"I've begun stockpiling all the food we need because we are 18 of us," says Hussein Abdullah, 50, who has seven children and nine grandchildren. "We have enough to keep us at home for months."
Last month, government officials issued ration coupons for three months' worth of flour, rice and other basic foods, rather than the normal one-month supply.
This month, U.N. relief workers began drawing up plans for offering emergency aid to Baghdad if it has no electricity or drinking water.
"We have to plan also for a lot of dead and wounded people," says Flores of the U.N. Development Program. "Health centers have stocks of food and medicines, but we don't know how long they'll last," she says. "A war in Baghdad could be a disaster."
In a small storefront downtown that serves as an unofficial foreign-currency exchange, Kadhim Mutlak, 42, this month began noticing familiar signs of an impending war. After years working as a moneychanger, Mutlak says he knows how Baghdad's residents behave when a battle is about to erupt.
"People are hoarding their money," Mutlak says. "They are not frightened because they have been through this many times. But there is a feeling that this time, it is much more serious."
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