John F. Burns is Back in Baghdad

November 11 – December 31, 2003

How Disappearance in '84 Blighted Family in Iraq................................................................. 2

December 31, 2003...................................................................................................................... 2

Soldiering On, Even as Spirits Ebb............................................................................................ 9

December 26, 2003...................................................................................................................... 9

Once Skeptical, Briton Sees Iraqi Success................................................................................ 13

December 24, 2003.................................................................................................................... 13

Talk of Tikrit's Favorite Diner: Hatred of Hussein, Fury at U.S.......................................... 16

December 23, 2003.................................................................................................................... 16

As a Fugitive, Hussein Stayed Close to Home......................................................................... 20

December 21, 2003.................................................................................................................... 20

U.S. Officers Display the 'Rat Hole' Where Hussein Hid....................................................... 26

December 16, 2003.................................................................................................................... 26

In the Streets, a Shadow Lifts.................................................................................................... 31

December 15, 2003.................................................................................................................... 31

In Baghdad, Celebration and Mockery of a Captured Leader.............................................. 36

December 14, 2003.................................................................................................................... 36

U.S. Considers Pay Raise for Iraq's New Soldiers.................................................................. 39

December 14, 2003.................................................................................................................... 39

There Is No Crash Course in Democracy................................................................................. 42

December 14, 2003.................................................................................................................... 42

A Conversation on Tiptoes, Wary of Mines............................................................................. 46

November 30, 2003.................................................................................................................... 46

Theft of Cobalt in Iraq Prompts Security Inquiry.................................................................. 50

November 25, 2003.................................................................................................................... 50

The New Iraq Is Grim, Hopeful and Still Scary...................................................................... 55

November 16, 2003.................................................................................................................... 55

Italy Says Hussein Loyalists Are to Blame for Bombing....................................................... 64

November 13, 2003.................................................................................................................... 64

At Least 26 Killed in a Bombing of an Italian Compound in Iraq....................................... 68

November 13, 2003.................................................................................................................... 68

Blast at Italian Base in Iraq Reportedly Kills at Least 27..................................................... 72

November 12, 2003.................................................................................................................... 72

General Vows to Intensify U.S. Response to Attackers.......................................................... 76

November 12, 2003.................................................................................................................... 76

U.S. Commander in Iraq Outlines Tougher Strategy............................................................. 80

November 11, 2003.................................................................................................................... 80

How Disappearance in '84 Blighted Family in Iraq

December 31, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

A HAUNTED MAN Dr. Taki al-Moussawi, once jailed with his young nephew Mehdi, recently learned of Mehdi's grisly death in 1985.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 30 — A month after American troops occupied Baghdad, the family of Dr. Taki al-Moosawi was gathered at his Baghdad home, watching one of the Arab satellite channels that have become popular since the toppling of Saddam Hussein made it possible for any Iraqi, not just the ruling clique, to have satellite receivers.

And suddenly there it was: Old film clips of executions looted from the archives of the General Security Directorate, the most powerful of Mr. Hussein's secret police agencies. There, too, in the last terrifying moments before he was blown apart by a grenade his executioners had taped onto his chest, was the nephew who had disappeared without trace more than 18 years before, Mehdi Salih al-Moosawi.

When the secret police came for him and other males in the family in December 1984, Mehdi was a quiet 22-year-old student at a Baghdad technical college, a karate champion just back from service as an infantryman in the Iran-Iraq war, the father of two infant children.

He was accused, along with Dr. Moosawi, of planting bombs in Karamanah Square in Baghdad, though Dr. Moosawi says that the charge was false and that the real offense was speaking, among friends, in ways that were critical of Mr. Hussein.

In all the years since Mehdi's arrest, there had been no rest in the search for his nephew by Dr. Moosawi, a British-trained physiologist. The doctor himself was released after several months, on the intervention of an acquaintance who was a cousin of Mr. Hussein, but he was haunted, he says now, by the anguish of having left Mehdi in the dungeons of the secret police headquarters in central Baghdad.

When he saw the tape on Al Jazeera, an Arab station that has frequently been criticized for whitewashing Mr. Hussein's rule, Dr. Moosawi said, he was overcome with anger and disgust, as well as shame that it had been Mehdi who died, not him. He also felt at that moment, he said, that any price Iraqis paid for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, including the ravages of the American invasion, had been worth it.

"In my own mind, I was already dead from the moment that Mehdi disappeared," he said. "I wished only that it could have been me, sitting there in the desert. Only later on, when I remembered that the Americans had come here to end this terror, did I begin to think, well, we were all dead, but we have been resurrected, we have been born again."

What happened to Mehdi, and what became of his family as they balanced their quest for him with a relentless theater of fealty to Mr. Hussein, is a grim — and grimly familiar — parable of the terror inflicted on 25 million Iraqis during the 24 years of Mr. Hussein's rule.

The critical view the family now takes of the American-led occupation may also hold clues for the United States as it confronts a brutal insurgency and grapples for some formula that will bring American troops home.

"They did a very good job for America and for Iraq in getting rid of Saddam, and we thank them," Dr. Moosawi said. "Now, they are young boys lost in a foreign country, and every day there is a bomb in the road. They live a terrible time. So please tell them, we would like that they would leave our country as soon as possible, as soon as they have arranged a stable government to replace Saddam."

Dr. Moosawi embodies much of what America has brought to Iraq. On the instruction of American officials, all 63 of Iraq's universities and technical colleges held elections this summer for presidents, vice presidents and deans; Dr. Moosawi, once a pariah among his colleagues because of the taint he bore from his brush with the secret police, is now vice president of Mustansiriya University, a proud if dilapidated institution in Baghdad that was founded by one of the ruling caliphs of the Islamic world in the 13th century.

Through all the years of the search for Mehdi, the family's hopes had been sustained by contacts with a senior officer in the mukhabarat, one of the prime agencies in Mr. Hussein's constellation of secret police agencies, which exacted money from the family, saying it would buy food, clothes and medicine for Mehdi in an undisclosed prison. It was a deceit of a kind that became common as Mr. Hussein's government came ever more to resemble an entrenched mafia whose brutality and greed metamorphosed into unrelenting terror.

The Moosawis suffered as grievously as any other from that murderous terror, Dr. Moosawi said, listing 9 members of the extended family who were executed under Mr. Hussein, and 30 others who are still missing, presumed dead, after being taken away by the dictator's enforcers.

Yet nothing had prepared the family for seeing the horror of Mehdi's end in the secret police film, which is available on a compact disk that sells on handcarts in bazaars all over Iraq. Dr. Moosawi, 50, hands copies of the CD to visitors to his university office, although he says he and most other members of the family, including Mehdi's father, Salih, and his mother, Zeineb, have never been able to watch through to the film's dismal end.

The CD shows Mehdi, sometime in 1985, emerging with two other young men from a white van, at what is said by the narrator to be an execution site in the flat, hot desert outside Baghdad. Their hands are bound behind their backs, and they have rags, in Mehdi's case a green bandanna, for blindfolds.

A group of men led by Ali Hasan al-Majid — Mr. Hussein's cousin, known as Chemical Ali for his role as commander of Iraqi forces that used chemical weapons to attack a Kurdish town, Halabja, in 1988 — stand at ease, cheering and clapping as the death sentences are read.

But these, it quickly becomes clear, are to be no routine deaths. The revolutionary court has condemned the three young men to hanging, the narrator says, because of their complicity in bombings that killed many people, including "women and children," in Baghdad. But President Hussein has ordered an exemplary punishment: that the condemned will be "blown to pieces," the narrator says, quoting from the document being read to the men in the desert.

One by one, the men are led forward to a mound of earth bulldozed as a sort of blast shield, and forced to sit down, cross-legged, on the ground. A man wearing a watch with Mr. Hussein's face on the dial then approaches, slips a grenade into the breast pocket of each of the victims, then closes the pocket by securing it with white medical tape. A wire runs back toward the execution party, linked to a battery and a detonator.

Each of the first two men is blown apart within seconds, their dismembered bodies lying in the fold of the earthen mound as Mehdi, in a brown track suit top, is led forward to his end. As the grenade is fixed and the tape secured, his bandanna, around the lower part of his face, slips further. Moments before the end, he looks up to his left, a slight, lightly moustached young man with a look of terror in his eyes, and says four or five words to the man leaning over him. On the tape, the words are indecipherable.

Then the detonator is pressed, and Mehdi disappears in a cloud of smoke and dust. The execution party walks away, led by Mr. Majid, laughing and congratulating each other. Mr. Majid, who later commanded troops who occupied Kuwait in August 1990, is now a prisoner himself, captured by American troops in Mosul in August. He was No. 5 on the list of 55 "most wanted" members of Mr. Hussein's leadership, and is likely to be among those, along with Mr. Hussein, who was captured himself on Dec. 13, who will face war crimes trials before Iraqi courts.

In the Dungeon

After 19 Years, Memory Still Stuns

Dr. Moosawi is a busy man these days. In his outer office at Mustansiriya University sits an American-trained Iraqi bodyguard with a pistol in his waistband, surrounded by dozens of petitioners seeking dormitory rooms, jobs as teachers and guards, scholarships and other favors that Dr. Moosawi can grant as the university's chief administrator. He also supervises postgraduate students in physiology at the medical school.

By his own account he is a quiet man, scion of a prominent Iraqi Shiite family respected for lineal ties that reach back to the Prophet Muhammad, and to a school of Islam that emphasizes tolerance, humanity and progress.

But when he sat down to tell Mehdi's story, and his own, he appeared to move into another world, speaking in a monotone that continued for two hours and more at a time, without interruptions from others in the room, without inflection or overt sign of emotion beside a gaze fixed on the carpet and the occasional wringing of his hands.

His descent into the gulag began at the University of Dundee, in Scotland, where he completed his doctorate between 1977 and 1984. They were years that bracketed Mr. Hussein's ascent to the presidency in 1979, and the Iraqi attack that began the war with Iran in 1980, leading by 1988 to a million dead on the two sides. As Dr. Moosawi told it, he left an Iraq at peace, in the middle of an oil boom that financed great progress in education, medicine and other fields, and returned on holiday in 1981 to a nightmare.

"I had a problem with Saddam right from the start," he said, speaking in a sometimes rusty, slightly Scottish-inflected English. "There were all those wounded people from the war, with no medical attention at all. There was no care for the families of the soldiers killed. On the radio, there were these songs with words that talked of the war as your lover. I was confused. War means killing, war means death. How can it be your lover?

"Everything had changed. The attitude was, 'Either you are fighting, or you are not an Iraqi citizen.' Everything was military, and everywhere the color was khaki. All your friends were in the army, or the people's militia. A lot of bad habits had been initiated among the ordinary people, like cheating, telling lies and spying. Schoolchildren were encouraged to spy on their parents, and wives on their husbands, and of course this led to the destruction of the family."

Back in Scotland, Dr. Moosawi spoke to fellow Iraqi students of his contempt for Mr. Hussein. Then, in June 1984, he returned to Iraq.

The first sign of trouble came when the Health Ministry refused to certify his Ph.D., barring him from working. Then, in December 1984, he said, 50 armed men from the secret police burst into the home of his older brother, Salih al-Moosawi, Mehdi's father, and arrested the two brothers, a cousin and two of Dr. Moosawi's nephews, one of them Mehdi.

His vision blinded by blackened, wraparound glasses, Dr. Moosawi said, he was driven to the General Security Directorate, which was then scattered around a score of old buildings in one of Baghdad's most historic sections and known as the White Palace, after a porticoed mansion once owned by a queen of Iraq. Long ago the houses had been owned by Jewish merchants; by the 1980's, the Jews were all gone, and the mansions had been converted to interrogation centers.

"They said, 'All of you have to be executed; all of you have to be destroyed,' " Dr. Moosawi said. " 'None of your family has to stay alive.'

"Before we got in the car, a very bad man pointed his gun at me and said, `You are to be killed now.' An officer came out and said, `What are you doing?' and he said, `He swore against Saddam Hussein.'

"It was not true, of course. The officer told the man to put his gun away."

At the interrogation center, the men were taken down stairs into a pitch-black basement, then separated. Dr. Moosawi's cell was just large enough for one man to sit, and two to stand, with an earthhole in the corner for a toilet. Mehdi was taken to another cell, and never seen again. It was bitterly cold and damp, Dr. Moosawi said, and women could be heard weeping somewhere in the dark.

Weeks passed, then months. Between interrogation sessions, the only contact with guards was when bread crusts were thrown into the cell.

"We didn't know if it was night or day," Dr. Moosawi said. "I told my nephew and my cousin, 'This is the time of our death, and we have to be patient, and strong.' "

Guards taunted them. "They said, 'Well, you are a doctor,' " he recalled. "I said, 'Yes,' and they laughed and said: 'Forget about it. It's all over for you. You will be buried here.' "

Finally, he was taken from the cell, up the stairs and into the presence of an officer, who told Dr. Moosawi he was to be released.

"Up the stairs I saw something I had forgotten, the sunlight," he said. "I thought, they will drive me to another place of execution. I said to the officer: 'Would you do me a favor, please: execute me here. I don't want to wait.' And he said: 'Dr. Taki, you are my friend. Honestly, you will not be executed. You are free.' "

Later, Dr. Moosawi learned that an Iraqi he had met in Britain — a cousin of Mr. Hussein's, though Dr. Moosawi says he did not know that — had visited his Baghdad home by chance, learned of his arrest, and intervened to have him released. Also freed were Mehdi's father and the two other men, but not Mehdi. Dr. Moosawi's name was placed on the secret police's special watch list of potential traitors.

After the Dungeon

A Time of Searching, a Time of Hate

At home Dr. Moosawi found the women in black, mourning men they had presumed lost forever. Remembering that, he paused, and wept silently into a handkerchief. After a full minute, he resumed.

Eventually, Dr. Moosawi got a job teaching at Mustransiriya, but colleagues avoided him. Friends stopped contacting his family, except for a few who came late at night or telephoned using false names.

Payments were made to the secret police officer who promised to look after Mehdi. But asking about his whereabouts, at secret police headquarters and prisons, was dangerous. "We'd say, 'Give him to us, and let us have a gun, and we will kill him,' " Dr. Moosawi said. "Of course, it was a lie."

Another war came in 1991, after the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, and Mr. Hussein's grip tightened still further. Economic conditions worsened under the United Nations sanctions imposed after the Kuwait invasion. Virtually the whole economy turned into a black market, controlled by Mr. Hussein and two of his sons. By the mid-1990's, with the Iraqi currency thoroughly devalued, Dr. Moosawi's salary as a full professor came to be worth barely $2 a month.

But he had something most Iraqis did not: a certain immunity to fear.

"I had learned, No. 1, that I wasn't afraid of death; No. 2, that I wasn't afraid of a hard life," he said. "I'd seen the worst, and I believed I should give as much as I can. I worked day and night at the medical school, and tried not to think about anything else."

A marked feature of Dr. Moosawi's account was that for long periods he barely mentioned the name of the fallen dictator, as though unwilling to invoke it.

Now, nine months after the American occupation began, mass graves are being exhumed all across the country, and charges of war crimes and genocide weighed against Mr. Hussein, whose secret police, by estimates of Iraqi human rights groups, may have killed 300,000 to one million Iraqis.

Though American troops captured Mr. Hussein in a bunker near Tikrit, many Iraqis say privately that he still casts a long shadow, and that his loyalists, insurgents now, can still strike with ambushes, assassinations and roadside bombs. Dr. Moosawi said any killer could enter his office in the throng of petitioners, and that, for his family's sake, he should be careful when saying anything about Mr. Hussein.

Still, the picture he painted of Iraq's last years under the dictator suggested that Mr. Hussein's psychological hold on Iraqis, through the terror, had eroded fast after the 1991 war over Kuwait.

"If you had come to me and asked me about Saddam Hussein a year ago, I would have told you that he was a hero, that the Iraqi people love him," Dr. Moosawi said, "because if I tell you the truth I'll be finished. They will kill me."

But secretly, Dr. Moosawi said, Iraqis had decided, after Kuwait, that the dictator had to go. "After the war with Iran ended, with nothing gained and everything lost, people thought Saddam would become like a priest, that he would pay for what he had done by becoming a very good man. Then, in two years, he attacked Kuwait, and even people who had doubted it understood that the government of Saddam was against the people."

Secretly, Dr. Moosawi said, he began meeting with others at the university, forming the nucleus of a group of intellectuals who have since formed a society to work for a re-birth of Iraq. At home, a year ago, he and his family watched the drumbeat of yet another approaching war, this time with the Americans coming to overthrow Mr. Hussein.

Their fear, he said, was that President Bush would compromise with Mr. Hussein at the last moment, giving him a reprieve of the kind he gained when American troops stopped at the Iraqi border in 1991.

"We wished that Saddam would leave without a war, but unfortunately this didn't happen," Dr. Moosawi said. "So we Iraqis came to a place where we said, 'We will have to sacrifice something to have our freedom,' and the war fought by the Americans was the price."

When American advance columns arrived in Baghdad on April 9, he said, and appeared on television assisting in the toppling of Mr. Hussein's statue in Firdos Square, there was joy among the Moosawis that there had not been since Mehdi disappeared.

"I went to my brother to congratulate him", he said, speaking of Salih, Mehdi's father. "It was like we were dreaming. There were tears and smiles. Everybody was laughing and crying."

But in the months since, the mood among the Moosawis has soured, and not only because of the bitterness of learning, after weeks of visiting virtually every secret police station in Iraq, and scanning lists of political prisoners posted on lampposts and trees, that Mehdi would not be coming back. The Americans, Dr. Moosawi said, have failed the high expectations of Iraqis and have sunk so low in popularity that most cannot wait to see them go home.

"It is freedom the Americans have given us, but it is not good freedom," he said. "Yes, we wanted freedom against dictatorship, truth against lies, education and progress instead of pushing the intelligentsia down. But what have we got? There is no law, we live in the dark without electricity, there are no police to stop the thieves, nobody to control the traffic, no gasoline.

"In those respects, we say, 'Things were better under Saddam.' "

Soldiering On, Even as Spirits Ebb

December 26, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

American soldiers at Camp St.-Mère, near Falluja, Iraq, had time Thursday to attend services, which were photographed through the branches of a lighted tree.

CAMP ST.-MÈRE, Iraq, Dec. 25 — When Bach's "Ave Maria" filtered softly out of Christmas communion at a makeshift Roman Catholic chapel on Thursday night, this forward base of the 82nd Airborne Division was an oasis of calm. Stars shimmered above as mess hall workers in Santa Claus hats noiselessly finished clearing the remnants of the soldiers' turkey dinner. Along with the soaring music from the Mass, only the steady hum of the base generators broke the silence.

But peace on earth is the stuff of hopes and prayer for the 3,300 men and women of Task Force Panther, at a cluster of three bases outside Falluja, ground zero of the insurgency in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein nearly nine months ago. At this base, Camp St.-Mère, as painfully as anywhere in Iraq, America is at war, and the burden falls mainly on the division's Third Brigade — the White Devils — who arrived here from Fort Bragg, N.C., four months ago.

As fought by these soldiers, this war has little in common with the glories memorialized in the camp's name, drawn from St.-Mère Église, the Normandy town where the 82nd's paratroopers dropped on D-Day in June 1944. Here, the enemy is shadowy and fleeting, and prepared to use any tactic, however brutal, to kill and wound Americans.

The division's territory is huge: all of western Iraq to the Syrian and Jordanian borders, hundreds of miles away. But the war's epicenter, for the Third Brigade, lies along the 80-mile axis from Baghdad to Ramadi. Falluja falls midway. This is the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, known as such for its domination by Sunni Muslims, who remain Mr. Hussein's strongest loyalists. About 90 percent of all insurgent attacks have been in this area.

In this war, soldiers here say, all pretense of honor is gone.

Along Highway 1, the expressway stretching westward past Falluja, shepherds wave at passing American convoys, then use doctored cellphones to detonate 122-millimeter artillery shells fashioned into crude bombs and buried in the median strip or under overpasses. Recently, troops at Camp St.-Mère said, a man sent his 8-year-old son to throw a grenade into the back of a Humvee, severely wounding an American soldier. The father and son were seized.

It is a conflict that saps at least some spirits. The American command in Baghdad has acknowledged at least 14 suicides among the 120,000 American troops in Iraq since Baghdad fell on April 9. But at Camp St.-Mère, most soldiers appear to think that the war is worth fighting. Most, too, seem to think it is winnable, although perhaps not for several years, longer if ordinary Iraqis keep denying the American-led coalition intelligence on the insurgents.

Others seem less sure, passing their days in their bunkrooms, keeping to themselves.

At the Christmas night Mass, the chaplain, Capt. Marian Piekarczyk, a 50-year-old Polish-born reservist from San Antonio, Tex., caught some of the hesitancy among the troops, the dispirited air. The chaplain told a sparse congregation of about 50 that, before the service, many soldiers had told him that they would not be in the mess hall, or at the chapel. "They told me, `I don't feel like celebrating Christmas.' But I told them, `We need to be celebrating Christmas more than ever before.' "

Christmas brought its share of attacks with plenty of heavy ordnance, despite Mr. Hussein's arrest and American raids that have netted hundreds of tons of stockpiled weapons. About 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Camp St.-Mère and Camp Volturno, three miles closer to Falluja, came under sustained mortar and rocket fire, but there were no injuries.

But in the pitch darkness outside the camps, the landscape seemed, briefly, like a scene from a Vietnam war. Amid the thud of mortars and the whistling of rockets, an AC-130 gunship circled over the desert, leaving a huge triple O-ring of vapor at 5,000 feet. A pilotless reconnaissance plane droned overhead. Helicopters clattered fast and low toward Falluja's dim lights on the horizon. High above, fighter-bombers patrolled.

A reporter's vehicle — a battered, Baghdad-registered Chevrolet — drove up a dirt road toward Camp St.-Mère, setting off alarms of a possible suicide bomber. Magnesium flares were fired from sentry posts, casting ghostly light as they drifted on miniature parachutes. The Iraqi driver, hoping to improve the Americans' view through their night-vision binoculars, halted at a zigzag of concrete barriers and switched off the car's lights. A man inside shouted: "We are Americans! Don't shoot!"

After soldiers cleared the vehicle and its four occupants, they said they had orders to fire on any unidentified vehicle approaching, if it behaved suspiciously and they could not establish that it posed no threat. "You were lucky," a staff sergeant said. "After the flares, the next rounds were high-explosive."

In the barracks, and out across Camp St.-Mère, Christmas Day was a time for cleaning weapons, re-packing gunny sacks, watching old Clint Eastwood films on DVD's and waiting in line at rows of computers and satellite telephones. The Army offers the world's cheapest satellite phone calls, about 5 cents a minute. On the computers, soldiers are limited to 20 minutes.

After three days of operations that captured nine suspected insurgent leaders, the soldiers at Camp St.-Mère were taking advantage of a lull. In one bunkroom, a group of men broke from a midmorning movie to talk about the war. From Delta Company, Second Battalion of the 504th Infantry Regiment, they, like many of the 82nd Airborne's troops, are combat-toughened soldiers, with experience in Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkans.

These men, all but one in their late teens and 20's, identified themselves as part of the post-Sept. 11 generation, Americans called to duty in a newly dangerous world. They compared themselves, in the hazards they face, and the stakes for America, to their grandfathers' generation, men who fought in Africa, Europe and the Pacific in World War II.

"We've heard the older generation talk of us as Generation X, individuals who've grown up soft," said Sgt. Michael Gabel, 25, of Baton Rouge, La., whose grandfather fought in China in World War II.

"My platoon sergeant at boot camp said, `If your generation had to storm the beaches of Normandy, you couldn't do it.' I thought he might be right then, but now I disagree. Our generation hadn't been challenged yet, but here we are, and we're rising to meet the challenge."

The soldiers' talk abounded with accounts of near-misses, of grenades tossed out of seemingly friendly crowds, of roadside bombs exploding beside Humvees.

The long, quiet hours of Christmas provided new opportunities to debate the likely outcomes of the campaign against terrorism.

"The way we're going to beat the terrorists is to broker a long-term solution in the Middle East," Staff Sgt. Mark Bruzinski, 35, of Redding, Conn., said. "Once you've created a wider peace in the Middle East, you take the wind out of the sails of people who want to destabilize things."

Specialist Jonathan Parisan, 22, from Pottsdown, Pa., said: "I agree with the fact that Saddam needed to be taken care of. But his regime is toppled now. From here on out, every American who's whacked, every guy who loses an arm or a leg here — I just think it's time the Iraqis took over."

Sergeant Gabel reached the opposite conclusion. "The extremists believe us to be infidels, they make us out to be the slaves of Israel," he said. "They hate us for their poverty, and for our power. Our enemies, if they don't see that American boots on the ground will duke it out at any cost, they'll go on elsewhere."

He thought a moment, and seemed suddenly less sure, as if weighing what the war — in which more than 460 American soldiers have died — could mean for him, and for thousands of others at bases like this one. "Some guys here say, `We've got to the place that we've been waiting for all our lives.' They love it," he said. "Other guys think it's like sitting at a PlayStation playing war, only for real. But the thing about a PlayStation is, when you die, you can hit the reset button."

Once Skeptical, Briton Sees Iraqi Success

December 24, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 23 — When Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, a 50-year-old Briton, arrived in June to lead the mainly European force controlling southeastern Iraq, he was skeptical, he said. He felt that "this is going to be a lot more difficult than we realized."

But as General Lamb prepared to hand his command to another British general, he said at a news conference here on Tuesday that Saddam Hussein's capture and other changes, including progress in restoring oil installations, power stations and running water, as well as the Iraqis' fast-rising prosperity, had fostered a new confidence that the American-led occupation force can eventually hand a politically stable Iraq back to its people.

"Is this do-able?" he said. "You'd better believe it."

The British officer described himself as neither optimist nor pessimist but "a hard-boiled realist," then offered an upbeat assessment that matched that of American generals: "I think we're in great shape."

He took a jab at the press. Western reporters, he implied, had come to an early conclusion that the allied undertaking in Iraq would not succeed, and had failed to adjust. He compared this with criticism that greeted allied forces in the first stages of the spring invasion, when resistance stalled the drive to Baghdad.

The plan provided for 125 days to take Baghdad, and it was accomplished in 23 days, he noted. But, he told reporters, "you had us dead and buried in seven days."

The general is finishing his six-month command of an 11-nation contingent of 13,000 troops, based in Basra, that controls an area covering about a quarter of Iraq, home to five million people. He has served in front-line units in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf war, the Balkans, Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands, and was with British headquarters staff during the invasion of Iraq in March.

The general said Mr. Hussein's capture on Dec. 13 in an underground bunker near Tikrit had lifted the shadow that his months as a fugitive left on Iraqis.

"We've just buried that nail in the coffin," General Lamb said. "He's not coming back."

For the insurgents, this removed a figurehead, if not a cause; for other Iraqis, particularly Shiites, the country's largest single group, it lifted a widespread fear of Mr. Hussein's restoration that had acted as a drag on the allied forces' prospects. "These are difficult waters that those who are against us swim in," the general said.

At times he tempered his enthusiasm. "I sense that we're well in the corner," he said. "We haven't turned the corner — this is a huge undertaking — but we are moving forward."

The general said he spoke principally from his experience in the south, where the population is 85 percent Shiite. But he based his conclusions, too, he said, on first-hand knowledge of conditions faced by fellow allied commanders: the American generals who command 120,000 American troops in military districts that account for 20 million other Iraqis, including Baghdad and the restive Sunni Muslim regions north and west of the capital.

It is in these regions that more than 90 percent of the attacks on allied forces have occurred. The south has been far quieter, though General Lamb said 20 British troops had died since he took command.

Progress, he said, has been rapid in meeting grievances in the south. He gave a chronicle of more than 1,000 repair and rebuilding projects involving oil installations, water-pumping stations and pipes, power stations and cement plants, as well as schools, hospitals, clinics and cultural institutions. With funds from the United States, Britain and others, he said, spending could soon rise to $250 million on infrastructure that had deteriorated disastrously under Mr. Hussein.

Part of the frustrations expressed by Iraqis over the occupation, he suggested, arose because some had exaggerated expectations.

He said civic leaders had approached him claiming that "before the war, everybody in Basra had running water," and that many had lost it as a result of allied bombing. But he said he had produced Water Department charts showing that a third of the city never had pipes to carry water in the first place, typical in areas not favored by Mr. Hussein. Pipes were being installed, he said.

For the most part, he offered a view similar to that of American commanders, who have repeatedly said allied forces would prevail, laying the grounds for the democracy that President Bush says is his goal in Iraq.

But General Lamb also struck notes of gentle admonishment. At one point he said that drawing from his experience in conflicts elsewhere, it was "slightly simplistic" to use the declining number of daily attacks by insurgents as a measure of progress, because it measured only a part of the challenge facing the occupation forces.

American commanders often use the attacks as a kind of barometer. In November there were an average of 40 a day across Iraq, and as many as 55, with more than 80 American soldiers killed, half of them when their helicopters were downed.

That prompted American forces to shift briefly to an all-out offensive that employed aerial bombing for the first time since the invasion. After the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ended a month ago, the attacks fell to an average that American commanders have put at slightly fewer than 20 a day.

One American officer at General Lamb's news conference said the attacks had declined still further since the arrest of Mr. Hussein, with only six reported on Monday, which the officer described as "the lowest level since May."

On Tuesday night, another shift in American tactics seemed to be taking place with the eruption of what sounded like heavy artillery and cannon fire in a wide area of southern and southwestern Baghdad. The fire continued far into the night, loud enough that it echoed deeply against the walls of the Palestine Hotel in the city center, at least 10 miles away.

The United States command had said earlier that it was cancelling arrangements for reporters to watch an offensive by the First Armored Division using 105-millimeter artillery guns, among the heaviest battlefield weapons in the Army's inventory.

Talk of Tikrit's Favorite Diner: Hatred of Hussein, Fury at U.S.

December 23, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Hatim Jassem, standing, a 35-year-old theology professor, in conversation with other Iraqis at Al Mudhaif, a chicken restaurant in Tikrit.

TIKRIT, Iraq, Dec. 18 — If there is a favorite meeting place here in Saddam Hussein's hometown, it is a tightly packed, crockery-clattering, $1-a-plate restaurant called Al Mudhaif — Arabic for a place of hospitality, or inn — on the town's scrappy main street.

Anybody wanting to know Tikrit can stop by and listen to the talk as waiters shuttle by with plates of flat-baked bread and spit-roasted chicken. All types gather here, including, one recent day, a posse of heavyset men with traditional Arab tribal dishdasha robes and checkered kaffiyeh headdresses. With jutting beards, old combat jackets and narrowing eyes, they were identified by other diners as members of the "resistance," still working, other diners said, for the restoration of their fallen idol, Mr. Hussein.

The restaurant lies around the corner from one of Mr. Hussein's pillared palaces, now the headquarters of the town's new rulers, the Fourth Infantry Division of the United States Army, whose tanks and armored vehicles ceaselessly thunder by. From the restaurant, it seemed a pageant of Iraq's wider drama, with the grim-faced resistance men looking out at the Americans driving by with flags fluttering from radio antennas, helmeted soldiers with wraparound goggles at their turrets, machine-gunners swiveling, watching for trouble.

But not all is quite as it seems in Tikrit, or at least quite as imagined by many Westerners here.

Tikrit, the legend goes, is the Dodge City of Iraq, a place of such fervor for Mr. Hussein that there can be no accommodation with the American vision for the country, no tolerance for democracy or a civil society that would strip power from the Sunni Muslim minority cliques that have dominated since the nation's founding in 1921; above all, no acceptance that Mr. Hussein, the town's great patron, might face trial for mass murder.

A hint that this image of Tikrit was incomplete came when the Americans took reporters out to Ad Dwar, the site of Mr. Hussein's capture on Dec. 13, aboard low-flying Black Hawk helicopters that curved across the Tigris and out over the silted wheat fields and citrus orchards by the river. The pilots flew in fear of rocket-propelled grenades, which have brought down American helicopters elsewhere, but days after the arrest of Mr. Hussein, villagers were running from their homes to wave as the Americans flew by.

When a reporter and a photographer for The New York Times walked into The Inn, apprehensively, it was a relief to be invited to sit down. A man at a table near the entrance identified himself as Hatim Jassem, a 35-year-old theology professor, Muslim by creed, recently returned to his home village of Al Alam near Tikrit from teaching at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, having judged the capital too lawless under American rule to remain.

His home village has been identified by American military intelligence as a bastion for Mr. Hussein, where many families are linked to the former dictator by extended family ties. Mr. Jassem, speaking loud enough to be overheard tables a distance away, addressed the matter forthwith.

"Look, it's not as if I love Saddam," he said. "I don't. They arrested me in August 1998, after I'd warned one of my younger brothers he was getting too close to Saddam's men and that they would hurt him and the family if he carried on. Somebody overheard me and told one of Saddam's bodyguards. Then they came and put me in prison for six weeks. They tortured me — I still have the scars on my back — but it could have been worse."

Among the complexities of post-Hussein Iraq is that many who speak in support of the toppled dictator, or oppose the Americans, are victims of his terror, either personally or through the brutalities inflicted on relatives and friends. By any reckoning of the number he killed — Iraqi human rights groups' estimates begin at 300,000 — a large proportion of this nation of 25 million were directly affected, and many more admit that they carry the trauma's scars.

Mr. Jassem is among the many with conflicted views. Having begun by condemning Mr. Hussein, he switched to castigating American troops for the "humiliation" they visited on him at his arrest. Next, unprompted, he was back to saying Iraqis had been unable for years to rid themselves of the tyrant. "We thought it was a good thing, that the Americans invaded and threw him out, because we Iraqis couldn't do it ourselves," he said. "Only American troops could do that."

"Even the psychological atmosphere is improving, after the overthrow of Saddam," Mr. Jassem said. "Wherever you were under the regime, you always felt people were watching you, you always felt people were listening. Now, it's better — you can criticize and complain. When I go to a restaurant now, I don't look about and wonder if the secret police are watching."

But for the rest of the 90-minute conversation, the professor spoke bitterly of the Americans. At those moments, with the rush of passion for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, against the troops that did it, Westerners in Iraq sometimes feel tempted to reach for reflections on Arab culture in books like "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," written in the 1920's by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

Some Arabs consider the book chauvinistic, but the sense of Arab tribal culture conveyed by Mr. Lawrence, an Englishman who lived among Bedouin warriors and helped lead them during the Arab rebellion against Turkish rule during World War I, may yet have relevance to Americans trying to make sense of the crosscurrents in Iraq.

"They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns," he wrote. "They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades."

He added: "Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity."

Mr. Jassem's words, at times, seemed unconsciously to echo Lawrence's sense of tribal psychology, one contested among Arabs ever since. The issue in Al Alam, Mr. Jassem said, is not the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, but the offenses against Arab dignity that the Americans were committing with their raids.

"Why are the Americans being attacked?" he said. "Not because all Iraqis are pro-Saddam, no. If Saddam had come out of his palaces and into the streets of Tikrit without guards, somebody would have killed him for sure.

"Iraqis are attacking the Americans now because they have humiliated us. We feel if somebody trespasses in your home, breaks the door and beats the head of the household and cuffs his hands in front of his family, it is the greatest humiliation. It happened to Saddam. If it happened to me, I wouldn't hesitate to go and buy a Kalashnikov and look for an American to kill."

But was it not Mr. Hussein who brought humiliation on himself, a visitor asked, by hiding underground and emerging from his bunker, hands up, looking like a vagrant? Mr. Jassem agreed, but switched to a homily.

From his studies of Christianity, he said, he knew of a truth that Americans should observe in seeking a way home from Iraq. "There is a very famous saying of Jesus Christ," he said. "'Glory to God, and peace on earth. Let the Americans bring peace on earth."

Lunchtime was coming to an end, and other Tikritis stopped by to offer a welcome to the visitors. Many offered extravagant invitations to their homes. The men of the resistance remained stone-faced, but as they left, pistols in their waistbands, they pulled Mr. Jassem aside and whispered that he might want to bring his new friends to Al Alam.

"They would like a conversation," he said.

THE UNDERGROUND

As a Fugitive, Hussein Stayed Close to Home

December 21, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS and ERIC SCHMITT

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

An American soldier took a photograph Friday of the bedroom used by Saddam Hussein in the Iraqi village of Ad Dwar, where Mr. Hussein hid, protected by relatives and loyalists until his capture on Dec. 13.

AD DWAR, Iraq, Dec. 18 — Before his capture in a coffinlike bunker outside this desolate Tigris River town, Saddam Hussein spent months moving furtively among 20 or 30 nondescript safe houses in the Sunni Muslim heartland, where a tightknit network of family and clan sheltered him and brought him news from across American-dominated Iraq, American military officials say.

In turn, he used a word-of-mouth system of couriers to carry his instructions back to a cluster of Baathist cells that helped him guide the anticoalition insurgency, according to American officers who led the painstaking intelligence effort that culminated in the raid that captured Mr. Hussein.

To avoid detection, the 66-year-old Mr. Hussein traveled on foot, by small boat along the Tigris River, and along back roads in an ever-changing mix of cars, taxis and pickup trucks, often at night, rarely with more than two or three loyal followers to avoid notice.

Accustomed to mosaic-domed palaces, he let his hair and beard grow, survived on chocolate bars, honey and canned fruit, and shed the uniforms and Italian-tailored suits he favored in Baghdad for traditional Iraqi dress, a dishdasha robe and a checkered headdress.

In an ironic twist, he came back, in the end, to a place he wove into his political legend: the site on the Tigris where, in October 1959, as a 22-year-old fleeing Baghdad and his part in the failed assassination of the Iraqi military ruler, Abdul Karim Kassem, he claimed to have swum the river to escape pursuing troops. The farmhouse where he was seized last Saturday lies a few hundred yards from the riverbank where he came each year to mark the anniversary with a choreographed swim.

Before two of Mr. Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, merciless enforcers of his terror in the years of power, were killed by American forces in a shootout in the northern city of Mosul on July 22, American intelligence officers say, they almost certainly met their father periodically at the safe houses, plotting stratagems before separating to avoid standing out. Their deaths further isolated Mr. Hussein from the top officials of his government, many of whom were being hunted down from an American most wanted list of 55 men, some of them offering tantalizing clues as to where Mr. Hussein might be tracked down.

Lt. Col. Todd Megill, intelligence officer for the Fourth Infantry Division at Tikrit, which carried out the raid that seized Mr. Hussein outside the nearby town of Ad Dwar on Dec. 13, said meetings among the three would have been an operational necessity, as well as a family comfort. "They probably met on a regular basis just because they were the only other people they could talk to," he said. Mosul, where Uday and Qusay were killed, is 150 miles north of Tikrit.

Much of Mr. Hussein's life as a fugitive remains a mystery. But before his capture and since, American intelligence officers and commanders in Iraq have worked to piece together a sketch of his life eluding American troops. They have based their conclusions on interviews with relatives, interrogations of captured Baath Party officials and other Hussein loyalists, satellite telephone intercepts, seized documents, a knowledge of Mr. Hussein's past habits and some assumptions by military officials about what it must have taken to avoid the manhunt.

The officers said they believed that Mr. Hussein fled north within days of the fall of Baghdad, the cocksure defiance of his last days in power shattered by the speed of the American takeover and of his government's implosion. A tyrant who built a totalitarian state on a web of betrayals, he broke one last vow, to stand and fight beside his followers, made as he stood atop a battered Volkswagen Passat outside the Abu Hanifa mosque, one of the Sunni Muslims' most sacred shrines in Iraq, on April 9, the day of the city's fall. As he spoke, in the district of Adhamiya, the closest American tanks were less than a mile away.

Until the raid that captured him, Mr. Hussein's desperate forays about Baghdad in the days just before and after the city fell were the last public sightings of him. Putting together accounts by one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards and other witness accounts, American intelligence documents paint a picture of the dictator, with his son Qusay, careering about the city in an armored Mercedes, then jumping into a Nissan sedan, trying frantically to stop Iraqi soldiers from joining the mass defections that began as American tanks headed for the city center.

After appearing at the Adhamiya mosque, Mr. Hussein and Qusay ran into heavy American gunfire as they tried to cross the Tigris back to the district of Khadamiya, where gangs of Saddam Fedayeen, a private militia controlled by his son Uday, were patrolling the streets. Turning back, the Husseins went to Adhamiya, which was raided that night by American forces, the first of many failed attempts to nab Mr. Hussein in the months that followed.

A Sheltering Network

Not long after, Mr. Hussein and his two sons disappeared, heading north out of Baghdad to their tribal homeland.

In Salahuddin Province, a sprawling region of more than three million people that includes Mr. Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, he went into hiding. There, he fell in among family and tribal members who associated with him before his rise to power and profited handsomely after it.

Mostly people of village origin, picked from a web of five key tribal families with close blood links to Mr. Hussein, those men were far from the Western-educated rocket scientists and nuclear physicists whom Mr. Hussein had used in his ambitions to make Iraq the Arab superpower.

But their value lay in their village contacts, their intimate knowledge of the area around Tikrit and their cunning in outwitting an enemy with spy satellites that can intercept telephone conversations, imaging technology that can detect men moving at night and computer databases that listed identities, biographies and habits of thousands of Mr. Hussein's followers. "These are people who held senior positions in the security services, the Special Republican Guard, the Special Security Organization and the military," Colonel Megill said of the men who supported Mr. Hussein during his fugitive months. "These are guys who have been with him for years, who have done his dirty deeds and who are just as dirty as he is."

The crucial man for Mr. Hussein was a 300-pound, middle-aged veteran of the Special Security Organization, one of the most feared organizations in Mr. Hussein's terror apparatus. It was this man's capture in Baghdad, a week ago on Friday night, that provided the breakthrough that trapped Mr. Hussein. He was caught after a dozen failed raids by American troops in Tikrit, Samarra and Baiji, Sunni Muslim towns in the Upper Tigris River Valley.

The American command has not publicly identified the informant, citing the risk to continuing military operations. But Maj. Stan Murphy, intelligence officer for the Fourth Infantry Division's First Brigade, the unit responsible for the night raid that brought in Mr. Hussein, described him as one of five top lieutenants trusted with essential tasks for Mr. Hussein. The captured informant acted as a chief of staff and appears to have been one of the only followers who knew of Mr. Hussein's whereabouts at any one time.

As for Mr. Hussein, the American officers said that while he reverted to "a fugitive's life," something he knew well from his experience as he fled Iraq to sanctuary in Egypt in 1959, his moves on the run were mostly improvised, not part of a master plan. "I think he had a plan and actualized it, but I also think it was very haphazard," Colonel Megill said.

American investigators are examining Mr. Hussein's movements and contacts during the eight months of the manhunt, hoping to learn much that will help them unwind the insurgency that has taken the lives of more than 200 American soldiers since President Bush declared an end of major combat operations on May 1.

For the Americans, probing Mr. Hussein's movements and contacts during the eight months of the manhunt is crucial. The Americans say they need to know the extent to which the ambushes, roadside explosions and suicide bombings have been aimed at Mr. Hussein's restoration, and how closely the former dictator was directing the attacks. Part of the answer, the American officers said, lies in the documents seized along with Mr. Hussein, which have, they said, provided evidence that he had at least a guiding and inspiring role, if not an operational one, in directing the attacks.

Colonel Megill says he is convinced that Mr. Hussein's role was crucial. "I don't think he goes out there and plans operations," the colonel said. "I think he gives more general guidance to his subordinates like `Focus on this or focus on that. In this area, recruit. In that area, make trouble.' " Major Murphy, the First Brigade officer, said much the same. "He would give very general guidance like, `Hey, I'd like to see more attacks,' " he said.

Mr. Hussein, described by American officers as nervous and cooperative at the time of his capture, is said to have reverted in detention to truculence and mockery of his interrogators, denying any wrongdoing, and defending pogroms during an uprising in 1991 in which tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims were shot and dumped in mass graves.

Still, the documents have provided a breakthrough in the American understanding of the cell structure underpinning the insurgency, one American official said. The leaders of three cells identified in the documents have already been detained, that official said, and four others identified in the papers and a man believed to have acted as a courier were being tracked down.

The guerrilla leaders' capture, the official said, has led to the names of many others believed to be fighting against the Americans. Those men, too, are now on an American wanted list of more than 9,000 people. One guerrilla leader was found this week preparing passports for himself and his family, suggesting that he was about to flee Iraq, the Americans said.

A Basic Distrust

If blood ties were basic to Mr. Hussein's survival, so too was his distrust of all those around him, born in his youthful days as a conspirator. That distrust led him, American officers said, to organize his life on the run around a web of underground cells, none aware of the others, using a model he studied in books about the Bolshevik underground in Russia and the man he took as his model, Stalin.

Written communications by Mr. Hussein were rare, as were telephone calls. American intelligence somehow penetrated Mr. Hussein's inner entourage before the war, finding one of his security aides who used a Thuraya satellite telephone, of the kind that American commanders favored. According to accounts circulating in Baghdad, Mr. Hussein personally executed the security man after the second of two pinpoint bombing strikes that nearly killed him, on March 20 and April 7, and after that the use of satellite telephones by his entourage virtually stopped. That, too, prompted a reversion to village habits.

"Traditional Arab society operates by word of mouth," Colonel Megill said.

In the end, the American officers said, a group of 20 to 25 people made up Mr. Hussein's innermost circle. They represented the brutish tribal bands that were the bedrock of his security in Baghdad, men with secure positions on his extended family tree: money men doling out some of the millions of dollars Mr. Hussein carried with him from looted banks and secret palace vaults when he fled Baghdad, logistics men who plotted his movements and prepared the way and a retinue of cooks, drivers and bodyguards.

All shared a bond of blood and trust, dating from Mr. Hussein's rise to power four decades ago, the American officers said. An assassin once himself, the former dictator understood how to construct the inner rings of his security from people of village origins, tied tightly to him, aware of the torture-chamber fate that awaited those inclined to betray him, and with few ambitions but to retain the dictator's favor and their privileged lives.

Mr. Hussein tried to keep his hideaways and movements secret by giving lavish cash gifts to those who harbored him, often after only a knock on the door in the middle of the night and a plea to help an anonymous family member in need. Most of the safe houses appear to have been owned by men favored by Mr. Hussein with gifts of land and jobs, often bestowed years before.

To bind those people and distract them from the lure of the $25 million reward posted by the American military command, Mr. Hussein carried large amounts of cash. He was caught with $750,000 in American $100 bills that the United States authorities are now tracing, but American officers believe that his options were narrowing as his cash drained away, along with his access to whatever foreign bank accounts that escaped being frozen, and other assets like jewelry from the extravagant collection of his first wife, Sajida, the mother of Uday and Qusay.

"You can show up unaccounted for and they'll offer you hospitality, but you've got to pay for it," said Colonel Megill. "Family ties get very, very thin after a while if they're not rewarded."

In a kind of Iraqi underground railroad, Mr. Hussein was passed from one lieutenant to another, from one safe house to the next, always one step ahead of the Americans. There were close calls. Before the mission on Saturday, the First Brigade believed it had hard enough information on Mr. Hussein's location 11 times in the past several months to conduct a raid. Until last Saturday, each attempt fell short, by only eight hours in one case. "My guess would be he had probably 20 to 30 of these around the country as he moved around," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the Fourth Division commander, said of Mr. Hussein's hide-outs. "I believe he moved every three to four hours on short notice." Major Murphy, the First Brigade's intelligence officer, agreed that the fallen dictator had moved often but said that he appeared to have remained as long as a week in any one place if it seemed safe.

If so, it would follow a pattern familiar to American intelligence from the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and the 21-day war that overthrew Mr. Hussein this spring, of the Iraqi strongman rarely sleeping in the same place two nights running, abandoning his motorcades and elaborate multilayered rings of security for clattering taxis and a solitary guard or two with pistols in their waistbands, and employing a team of doubles.

The safe houses were a mix: modest homes in middle-class suburban neighborhoods, or mundane outbuildings on sprawling properties owned by his henchmen, or disheveled rural farmhouses like the one where he was finally caught in Ad Dwar. Some had false walls built into them. Others had cramped underground chambers camouflaged at ground level. All were in areas where Mr. Hussein was surrounded by Sunni Muslims loath to betray him, as the latest in the long line of Sunni minority leaders of Iraq.

The Final Hide-Out

It was one such man, Qais Namaq, a former guard at one of Mr. Hussein's palaces in Baghdad, who with two younger brothers took Mr. Hussein in at a farmhouse beside the river at Ad Dwar. They were arrested during the raid. A sister of Mr. Namaq told reporters at another family home in Ad Dwar this week that it was the three brothers who dug the hole and poured the concrete for the cramped, dank underground bunker in the farmhouse courtyard where Mr. Hussein was found.

The trail to Mr. Namaq's farmhouse opened up in June, when the First Brigade made a perceptional breakthrough, said Col. James B. Hickey, the armored cavalry officer from Chicago who led the raid. Army intelligence realized that the key to Mr. Hussein's security — and, ultimately, to his whereabouts — lay in the five tribal families that had provided his bodyguards, said Colonel Hickey, 43.

At its headquarters, the infantry division put up a color-coded chart showing Mr. Hussein in the center, in a yellow bull's-eye, with family and tribal links radiating outward and the names of those killed or captured in red. Along with Mr. Hussein, the key man on the chart is the "man with the 42-inch waistband," as Colonel Hickey described him, Mr. Hussein's effective chief of staff. It was his capture in Baghdad a week ago on Friday that led the Americans to Mr. Hussein.

American officers said they had mounted sweeps of Ad Dwar dozens of times, but one crucial clue eluded them: the link between the town and Mr. Hussein's swim in 1959. So crucial was this to the townsmen that they had a nickname for the farming area just northwest of the town, Al Aboor, meaning crossing in Arabic. Whenever Mr. Hussein came for the annual commemoration, he handed out plots of land and jobs, cementing the loyalties that kept him in power. In 1991, one of the men who got a job in Baghdad, as a palace guard, was Mr. Namaq, the man whose farmhouse provided Mr. Hussein with his last redoubt.

Now, the question that presses on the angry men of Tikrit and Ad Dwar is why their fallen idol failed to fight it out with his captors, leaving a pistol and a Kalashnikov rifle lying on the bunker floor as he emerged, hands raised, into the night.

"It was a mistake to hide in such a disgusting place, a dishonor for Saddam but also for Iraq," said Hatim Jassem, 35, a theology professor. "People saw him on television and said: `This is pathetic. He has disappointed us. He has let Iraq down.' "

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THE SURRENDER

U.S. Officers Display the 'Rat Hole' Where Hussein Hid

December 16, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Almost hidden behind a fence and beneath palms in Ad Dwar, Iraq, is the boxy shed where Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a narrow hole. The small gate, center, off the dirt road was the only entrance.

AD DWAR, Iraq, Dec. 15 — After the gilded palaces and the tyrant's life of luxury, it came down to this for Saddam Hussein: a final hiding place beneath a scrappy peasant farmer's courtyard that was as small and dark and dank as a coffin, and a trembling decision to surrender that saved him from an almost certain death at the hands of American troops.

The 43-year-old Chicago-born officer who led the raid, Col. James B. Hickey of the Army's Fourth Infantry Division, stood near what he called "the rathole" on Monday. He described to reporters how soldiers peering down into the shaft with weapons and bright lights, with orders to kill Mr. Hussein if he put up a fight, held back when they saw he carried no body belt bomb or gun and appeared to be pleading for his life.

Then they hauled the man they had sought relentlessly for eight months into the chilly night air, restrained him with white plastic handcuffs that held his hands behind his back and placed a plastic hood over his head, just as they have done with thousands of other Iraqi detainees.

One of the surprises of a visit to the site of Mr. Hussein's capture was the size of the underground hiding place where he was found.

It was more cramped and airless than it appeared in photographs released by the Army on Sunday. Its concrete entrance at ground level was barely large enough for a burly man like Mr. Hussein, who is close to 6 feet tall and was believed to have weighed about 200 pounds before he went on the run, to squeeze through.

A reporter of about the former Iraqi ruler's size went down into the hole and discovered that Mr. Hussein would have had to lower himself awkwardly down the shaft of what amounted to an inverted T. He then would have had to twist and slide until he was lying flat in the cramped concrete-walled, wood beam-roofed tunnel. It was about 8 feet long, 30 inches high and 30 inches wide. It was there that he was lying when the American raid broke over him.

Even a few minutes in the tunnel, in daylight, was enough to foster claustrophobia.

Those who built it — possibly the two men captured along with Mr. Hussein, whom the Army has not identified — had installed a small, six-inch-high ventilation fan above where Mr. Hussein appeared to have placed his feet, a jutting steel pipe for further ventilation and a small light that appeared not to work.

The only traces of its former inhabitant that remained after an American military sweep were several used cotton swabs and an empty black plastic bag.

From this last miserable redoubt, at 8.26 p.m. on Saturday, Iraq time, the man who sent hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths at the battlefront and the torture chambers and the gallows made a decisive choice for life, his own.

From the bottom of the shoulder-wide shaft, the 66-year-old former dictator thrust both hands skyward, signaling to Special Operations forces soldiers that he would offer no resistance.

Colonel Hickey said the Americans learned from an interrogation of one of Mr. Hussein's relatives barely three hours earlier that he could be found in the area near the peasant's house, among flat, silted lands along the Tigris River rich with citrus orchards and palm groves.

But to preserve secrecy, and perhaps to keep the 600 American soldiers on the raid as cool-headed as possible, they avoided using the former Iraqi ruler's name. They referred to him in the jargon of the raid as "HVT One," meaning High-Value Target No. 1.

Mr. Hussein, straggly bearded, unkempt and, Colonel Hickey said, "nervous" and "disoriented" after months on the run, did not try to hide his identity.

As he emerged from the shaft, he addressed the Special Operations forces soldiers with a directness, and at least a hint of delusion about his altered status, that could stand as a epigram for a man so used to dictating terms that he thought, even at the end, that he could haggle over conditions for his surrender.

"I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate," he said, in halting English, as recounted by Colonel Hickey on the basis of what he was told later by the Special Operations forces. The Army has declined to identify the soldiers beyond saying that they were members of Task Force 121, a Special Operations unit that includes Central Intelligence Agency officers.

The Americans, Colonel Hickey said, were ready with an ironic riposte of their own that may still have Mr. Hussein puzzling in the unidentified "high security detention facility," probably near Baghdad, to which he was moved by helicopter some time on Sunday.

"President Bush sends his regards," they said.

Colonel Hickey said that none of the procedures used in handling Mr. Hussein differed in any way from those applied to the lowliest of his followers, and that they included an authorization to "kill or capture" Mr. Hussein as judged necessary.

Asked if the Special Operations troops had been standing over the bunker with unpinned hand grenades, ready to stop anybody in the shaft from attacking his would-be captors, Colonel Hickey smiled.

"He was wise not to waste much time," the colonel said.

In a similar vein, when asked how American troops confirmed Mr. Hussein's identity, the colonel replied, "The fact that he announced himself as Saddam Hussein helped."

A similarly understated, even laconic, quality characterized the radio exchanges between the American soldiers who raided the house and commanders who held back with the surrounding force of Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a dozen patrolling helicopters.

Within moments of Mr. Hussein stepping out of the bunker, Colonel Hickey said, the troops at the house radioed to say they believed they had captured "HVT One."

"You mean you have Saddam?" he asked. "Yes, Saddam," the men at the house replied. "That's great," Colonel Hickey said, concluding the exchange.

With confirmation that Mr. Hussein had been captured, Colonel Hickey radioed the news to Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the Fourth Infantry division commander, a former linebacker for the Army football team, who started the news on the way up the chain of command to the White House.

"I said, `General Odierno, we've captured HVT One,' " Colonel Hickey said.

"And the general said, `Really?' And I said, `Yes, sir.' "

The scene on Monday near Mr. Hussein's hiding place provided further clues of the dismally austere life that was the former dictator's, at least in the last hours or days before his capture. Just how long he stayed here was not clear.

Inside a concrete hut, belongings that could have been his — two pairs of cheap, unworn Iraqi-made black shoes, three pairs of large men's white boxer shorts and two T-shirts still in their plastic wrappings, several well-thumbed books of Arabic poetry, and, in a food shelf and a small refrigerator, a jar of honey, some tinned pears and a packet of coconut chocolate Bounty bars — were strewn about a single, unmade bed.

The unworn clothing and shoes suggested provisions for somebody who arrived without baggage, and needed emergency supplies.

American intelligence officers have said that repeated tip-offs on the whereabouts of Mr. Hussein, none of them decisive until Sunday, had shown a pattern of his moving rapidly from place to place, often in the Tikrit area, since his overthrow by the American invasion in April.

Colonel Hickey said his troops had mounted 12 such operations in pursuit of Mr. Hussein in the First Brigade's area of operations, the upper Tigris River valley, since April.

How close the latest raid may have come to failure was suggested in Colonel Hickey's account of how Mr. Hussein was discovered.

He said troops mounting the raid on Saturday had pounced on two other houses in a target area about half a mile wide and a mile and a half deep on the Tigris's eastern bank, about 10 miles southeast of Tikrit and less than a mile to the northwest of Ad Dwar.

The area was well known to Mr. Hussein, who was born in a poor village a few miles away beside the Tigris, to a family that had supported itself, in part, by piracy against boats carrying goods down the river to Baghdad.

Nor was it the first time that he had found refuge in the area. As a 22-year-old wanted for his part in a failed assassination attempt on Iraq's then ruler, Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, in 1959, he passed through the area on his way to sanctuary in Egypt. Then, according to the legend he fostered later, he dressed as a woman and hid for days in a village well.

Ad Dwar, a dour cluster of concrete-walled homes and shops about a mile from the house where Mr. Hussein hid, is closely associated with Izzat Ibrahim, Mr. Hussein's widely feared, ginger-haired vice president and No. 2 man.

Mr. Ibrahim is believed by American commanders to be directing at least part of the insurgency against coalition forces, and remains, after Mr. Hussein's arrest, the highest-ranking Iraqi still at large on the high-priority target list of 55 names that American officials issued in April.

After an initial sweep had found nothing at the first two houses, code-named Wolverine One and Wolverine Two by the Americans, Colonel Hickey said, the American troops moved northwest and checked the house where Mr. Hussein was eventually found.

On the first sweep, the troops found nothing.

But after the troops involved in the Saturday raid cordoned off the area and conducted a more detailed search, one of the Special Operations soldiers noticed an edge of a fabric-backed rubber mat peeking through soil edging the concrete floor in the home's courtyard, tugged on it and swept the earth away to find a rectangular foam plug about 20 inches high and perhaps 3 feet long, topped with two looped ropes as handles.

Lifting it, he found the hiding space. Soon after, Mr. Hussein rose in an appeal for the soldiers not to kill him.

American troops here were not inclined to triumphalism on Monday. They know they face a continuing insurgency.

"This is business," Colonel Hickey said. But he added a hopeful note, that insurgent strikes might intensify in retaliation for the arrest of Mr. Hussein, but would probably fall away later as the demoralizing effect of the capture sinks in.

"From a military point of view, if you lop the head off a snake, the snake's not going to be so viable after that," he said.

In the Streets, a Shadow Lifts

December 15, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Michael Kamber/Polaris, for The New York Times

An Iraqi celebrated by firing his AK-47 from a Baghdad rooftop.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 — As Iraqis struggled to grasp the impact of Saddam Hussein's humiliating capture in a darkened spider hole near Tikrit, it was the television images of the fallen leader that kept replaying in their minds throughout the day on Sunday, just like the images played on their television screens.

The videotape taken by his American captors showed a disheveled old man, more like a hapless, disoriented vagrant than the tyrant whose quarter of a century in power bludgeoned 25 million people into cringing submission. A mythic strongman, so feared that his name set people trembling until only a few months ago, was suddenly reduced to piti able, mumbling impotence.

On the streets of Baghdad, and across Iraq, people who danced out of their homes with paper American flags and raised their rifles for staccato bursts into the clear winter air paused to tell one another again and again what they had seen. They acted as if ceaseless repetition would make real what many called a dream, as if testing their sanity by checking that others had also experienced what they had seen.

Long into the night, the images replayed on televisions at kebab houses and grocery stores, in homes and hospitals. They showed the captured dictator opening his mouth obediently to an American doctor's beam, sitting passively as his unkempt hair was searched for lice, patting his face as if to identify an aching jaw or troublesome teeth, pulling on his straggly beard as if pondering his fate.

As the mocking shouts grew louder in a thousand Baghdad streets, and across almost all Iraqi towns outside the sullen precincts like Tikrit that are still loyal to Mr. Hussein, it was possible to believe that Iraq's nightmare had finally ended.

That is what President Bush proclaimed. The hope, as fervent among millions of Iraqis, was that the shadow Mr. Hussein cast for a generation over the Iraqi soul had passed, never to return.

Yet Americans may be wise to restrain hopes that Mr. Hussein's capture will generate an early downturn in the insurgency that has taken the lives of more than 190 American soldiers since May 1, the day Mr. Bush proclaimed an end to major combat operations. At the same time, many more Iraqis have died.

And listening to the voices in Baghdad's streets on Sunday suggested that the end of Mr. Hussein's months as a taunting fugitive may not contain the other forces that have eroded American popularity. Mr. Hussein's capture brought a surge in popularity for Mr. Bush and the American occupation, yet the inflexions in what the revelers said often sounded like a warning that the tide could just as easily break on the stony shores of unfulfilled Iraqi expectations.

The scenes that played out across much of Iraq were replicated in the celebrations that greeted the American capture of Baghdad, and the toppling of Mr. Hussein, eight months ago.

This time, American troops have done more than help topple a statue, having caught the man himself.

But few who witnessed the statue falling could have imagined the speed with which Iraqi opinions began to turn against the Americans as problems accumulated with failing electricity supplies, looting and lawlessness on the streets and lines outside gasoline stations that have stretched into days. Judging from the undertones in what many people said on Sunday, there was little reason to think that something similar could not happen again.

In one Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday, Adhamiya, the seizure of Mr. Hussein met with angry vows to continue the attacks that have seen American soldiers and Iraqis killed by suicide truck bombings, by roadside explosives, by ambushes and by assassinations.

Adhamiya was the last place where Mr. Hussein was seen before the television images of him after his capture, a dramatic sequence on April 10 when he taunted American troops who captured the center of Baghdad the previous day by climbing onto a car roof outside one of the city's most venerated mosques. There he proclaimed that he would stand with the Iraqi people to fight the Americans.

At exactly the hour on Sunday when the American governor of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, was prompting cheers from Iraqi journalists at a news conference with his opening words, "We got him!" a group of men gathered sullenly on the sidewalk outside Al Imam al-Adham mosque, still bearing the marks of the tank shell American troops fired at its minaret as they hunted Mr. Hussein the day after he appeared.

Adhamiya is one of the few districts in Baghdad that is virtually 100 percent Sunni Muslim, and therefore a redoubt of loyalty, like Tikrit, to the domination of Iraq by the Sunni minority that was represented by Mr. Hussein.

The images of their idol as he emerged from the crawlspace outside Tikrit had not yet been seen by the men at the mosque, so they began, as many Iraqis did, by saying they would not believe reports of his capture until they saw "real pictures" of the former dictator in American custody.

It quickly became clear that the men knew that Mr. Hussein's hopes of restoration were finally gone. Gone, too, was any hope that the majority Shiites, 60 percent of the population, could continue to be excluded from power as they have been since Iraq's founding as a modern state in 1921.

What followed was an example of something eerily familiar to anybody who experienced Mr. Hussein's years of power, indeed familiar to anybody who has studied totalitarian states like Stalin's Russia. That is the seeming ability of people to dismiss reality by creating a virtual world that conforms to the dictates of the state, or to their personal interests, either in benefiting from the state or surviving its terror.

"Sunnis or Shiites, we all love Saddam Hussein," said Abu Mohammed, a 33-year-old store owner. Mr. Hussein, he said, had built a strong Iraq that had made its people proud; he had been "cruel," but only as far as he needed to be to maintain "security."

As for the mass graves discovered since the dictator was toppled, which have led to estimates that he murdered as many as 300,000 people, that, Abu Mohammed said, was a fiction bandied about by the "looters and thugs" the Americans brought with them and installed on the Iraqi Governing Council, the shadow administration that advises Mr. Bremer.

"Those traitors who asked the Americans to come to Iraq are dead," Abu Mohammed said, "As of today, we will kill them all."

As one man in the crowd waved a pistol, he waved off any notion that the Shiites could hope to lead the government, by simply eliminating them from the count of Iraq's population.

"We Iraqis are 10 million Saddams," he said, counting only Sunnis, "and we will drive the Americans out, with or without our leader."

A few miles distant, similar groups of men, and occasionally a handful of black-cloaked women, gathered on the muddy streets of the Baghdad district where more families were devastated by Mr. Hussein's years of torture and execution than any other. It is the suburb of two million impoverished Shiite Muslims that used to be called Saddam City, renamed Sadr City now after a Shiite ayatollah Mr. Hussein had assassinated in 1999.

The hubbub on the sidewalks and in the bazaars quickly became a cathartic ritual, as if mocking the Shiites' erstwhile persecutor would purge the darkness he had cast across their lives.

An hour after Mr. Bremer began to speak, virtually everybody had seen the television images. "Saddam's a coward, he didn't shoot, he didn't kill himself, he gave himself up without a fight!" one teenage boy shouted. "He was like a rat in a hole," an older man said. "Like a beggar," another said. "Like a caveman."

Across the divide that separates Adhamiya and Sadr City, one thing emerged that all Iraqis have in common: that nothing in his arrest, nor anything in a trial or possible execution, is likely to remove the huge psychic space he occupies.

One man in Sadr City, Mohammed Jabbar, a 32-year-old teacher, who cried so jubilantly his voice became hoarse, said the fallen dictator was "our Hitler, our Stalin, our Mao, because he killed so many people."

The analogy may work at deeper levels even than Mr. Jabbar intended, if the experience of those other societies that have emerged from the 20th-century's harshest tyrannies is any guide. Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist who became the leader of that country's human rights movement, once said it would take the lifetime of everybody living in the Soviet Union in 1980 before it became a normal society, even if communism collapsed overnight, because of the trauma inflicted by Stalin.

Some Iraqis think the same may be true after Mr. Hussein. Kamel Ahmed, a professor of history at the University of Baghdad, told Al Jazeera television in the hours after Mr. Hussein's capture became known that "we will need hundreds of Ph.D's and M.S.'s to understand all the dimensions of this subject," the terror inflicted by Mr. Hussein and the way in which he held, and still holds, millions of Iraqis in psychic thrall. Other Iraqi academics and politicians have said much the same thing, that Mr. Hussein and his terror will continue to obsess Iraq, and shape the future, long after he is gone.

One middle-class Iraqi, a 44-year-old engineer, showed a glimpse of that when he saw the first images of Mr. Hussein being looked over by the American doctor. Turning to a friend, he said: "I hate this man to the core of my bones. Just seeing him sitting there makes the hairs on my arms stand up. And yet, I can't tell you why, I feel sorry for him, to be so humiliated. It is as if he and Iraq have become the same thing."

For the American occupation, those complexities are more than a matter for abstracted discourse. Of all the unpleasant surprises since American troops overran Iraq, none has puzzled officials quite as much as the volatility of Iraqis who welcomed the Americans as liberators in April, and by the autumn were stamping on the bodies of American soldiers. Even Sadr City, where the first troops were welcomed like the G.I.'s who entered Paris in 1944, has become so dangerous for Western reporters that, until the mood changed Sunday, few dared entered the area without armed guards. On Sunday, the hostilities were gone, but the undercurrents were still there.

Men and boys who shouted "Bush good, Bush good," and "Saddam bad," along with the harshest curse of all in the Iraqi street, "Saddam down shoes," and acted out mimes of eating his flesh, shifted moments later to what sounded like warnings to the Americans that things could quickly turn against them once more.

"We need salaries, tell the Americans that," Amar Jabbar, an 18-year-old, said during the pause in the celebrations. "If there are no jobs soon, we will hate them just as much as we love them today."

In Baghdad, Celebration and Mockery of a Captured Leader

December 14, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS and EDWARD WONG

Ashley Gilbertson/Aurora, for the New York Times

Iraqis in Baghdad celebrated the news with impromptu bands and gunfire.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 — Gunfire resounded in the streets and Iraqis danced and waved flags in Baghdad's teeming neighborhoods in celebration of the capture of their former leader, Saddam Hussein, by American forces.

On Karada Street, a busy commercial strip in central Baghdad, Iraqi men pulled out AK-47's and pistols and squeezed off shots into the air, littering the streets with hundreds of bullet casings.

On one corner, an impromptu band formed, with men banging on drums while their friends fired guns in front of them. Cars raced down the street and men with AK-47's leaned out the windows, spraying the air with gunfire, while others fired from balconies.

Iraqis said they had not seen such celebrations in the streets since perhaps the end in the late 1980's of the disastrous Iran-Iraq War.

"It will be a new start for peace," said Said Jassim al-Yasseri, 34, the imam, or head cleric, of a Shiite mosque. "This is a new day for the country. Saddam should at least get the death penalty."

More than a hundred Shiites marched down the middle of one street, carrying red and green flags with the names of the most famous Shiite clerics.

"Saddam has been captured, death to the Baathists," they chanted, referring to Mr. Hussein's much-feared political party. One man broke away from the march and ran up to a reporter, yelling, "This is the greatest day in Iraq."

Under Mr. Hussein's rule, Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of the population, were persecuted. Mr. Hussein was a Sunni, and he was intent on keeping followers of that branch of Islam in power. The greatest resistance to the American occupation has come from towns in the so-called Sunni Triangle in central Iraq.

While the celebrations were chaotic in most of the city, stunned residents in at least one Sunni neighborhood reacted with sullen disbelief at the initial reports of the capture.

"Let them show us it is real," said Abu Mohammad, a resident of Adhamiya, where last April Iraqis had recounted a tale of how Mr. Hussein paid a visit to the local mosque and greeted a throng of well-wishers who kissed his feet.

Abu Mohammad's Sunni-dominated neighborhood was a Baathist stronghold where Mr. Hussein had found much of his support. But as he continued to express that support — "All the people in Iraq love Saddam Hussein," he said — celebratory gunfire rang out in the distance from Iraqis overjoyed by the news of the capture.

"Let them put pictures of Saddam Hussein on television so that we know it's him," Abu Mohammad said.

The United States military broadcast footage of the man who had ruled Iraq for decades with an iron fist. But instead of Mr. Hussein sitting proudly at a conference table in military uniform, as Iraqis had grown accustomed to seeing during his rule, the footage showed him disheveled, rubbing his hands down his bearded cheeks, and throwing back his head as an American medic pressed a tongue depressor into his open mouth.

The gunfire started sporadically at around 3:00 p.m. Baghdad time when rumors of the capture by American forces near the Iraqi leader's hometown of Tikrit emerged. As the news spread and gained credibility, Iraqis poured into the streets in many neighborhoods to show their support.

Thousands of Iraqis gathered on street corners, cheering and dancing. Children waved American flags. Men tossed sweets to the crowds.

In the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, not many of the residents have satellite television, so the news did not spread as quickly. But when it did, residents wasted no time in mocking the man who they blame for the disappearance and execution of thousands of Shiites.

"I am very happy because Saddam was a bad leader," said 26-year-old Hanaa Abdul Hussein. "It is a new birth for all of us."

Young men who had seen the video footage of the dishevelled Iraqi leader mimicked the way he stroked his beard, or rubbed the side of his face, or they mocked him for being plucked from his underground hiding place by the American forces.

"He is a coward. Just like a rat!" shouted one man.

"He looks like a beggar!" said another.

"He is finished!" said a third.

While many also shouted "yes, yes," some people questioned how the Iraqi leader would be put on trial.

"Saddam destroyed us and destroyed the Iraqi people," said Hussein Nasar Jassim, 20, as he pulled a fistful of candy out of a cardboard box. "I hope he's tried in public, and all the Iraqi people will see this."

Others questioned whether the capture would mean an end to the attacks on American and other forces attributed to pro-Saddam loyalists

"The arrest of Saddam will make the resistance weaker," Mr. Yasseri said. "`But it will still take a long time for America to get rid of them. The Americans need support from the Iraqi people, and they need to respect their promises to the people. They must quickly establish a new Iraqi government."

And after the celebrations are over, the United States still has its work cut out for it as it works on promises that it would make life better for Iraqis in the post-Saddam era and hand over power to Iraqis.

"American is very good but we still want salaries," said one man.

Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York for this article.

MILITARY TRAINING

U.S. Considers Pay Raise for Iraq's New Soldiers

December 14, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Associated Press

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said today that the United States will reconsider the pay scale for members of the new Iraqi Army.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 13 — The allied military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said on Saturday that American troops had "achieved a significant decrease in attacks" with the help of Iraqis who were coming forward in growing numbers to identify those planning and mounting insurgent strikes.

The general struck an upbeat tone at a news conference at the heavily fortified convention center here, where he said that the American-led forces had experienced "another great week," compared with a deadly November in which more than 80 American soldiers died.

That death toll accounted for nearly half of the 197 American soldiers who have died in combat — including one on Friday — since President Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq concluded on May 1. But the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — a period chosen by the insurgents for a stepped-up campaign of roadside bombings, ambushes and attacks on military helicopters, and answered by a tough American counteroffensive — has been followed by relative calm.

General Sanchez said the daily tally of insurgent attacks had fallen to "around 20" — an average of 21 for the past week, according to a staff officer — from an average of more than 40 a day, and a one-day high of 55, during Ramadan, which ended Nov. 24. The principal reason he cited for the decline was that, after months of inadequate intelligence, the Americans were benefiting from "a significant number of Iraqis who are willing to come forward and sacrifice" their safety to offer what he called "actionable intelligence."

He also said that pay for recruits for the new Iraqi Army would be reviewed, after a wave of desertions linked to the low pay of $60 a month, in order to attract an keep more Iraqi soldiers.

The United States Central Command in Florida issued a statement on Saturday saying that a soldier had died Friday after a convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad. Two Americans were injured, the command said.

In another incident reported on Saturday, the American command in Baghdad said a roadside bomb exploded Friday as a Polish convoy drove through the outskirts of the city of Mahaweel, 50 miles south of Baghdad, wounding two soldiers.

Also on Saturday, officials with the Fourth Infantry Division said that Lt. Col. Allen B. West, who confessed to mistreating an Iraqi during questioning, would not be court-martialed, but would be fined and allowed to retire.

General Sanchez' appearance followed generally positive assessments here this week by L. Paul Bremer III, the American governor of Iraq, and several of the American divisional commanders responsible for areas where insurgents have concentrated their attacks. Like Mr. Bremer, General Sanchez said attacks were likely to increase as the June deadline for an Iraqi provisional government nears.

But he appeared a happier man than he did a month ago. Then, he called the conflict here a war, the first time any senior American commander had done so since May 1, and vowed grimly to use every weapon in the American armory to beat them back. Today, he simply said that alliance forces were engaged in a "low-intensity conflict."

He hinted, too, that the gloves-off approach had been set aside, or at least modified. The American approach now, he said, would be to mount raids that were "precise" and based on the incoming intelligence.

In response to questions, the general acknowledged that the number of detainees in Iraq, which he put at 5,000 a month ago, was "now almost to 10,000," including 3,800 members of the Iranian militant group Mujahedeen Khalq. General Sanchez said the Iranians were restricted to a camp northeast of Baghdad, and that what would become of them was a matter for Washington to decide.

The general reacted strongly to a suggestion that American commanders were taking a leaf from the Israeli military in mounting "targeted assassinations" of insurgent leaders that risked civilian casualties, and may also be taking advice from Israeli military experts. "It's a different time, it's a different place, it's a different enemy, it's a different world," he said.

U.S. Releases Prisoners

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Eight Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian prisoners were flown home Saturday after they were released from American-run detention centers in Iraq.

They were flown from the southern Iraqi port city of Basra aboard an aircraft for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which made stops in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, a Red Cross spokesman told The Associated Press.

Three of the eight suffered "serious injuries which may result in partial disabilities," he said. He said their wounds were inflicted in an "accident" during detention.

There Is No Crash Course in Democracy

December 14, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Ashley Gilbertson/Aurora, for The New York Times

Tribal leaders at a democracy workshop in Hilla, Iraq.

HILLA, Iraq — Americans have set out to teach Iraqis about democracy, and the way it is going says much about the differing cultures and histories and aspirations of the teachers and the students. It is another matter whether the American effort can succeed: Whether President Bush will be able to make Iraq a torch of democracy capable of lighting a fire among the autocracies and dictatorships of the Arab world, or will end up resembling Woodrow Wilson with his belief that the League of Nations would make the world safe for Jeffersonian values after World War I.

The venue for the "democracy training" classes run by American occupation authorities at Hilla, 80 miles south of Baghdad, could scarcely have been more apt for the transition the Americans hope to achieve before the deadline they have set for handing sovereignty back to an Iraqi provisional government next June. The Iraqis who take power then, according to the accelerated timetable approved by Mr. Bush last month, will lead the country as it adopts a constitution with American-style rights and moves to popular elections for a full-fledged new government by the end of 2005.

Overhanging everything here is the shadow of Saddam Hussein, his tyranny and mass murder. So it was apt that James Mayfield, the 70-year-old emeritus professor of the University of Utah who has led the classes, an expert in local government in the Middle East, should find himself addressing Iraqi tribal leaders and stern-faced Shiite clerics in a crypt-like room at the rear of a huge mosque that Mr. Hussein built to his own glory in the closing passage of his 24-year rule.

For the Americans, the tribal leaders and the clerics are crucial constituencies. Many in this country of 25 million give their first and overriding loyalty to their tribal families, and to the men who control their mosques. It was a fact acknowledged by Mr. Hussein, who accompanied his terror with a policy of buying and compromising tribesmen and clerics alike. The Americans too need their backing if they are to work their way back to anything approaching broad support after the months of erosion following the invasion.

At Hilla, it was a tough sell, presaging the problems in forging anything like a consensus on the government that will emerge from the occupation. Tribal and religious leaders, after all, are among those who stand to lose the most if Iraq adopts the broader civic principles preached by Mr. Mayfield. The men who came to Hilla are, for the most part, schooled in the arts of subterfuge and maneuver that find no place in the democratic handbook. "We are chameleons," one of them boasted, after acknowledging that a year ago he could have been found at the mosque limning the praises of Mr. Hussein and celebrating his re-election as Iraq's president by a claimed 100 percent of the vote.

The man who said that, Sayed Farqad Al-Qiswini, is president of the theological college that took over the mosque after Mr. Hussein's downfall, stripping the marble entranceways of plaques that had reminded the dangerously absent-minded or suicidally irreverent that they were stepping into a place of worship not of God alone, but of Mr. Hussein. A senior cleric, Mr. Qiswini had the merit of candor, at least, when discussing his erstwhile fealty to Mr. Hussein. "If you said anything against Saddam, you might as well have jumped into a boiling sea," he said. "I had no intention of jumping into the sea."

This pliability, essential to survival under Mr. Hussein, is a problem now for the Americans, who are arguing for a politics of principle in a country that has had no legitimacy save the gun for most of its existence, under the British after World War I, under the monarchy that was overthrown in 1958, and under the Baathists who paved Mr. Hussein's path to power. If principle were all, America would have little problem in persuading Iraqis of the merit of the formulas brought by the new rulers, focused on the need for a government that can be held accountable to the people.

Listening to Mr. Qiswini, it was possible at times to think him a stalwart advocate of everything in the Mayfield handbook. After the democracy class adjourned, he led a visitor out to a monument in the mosque's parking lot in memory of the thousands of Iraqis, mostly Shiites, who were buried in the largest mass grave discovered since April, at Mahawel, a few miles up the road. Standing there, it was easy to believe him when he said Iraqis had learned a bitter lesson from the dictatorship, that no man should ever again be allowed to concentrate power like Mr. Hussein.

"Saddam Hussein stripped Iraqis of all morality, of all conscience, and left us like a blank sheet of paper, ready for the writing of a new creed," he said as fellow graduates gathered. "We would rather eat dirt than have somebody like Saddam back in power again. All Iraqis have resolved never to allow the tyranny to be restored. So we will construct a new society that will be a model for all the countries in the Middle East."

But it was striking how he avoided mention of the word democracy, the keystone of everything the American lecturer had said. Mr. Qiswini is a local strongman for Muqtada Sadr, the 30-year-old cleric who issues edicts from a Shiite slum in northeast Baghdad and is the son of an ayatollah assassinated on Mr. Hussein's orders in 1999.

Mr. Sadr has come out defiantly against the American occupation, and has devoted himself to street politics that emphasize the demand for a swift transition to an elected government, which in an Iraq with a 60 percent Shiite majority would mean, with certainty, an end to rule by the Sunni minority that has ruled since 1921. Briefly, in the fall, Mr. Sadr declared his movement to be the rightful government, suggesting that he, at least, is not an ardent student of the subtleties of constitutions and minority rights.

Finding ways to mitigate the effects of handing Iraq over to a Shiite-dominated government that might mistreat the Sunnis or simply dominate them is at the heart of the debate among the Americans and Britons who are working on a schedule for a constitution and elections.

At its core, this involves keeping promises made before the invasion that tyrannical centralism would be replaced by a federal system, with a bill of rights protecting minorities and other features to shape a working political relationship among the rival Sunnis, Shiites and Christians, as between Arabs, Kurds and Assyrians.

Nothing like this has ever been tried in Iraq before, and nothing like it, at least on more than paper, has been seen elsewhere in the Arab world. Still, the Americans are betting that Mr. Hussein's ultimate legacy will be, in effect, that past nightmares will draw Iraqis on a path of entrenched individual and group rights, of a firewall separation between church and state, of independence for the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and above all, of tolerance for minorities. In other words, the core of a civil society as understood in the West.

The vision is not shared by all Americans here. As they struggle to make sense of the volatile moods here, some senior officers have lowered their benchmarks for an American withdrawal. Now, they say, a stable pro-American government capable of defending itself against overthrow by Hussein irredentists would constitute a success. To hear some American officers and many ordinary Iraqis talk, the country's need is for a pro-Western strongman of the kind that govern in many other Arab countries.

Mr. Mayfield, the lecturer at Hilla, had a more ambitious view. In the gaps between power failures and a chorus of imprecations to Allah, he spoke of his epiphanies. He said he had met a 12-year-old boy who asked him, "Will this democracy you speak of give me a job?" In one way or another, that is the view of many Iraqis, impatient of political process but desperate to the point of rebellion for work, for electricity, for schools and hospitals that function as efficiently as they did under Mr. Hussein - and for law and order.

But Mr. Mayfield took an optimistic view: "I realized that a year ago if this young boy had stood and asked a question of that kind of Saddam Hussein, he would have been shot. And when the neighbors of this young boy started to clap, I took it as evidence that the people of Iraq want democracy."

The lecturer, however, ran onto stony ground when he tried to explain the importance of the separation of powers. "That's why a constitution is so important, so that they cannot take your property, they cannot put you in jail, they cannot force you to be tortured, because the courts are controlled by the government," he said. The interpreter, otherwise fluent in English, was stumped by the concept of divided government, and made several false starts in attempts to convey the idea before giving up.

Otherwise, the reaction of the class was polite, but hardly enthusiastic.

Something closer to a bottom line emerged when they were asked if it wasn't presumptuous to teach basic political principles to the citizens of a land long hailed as the cradle of civilization. Several men said Mr. Mayfield had said nothing new to Iraqis, because it was all written in the Koran anyway. Saddam Hussein, like Iraqi leaders for centuries, they said, was an aberration from Koranic principles, but that didn't mean Islam was at fault, only that it hadn't been properly applied since the Caliphs ruled in Baghdad nearly 1,000 years ago.

To travelers in the Muslim world, this sealed argument, attractive as it is, is unconvincing. The democratic possibilities in the Koran are most intensively studied at Islamic studies centers in Europe and the United States, not in the many Arab states where the propagation of democratic ideas can lead swiftly to prison. If Iraq can prove the exception, against all odds, the American venture here may yet be the landmark its backers have hoped it will be.

THE TALK OF IRAQ

A Conversation on Tiptoes, Wary of Mines

November 30, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Standing amid looted steel pipes, Muhammad Jasim (in headdress) talked to a reporter and photographer.

AMIRIYA, Iraq — Knowing what ordinary Iraqis thought was never easy for Western reporters when Saddam Hussein bestrode the land. Now his secret police and information ministry minders are gone, but not Mr. Hussein himself. So his terror still radiates among Iraqis, many of whom condition their words and actions against the possibility he may return.

For now, to gauge the real mood of Iraqis, a visitor must listen carefully — especially when they gather in numbers, wary of what candor may cost if American troops are withdrawn before stability is established.

One such conversation developed when a reporter and photographer from The New York Times arrived in Amiriya, just outside Mr. Hussein's principal battlefield testing site, 35 miles southwest of Baghdad. In September, men from the village carried away three radiation testing towers, along with two dangerous steel capsules containing Cobalt 60, and some villagers developed signs of radiation sickness. Amiriya is at the southern end of the Sunni districts near Baghdad that have become, for the Americans, this country's principal badlands. If any village in Iraq should be Saddam country, it is this.

The conversation involved Muhammad Jasim, 38, who described himself as a farmer but emerged from a modern stone-and-glass house of the kind that were the privilege of Hussein loyalists. He was joined by Muhammad al-Hussein, 60, a farmer with the weathered face of a man who works with animals and crops; by Saddoun Hussein Alawi, 45, yet another farmer; and by Salih Farhan, 29, who said he had been a guard at the battlefield testing site and was now unemployed.

The conversation began with a visitor suggesting that the stakes in Iraq for America were such that Mr. Hussein, despite the insurgency, could not hope to return. Here is what followed.

Mr. Jasim: "Nonsense! Saddam's regime is not collapsing; Saddam is still there, he is still fighting, he will come back."

Mr. Hussein: "Yes, it's true, Saddam is still there, and we count on him, every last man among us. The Americans promised us the world, but we have had nothing from them except their bullets and their bombs. In every way, our situation is getting worse."

Mr. Alawi: "By the grace of Allah, peace be upon him, Saddam will kick the Americans out. . . . Saddam was brave; he was the emir of the Arabs, he was our leader, he was our king."

The men were asked if reports of Mr. Hussein's brutality, and of mass graves, were American fictions. They spoke softly to each other, then resumed.

Mr. Jasim: "Well, O.K., we didn't love Saddam, we have to be honest about it. He was a man of war, and only war: Because of him, I served 12 years in the army, I fought in Iran and Kuwait, I saw many of my fellow Iraqis killed, and what did we get? Nothing! It was a big mistake to attack Iran, and then to invade Kuwait, and it is as a result of that that men like me have seen their lives waste away."

Mr. Hussein: "Yes, it was a big mistake, invading Kuwait. But then, they say it was the Americans who ordered Saddam to do it, just so they could attack him for it afterwards. These things are never what they seem."

Mr. Alawi: "You're quite right, Kuwait was the Americans' fault. But Saddam really destroyed us by going in there like he did. For him, it was always like that. Right up to the end, it was war, then more war, then still more war."

The men were asked whether America should see the drumbeat of attacks on its troops, many of them within a half-hour's drive of Amiriya, as meaning that Iraqis want the troops withdrawn quickly, with power rapidly handed over to the transitional Iraqi authority.

Mr. Jasim: O.K., let us be honest here. Whatever we may say to foreigners like you, the truth is that we were never really with Saddam; in our hearts, we were always against him. But he is gone; what we are against now is America. It is different. We want the Americans to go home."

Mr. Hussein: "That's right. We wanted America to get rid of Saddam, but we didn't want Americans to trespass in our land. We didn't want the soldiers to come into our villages and break down our doors and defile the honor of our women."

Mr. Jasim: "So tell the Americans that what we want is for them to bring a suitable man to power, an Iraqi the people can trust, a man who will govern us well. Only when they have done that should they leave, and they will do so with our blessing. We don't want them to leave now. It would be chaos."

A crowd had gathered, and now shouted, "Yes, we agree" and, "The Americans should go home, but not right now, not until they have ended all this trouble."

Mr. Alawi: "Look, we really don't have anything against the Americans. We just don't want them in our homes, in our villages and towns and cities. Perhaps if they pulled back to their military bases, and just stayed to guarantee the peace, things would start to get better."

Mr. Jasim: "The thing is, whatever people tell you, we ordinary people never had got anything from Saddam. He stole the country's wealth, but did he give it to us? No, never! He gave it to his family, and to his tribesmen from Tikrit."

Mr. Alawi: "It's true! My son often used to say bad words about Saddam, and I would tell him to be silent. Then he would say, `What did Saddam ever do for you? Are you better off because of Saddam? Or are you just frightened?' And he was right. Saddam never did anything for people like us. All he brought was fear."

Mr. Hussein: "Yes! The truth is, Saddam gave us nothing but cruelty, he looked after nobody but his own family. He was a tyrant. He gave us nothing."

Mr. Jasim: "I say a prayer every day, five times a day. `God, give me five years without wars.' But we will never have peace as long as we must fear Saddam."

Mr. Farhan: "Saddam saturated us in blood, and with weapons. Why would we ever want him back?"

Mr. Jasim: "The truth is, if the Americans had stopped the looters right away, things would never have come to this, with people shooting and bombing them at every chance. Still today, the looting is continuing, and still the Americans do not stop it. But it would make things worse now if they were just to go away."

Soon after, as the reporter moved to leave, some in the crowd asked if the journalists had any baksheesh — a form of alms commonly sought by the poor. Mr. Jasim moved forward and said he had one more thing to add:

Mr. Jasim: "Tell the Americans everything depends on jobs. Look at us; not a single man among us has a job, not one of us can feed his family properly. . . . So tell the Americans to find us jobs, then everything will begin to improve."

NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Theft of Cobalt in Iraq Prompts Security Inquiry

November 25, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Defense Threat Reduction Agency

An American officer at the spot in the backyard of a home in Amiriya where a radioactive capsule was found. In the clay oven in the foreground, the family cooked bread for a month while the capsule lay in the yard.

AMIRIYA, Iraq — A seeming lapse in surveillance by American forces has led to the looting of dangerously radioactive capsules from Saddam Hussein's main battlefield testing site in the desert outside Baghdad and the identification of at least one 30-year-old Iraqi villager, and possibly a village boy, as suffering from radiation sickness.

The two capsules, taken from a site once used by Mr. Hussein's government to test the effects of radiation on animals and perhaps humans, have since been recovered after an American sweep through the area.

But American officers fear that more cases of the sickness may follow, and that they will be powerless to help unless people in the villages of Amiriya and Shamiya break their silence and identify men who looted the desert site in early September.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the American commander in Iraq, has ordered an investigation to discover why an arc of eight 75-foot radioactive testing poles at the site was not more closely guarded after American nuclear experts filed a report to the Pentagon identifying them as dangerous after a visit to the site on May 9, American officers said. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also taken a personal interest in the case.

Under investigation is how American surveillance of the area, now under the control of the 82nd Airborne Division, failed to spot villagers entering the testing site with heavy vehicles to dismantle three of the poles, or towers, for scrap, leaving heavy tire tracks in the desert.

One of the cobalt capsules was found by American troops on Oct. 6 lying in the yard of a villager's house in Amiriya, less than 15 feet from the outdoor clay oven the family used to bake bread.

The second capsule was found partly buried about 75 feet from a house in Shamiya, just east of Amiriya and about 10 miles north of the nuclear testing site, in a position where it, too, would have been approached by family members and neighbors. Along with the capsules, parts of the giant testing poles were found, dismantled for scrap metal.

"We've made every effort to unscramble this thing," said Lt. Col. George Krivo, a spokesman for the American command in Baghdad.

Looting of military depots has been a persistent problem since the fall of Mr. Hussein, prompting suggestions that the 130,000 American troops in Iraq may be too stretched.

The radioactive capsules, less than five inches high and shaped like stainless steel miniatures of the Apollo spacecraft's command module, contained thumbnail amounts of cobalt-60, a radiation source commonly used in X-ray machines and in other medical and industrial applications. The capsules were situated in concrete crypts at the base of the towers, and raised on cables into the towers to create an irradiated environment on the simulated battlefield.

American experts say they have not been able to verify whether the radioactive poles were used under Mr. Hussein for live tests on humans and animals that simulated battlefield conditions under nuclear attack, as reports from Iraqi exiles in the years before the American occupation suggested.

But documents recording tests on humans, including dust-covered strips of film showing the naked upper bodies and heads of men who appeared to have been alive when the films were made, were found by The New York Times at the site during two visits there in mid-November.

American officers who oversaw the complex operation to recover the two unshielded capsules of cobalt-60 have hinted that the failure to identify the looting in September until two weeks later may have resulted from a work overload among experts who gather data from spy satellites.

In a somber reflection of the hostility toward Americans in this area at the southern end of the so-called Sunni triangle, Colonel Krivo said, "If for any reason there are people in those villages who cannot or will not come forward to be tested, that would be very much to their detriment." He added, "The attitude out there is `Why should we trust the Americans?' "

The two houses where the cobalt-60 capsules were found were identified after United States Army Black Hawk helicopters fitted with powerful radiation detectors flew wide patterns across the desert near the testing site, the officers said.

American experts say cobalt could be used in the making of "dirty bombs" — cheap, improvised nuclear devices. But American commanders here are convinced that the looters wanted the metal only for scrap.

American experts, and others from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which had the towers under surveillance for much of the 1990's and just before the American invasion of Iraq, say the cobalt capsules were strong enough when Mr. Hussein's scientists first used them in the early 1980's to emit potentially lethal gamma rays. Recent American tests have shown that the radioactivity of the capsules has decayed to about 10 percent of its original potency. But the fact that the capsules were unshielded, American experts say, still posed a danger to anyone exposed to them for a protracted period.

At both villages, local people have steadfastly refused to identify the men who dismantled the towers and moved them to the villages, along with the two capsules, or to tell American and Iraqi investigators where the men are now.

The officers said they believed that after the lapses in spotting the looting, the American command — particularly a Pentagon unit called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, working in Iraq to dispose of materials found at former chemical, biological and nuclear weapons sites — deserved credit for moving quickly into the villages and taking the capsules back to the testing site.

The testing site was then made safe by moving the capsules from all eight towers to an undisclosed but "safe" place.

In a measure of how concerned the Americans were when they reached the two villages to recover the capsules, the officers described how an American soldier in Amiriya wearing no protective equipment had approached the capsule, mounted atop a 60-pound steel counterweight, had run with it, and had "heaved it over the fence, 100 feet from the house."

So far, about 70 villagers have been tested by teams from the Iraqi Ministry of Health and assisted by Americans, who took blood samples and conducted other tests.

Of those villagers, American officers say, four showed "abnormal results," and two, the 30-year-old man and the 4-year-old boy, were found to have symptoms consistent with radiation sickness. The man, who has the more serious of the two cases, had muscle pains, fatigue and multiple ulcerations in his mouth, the officers say, all classic symptoms of radiation sickness.

The officers did not identify the two victims or give their current state of health, but said they remained under observation.

In the case of the house in Amiriya, only women and children remain there, a situation almost unknown in the male-dominated life of Iraqi villages. American officers did not say in which village the two suspected radiation victims lived, or whether they believed that the 30-year-old man was among the looters.

The officers quoted the Iraqis living at the Amiriya house as saying that all the men in the family had been killed in the American invasion of Iraq, and that they knew nothing about how the radioactive capsule and the two 38-foot lengths of heavy steel lying just beyond a fence marking their yard had gotten there.

In Shamiya, the officers said, the family offered an even less credible explanation, given that American experts inspected all eight towers in May and found the capsules intact.

"They said, `An Iraqi soldier came to the house in April and told us to bury the object here, and to stay away from it,' " the officers said.

The American investigation set in motion by General Sanchez appears to be a rigorous one. "He's investigating this in great detail, and he's personally engaged," Colonel Krivo said of the general. "We will get to the bottom of this."

For years, Western human rights groups reported claims by Iraqi defectors that prisoners were being taken from Mr. Hussein's overcrowded prisons, including his main fortress at Abu Ghraib, about 30 miles north of the testing site, to be used as human guinea pigs.

But initial translations of the Arabic documents found at the site have not yet shown whether the tests recorded in the films involved biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, or who the men in the filmstrips were.

The looting of the capsules seems likely to become a parable for much of the nature of the American occupation of Iraq.

Some defense officials who discussed the incident on the basis of anonymity said events at the desert site showed the Bush administration's error in sending too few troops to Iraq, a decision that high-ranking American officers in Baghdad shortly after its capture said had curbed their powers to crack down on the looting that ransacked the city.

So far, experts working for the Iraq Survey Group, mostly Americans and Britons with long knowledge of Iraq's secret weapons programs, have failed to discover, or at least to announce the discovery of, materials indicating that Mr. Hussein was developing illicit weapons in the final years of his rule.

The site looted was known to the West. In the Persian Gulf war in 1991, it was heavily bombed. Although the site carried several names, the most common of them, the Saddam State Company, left little doubt of the direct link to Mr. Hussein.

After the site came under close inspection by United Nations weapons inspectors who arrived in the wake of the 1991 war, it lost much of its importance as top-secret programs were transferred.

Now, it is a desolate, windswept wasteland, evocative of the billions of dollars Mr. Hussein spent on weapons programs at a time when Iraq was being steadily impoverished by the wars he started and by the United Nations economic sanctions that followed.

But the site's size, about 20 square miles, its history and its strategic positioning in an area that was Mr. Hussein's main political stronghold, made it an inevitable place for American experts to visit shortly after Baghdad fell on April 9.

In the first half of May, a member of a United States Army unit searching for secret weapons said the team had found the eight radioactive testing towers and the concrete crypts beneath them, and had discovered a large radiation source in each crypt.

As reported by The New York Times on May 12, the team recommended that the area be secured by American forces until the radiation sources could be removed.

But the unit's recommendation was evidently ignored. American officers fear that because the villagers may have been continuously exposed to the gamma radiation for as long as a month before they were taken away by American troops on Oct.8, the risks of sickness among the missing villagers could be high.

Judith Miller contributed reporting for this article from New York.

WITNESS

The New Iraq Is Grim, Hopeful and Still Scary

November 16, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Iraqis craved liberation from Saddam Hussein, but not the disorder that followed. Last week, a family in Baghdad watched as Iraqi police and American military police raided gangsters' arms caches.

BAGHDAD — To return to Baghdad after six months is to encounter a country at once dispiriting and yet, in spite of all, still hopeful, if flaggingly so. The letdown begins at 19,500 feet over the southwestern limits of the city, in a twin-turboprop aircraft of Royal Jordanian Airlines that seeks safety from ground-to-air missiles by flying a downward spiral over what was Saddam International Airport — the first foothold seized by American troops when they reached the city on April 3, and now a principal stronghold of the American occupation.

With no metal chaff or magnesium flares to fool missile guidance systems, the pilots on the 600-mile flight from Amman pray they will outwit attempts to shoot down the aircraft by keeping their spiral over populated areas of the city and a stretch of desert reaching northwest to the town of Abu Ghraib. Landing is a relief, still more so for a first encounter with the polite, American-trained Iraqi immigration officials who have replaced the thugs of Mr. Hussein's time who imposed compulsory AIDS tests and searched every bag for forbidden "spying equipment" like satellite telephones.

Even the path of descent into the airport seemed a metaphor for a reporter who spent months before, during and after the American-led invasion in Baghdad, covering the last chapter of Mr. Hussein's rule and the first weeks of the American occupation.

Nothing was so grim in that compelling and often frightening passage as the events at the Abu Ghraib prison on Oct. 20, 2002. Mr. Hussein, seeking to counter President Bush's characterizations of him as a murdering tyrant, ordered 100,000 prisoners released from his prisons then, many of them from the vast, forbidding complex at Abu Ghraib.

The day turned into a parable of his terror, and, because of what some criminals released that day have done to support the violence now directed at the American occupation, a harbinger of much that followed. At the prison, emaciated men emerged into the sunlight after long years incarcerated, often for nothing more than whispering against Mr. Hussein; women in black cloaks fell to the ground in despair, appealing to Allah, when husbands, brothers and sons they hoped had survived proved to be gone forever.

Just over a year later, I glimpsed the prison again, far below, now metamorphosed into a detention center for many of the 5,000 loyalists of the old regime who are held as detainees by the American command.

Somewhere north and west, in the "Sunni triangle" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and further north around the oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, some criminals who left Abu Ghraib have enlisted in the anti-American underground, American officials say. These former prisoners now help carry out roadside explosions, suicide truck bombings and assassinations that have some of the occupation's critics worrying about a new Vietnam.

Over all, more Iraqis than Westerners have died in the suicide bombings at the United Nations compound, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Baghdad Hotel and, last week, the Italian military police compound in Nasiriya. But the anxieties are most palpable among Westerners. Many who work for Western relief agencies, construction companies and other organizations essential to Iraq's rebirth are talking of following others who have already headed home.

Many of the Westerners live in Baghdad, a city made a maze by newly erected, blast-resistant concrete walls, no-go areas that alter the geography of whole neighborhoods, rolls of razor wire placed by the Americans, and military checkpoints.

At the Palestine Hotel, where I was taunted in the last weeks of Mr. Hussein's terror by officials of his information ministry as "the most dangerous man in Iraq" because of my articles about the regime's brutality, some of the same Iraqis, who now work as interpreters for Western news bureaus, caution me against staying in the 16th-floor room I used to inhabit. It is, they say, potentially vulnerable to the rockets and truck bombs of Mr. Hussein's die-hards.

It is a world upside down, or at least skewed, for anybody familiar with Mr. Hussein's Iraq, a world that challenges much that seemed sure in the days when the drums of war were sounding in Washington.

Then, many of us believed that Iraqis craved, and deserved, their liberation from Mr. Hussein. Despite all the disappointments of the occupation, there has been little change in that view, judging by what was almost certainly the first scientifically conducted public opinion poll in Iraq, by the Gallup Organization in late September.

Not all the findings were music to Washington's ears, especially the one in which 47 percent of the 1,178 Baghdadis polled said they were worse off under American occupation, while only 33 percent judged themselves to be better off.

But against this, and the bedrock on which American prospects here may well depend, was the poll's central finding: that 62 percent believed the ouster of Saddam Hussein was worth any hardships they suffered during and after the invasion. In addition, 67 percent said they believed Iraq would be better off five years from now than it was under Mr. Hussein, against 8 percent who thought it would be worse.

Baghdad is not Iraq, and it is certainly not Falluja, Ramadi or Tikrit, where crowds have gathered to cheer the killings of American troops, most recently in the shooting down of two helicopters.

But the random experiences of a week back in the country and among ordinary people I have talked to, by far the most common view has been that for all the American failures, as they see them, a guarantee of greater misery would still be the premature withdrawal of American troops.

These Iraqis, for the most part, do not make that the first point of any conversation, more often it is the last, but it is their bottom line.

Most conversations are still about what is wrong with the occupation. High on the list, predictably, is the humiliation at finding themselves once again subject to foreign rule. Stories abound of perceived insults by American soldiers, often in places like checkpoints where the Americans are at high risk. Being ordered around by a foreigner with a gun, particularly a young man who knows nothing of your language and little of your culture, is always a trigger for discontent.

Also common, though less so now than even a few weeks ago, are complaints about the basic conditions of life. To see cars and trucks lining up on the dirt shoulders of roads everywhere filling their tanks from roadside hawkers with plastic jerry cans is one measure of the frustration in a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves, where a tank of gasoline before the invasion cost about $2.

Never mind that the empty gas stations are the result, largely, of terrorist bombings of pipelines; Iraqis ask what has become of the one thing they have always seen as the measure of their potential wealth and power, oil.

United States officials here issue a torrent of e-mail messages about the efforts made by American troops and contractors spending taxpayers' dollars to rebuild schools, hospitals and oil installations, along with a thousand other projects.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the American commander, acknowledged at a news conference on Monday that much work remained to be done in winning "hearts and minds" but complained, as politicians and generals in these situations generally do, that the "good news" about the occupation is rarely told with the same volume as the bad. But, as the debates within the Bush administration attest, finding the balance between what is going right and what is not, in a situation inherently fluid and contradictory, is a problem not just for reporters.

To outsiders, Iraqis can often seem among the Middle East's most congenial people. But they can also be hard to please, as the Americans are discovering. The amiability that greets a Westerner almost everywhere outside the Sunni triangle, and even there when American troops are not around, masks a reflex commonly found among people emerging from totalitarian rule: the sense of individual and collective responsibility is numbed, often to the point of passivity. The Iraqis' instinct to blame their rulers for life's hardships, engendered by Mr. Hussein's regime and at the same time silenced by it, is the Americans' burden now.

But even skeptical Iraqis are acknowledging that some things have improved.

American helicopters that buzzed like night flies in Baghdad's skies in recent days, flying to support the new crackdown on the terrorists, flew over well-lighted suburbs, which had been dark much of the summer. Many Baghdadis still live by a three-hour rotation, power on and off, but the power ministry says the country as a whole is producing as much electricity as before the war. Running water, too, is less of a luxury than it was.

Even among Iraqis who complain most bitterly, it does not take long to discover that some things have changed for the better. Men who ran battered taxis under Mr. Hussein are now profiting by the occupation authority's tax-and-duty-free regime and upgrading to snazzy four-wheel drives. Civil servants who earned $2 a month under Mr. Hussein now get an average of $60.

In another two or three months, the telephone exchanges in Baghdad that were bombed in the war should be repaired, restoring land-line service just as a new commercial cellphone network, Iraq's first, is scheduled to begin operation.

Prices for many staples are higher these days, but the streets and markets are choked with commerce as they never were in Mr. Hussein's latter years.

One thing that draws common assent among Americans and Iraqis is Saddam Hussein. While the bombers seem to want him back in his palaces, virtually everybody else wants to see him dead — captured first, tried by an Iraqi court, then executed for his crimes.

Black jokes about him abound, and children sell $10 dolls of him, delighting when they switch the batteries on and the doll sets into a frenzied jig. Just about everybody believes Mr. Hussein is somewhere within 100 miles of Baghdad, in a basement, cut off from his closest aides, his shoe-black hair turned white, fearful of an American knock on his door.

One thing almost no Iraqi even bothers to discuss is Iraq's most destructive weapons — what Mr. Hussein had, and what he was planning to develop. For people here outside the old hierarchy, the issue that the United States and Britain used to justify the war was never a prime concern. Despite the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds, the weapons that terrified Iraqis most were the pistol, the garrote and the gallows.

For the most part, it is the present, not the past, that engages Iraqis' passions. The Iraqis can be incandescent about the perceived failings of the occupation administration led by L. Paul Bremer III, so far short of the American efficiencies that were an Iraqi gospel before. They mock most of the hand-picked Iraqi leaders who form the transitional governing council, saying they spend most of their time abroad on expense-paid trips or maneuvering against one another in the time they are at home.

And Iraqis want an end to the "Ali Babas," the bandits who terrorize neighborhoods and the roads outside Baghdad. After a narrow escape of my own from six masked, Kalashnikov-brandishing Ali Babas who leapt on the highway about an hour north of Nasiriya on Tuesday night, I could see their point.

Only the swift reflexes of Abu Karar, the Iraqi driver who had helped me deal with Mr. Hussein's enforcers before the invasion, saw us through. He switched off our vehicle's lights and drove straight at the Ali Babas at 100 miles an hour, causing them to jump back from the road.

But then there is the bottom line, and it is accessible to anybody who stands on a street corner, as I did in the hours after that near-miss, covering the bombing of the Italian military police compound in Nasiriya.

Gesturing toward the smoking hulk of the headquarters where at least 19 Italians and 13 Iraqis died, I asked the crowds if they thought America and its allies should pack up and go home. In the clamor that followed, I asked for quiet so that each man and boy could speak his mind. Unscientific as the poll was, the sentences that flowed expressed a common belief.

"No, no!" one man said. "If the Americans go, it will be chaos everywhere." Another shouted, "There would be a civil war."

"If the Americans, the British or the Italians leave Iraq, we will be handed back to the flunkies of Saddam, the Baathists and Al Qaeda will take over our cities," another man said.

Nobody offered a dissenting view, though many said it would be best if the Americans achieved peace and left as soon as possible. These people, at least, seemed concerned that America should know that the bombers, whoever they were, did not speak for the ordinary citizens of Iraq.

Guerrillas Posing More Danger, Says U.S.

November 14, 2003

By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — The senior American commander in the Middle East said Thursday that the Unites States-led occupation in Iraq faces no more than 5,000 guerrilla fighters, but that they are increasingly well organized and well financed, and are gradually expanding their attacks to the previously calm north and south.

His estimate of the scale of the shadowy armed opposition, the most precise from a top commander, came in a broad outline of the military obstacles his forces face.

The officer, Gen. John P. Abizaid of the Army, said loyalists to Saddam Hussein — not foreign terrorists, as some Bush administration officials have said — pose the greatest danger to American troops and to stability in Iraq. He said these militants were capitalizing on the political and economic turmoil to hire unemployed "angry young men" to do much of their "dirty work."

As the general described the challenges, President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, made her own outline of the political steps to be taken in Iraq, acknowledging that the United States was changing course on forming an Iraqi government.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, she said it was important to "find ways to accelerate the transfer of power to the Iraqis."

"They are clamoring for it, they are, we believe, ready for it," she added.

Ms. Rice said the administration had been persuaded by the Iraqi Governing Council that writing a constitution would take so long that Iraq and its American occupiers could not wait until it was complete to transfer more civilian authority.

In brief remarks to reporters, President Bush said the United States was developing a plan to "encourage more Iraqis to assume more responsibility" quickly.

Administration officials said Mr. Bush had approved in broad strokes the formation of a temporary government by the middle of next year.

The urgency has raised new concerns about the administration's policy in Iraq. After a long period of criticism, both here and abroad, that the United States was not moving rapidly enough to hand over power, there is now a growing anxiety that, for domestic political reasons, it may move too rapidly.

General Abizaid, who leads the United States Central Command, offered a sobering assessment of a guerrilla force that is dwarfed by the 155,000 American and allied troops and more than 100,000 Iraqi security forces, but is fighting an increasingly bloody low-intensity war that will claim more American lives.

"The force of people actively armed and operating against us does not exceed 5,000," he said at a news conference at his headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., which was broadcast to the Pentagon. "People will say, well, that's a very small number. But when you understand that they're organized in cellular structure, that they have a brutal and determined cadre, that they know how to operate covertly, they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you'll understand how dangerous they are."

Military officials said the general's estimate was based on interrogations of captured fighters and other intelligence.

With the deaths of some 40 Americans in the past two weeks clearly weighing on him — and in the shadow of Wednesday's deadly attack on an Italian military compound in Nasiriya — General Abizaid said United States forces needed better and more timely intelligence to crush those responsible for the roadside bombings, ambushes and mortar attacks.

"Clearly I feel a sense of urgency," he said. "They're a despicable bunch of thugs that will be defeated."

In Nasiriya, the Italian defense minister, Antonio Martino, toured the bombed compound on Thursday. He told Italian state television outside the headquarters that Italy had "some fairly reliable intelligence information" that the bombing was mounted by a combination of "re-grouped Al Qaeda terrorists" and former members of the Fedayeen Saddam, the most brutal of the paramilitary groups that constituted a private army for Mr. Hussein's family. But he offered no evidence.

Investigators said they believed that only one vehicle, a Russian-made tanker truck, was used in the bombing, and that it carried two men.

The death toll in the attack rose to 31, including 18 Italians and 13 Iraqis, and seemed likely to move higher. One of the 22 Italians injured, a 22-year-old soldier, was declared brain dead by doctors at a military hospital in Kuwait. State funerals are planned next week for the Italians, 16 soldiers and military policemen and 2 civilians working with them.

While Italy has insisted that it will keep its troops in Iraq, the Japanese government, a similarly staunch ally of the Bush administration in its campaign in Iraq, suggested that it would delay sending ground troops.

The government had expressed its intention to dispatch a small contingent of noncombat troops from its Self-Defense Forces before the end of the year, followed by a larger force next year, in what would amount to the first deployment of Japanese troops to a country at war since the end of World War II.

But the attack on the Italians, in a zone that had been considered relatively safe and that the Japanese had regarded as a possible destination, caused them to backpedal.

"We have consistently felt that we would like to participate in the reconstruction of Iraq as soon as possible," Yasuo Fukuda, the chief cabinet secretary and the government's chief spokesman, said at a news conference. "But we have to consider the changing situation and respond accordingly."

In one measure of how serious the situation remains in Iraq, six and a half months after Mr. Bush declared major combat operations over, a senior military official confirmed that General Abizaid would soon move about 150 military planners to Qatar from his Central Command base in Tampa, and work from his headquarters in the Persian Gulf state to be closer to the operation in Iraq, where he has been spending most of his time. The move was first reported on ABC and NBC news programs.

General Abizaid said there was increasing evidence that the Baathists were coordinating on a regional level with small numbers of foreign fighters and terrorists, and that the militants might even be close to forming a national leadership to direct the attacks. He did not address the issue of whether Saddam Hussein was directing the attacks.

"There is some level of coordination that's taken place at very high levels, although I'm not so sure I'd say that there's a national-level resistance leadership," he said. elaborating. "Not yet. It could develop."

The general said he believed Mr. Hussein was still alive and in Iraq, but dismissed the notion that he planted the seeds for the current insurgency even before the war began last March.

General Abizaid said the military's strategy for defeating the militants relied on stepping up the pressure on the fighters and turning over more security responsibilities to Iraqis. But he was surprisingly blunt in describing the challenges to achieve those goals.

The 100,000 Iraqi security forces "are not as well trained as American and coalition forces yet," he said. "The police, in particular, need an awful lot of work."

In contrast, Ms. Rice painted a more optimistic picture of how the transfer was going, and said there was a compelling reason to put Iraqi forces on the street.

"I was asked the other day, `What makes you think the Iraqis will be more competent in dealing with foreign terrorists and with Baathists?' " she said. "And one answer is, `They will know that they're Baathists and they will know that they're foreign, which is already a very big step ahead.' "

Ms. Rice described the change in the political landscape in Iraq as chiefly one of timing. "It's the time line on the permanent constitution that's really extended," she said.

But other senior officials said that was a coded way of referring to looming arguments over the constitution, which they said were likely to focus on how much autonomy to allow provices, particularly the Kurds in the North, and the sensitive issue of whether Iraq will be a secular state, an Islamic one or something in between.

John F. Burns, in Nasiriya, Iraq, and Norimitsu Onishi, in Tokyo, contributed reporting for this article.

Italy Says Hussein Loyalists Are to Blame for Bombing

November 13, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Antonio Martino, Italy's Defense Minister, visited the scene of yesterday's suicide bombing at the Italian military police base in Nassiriya.

NASIRIYA, Iraq, Nov. 13 — The Italian defense minister arrived here from Rome today under very tight security, and said there were strong indications that Saddam Hussein loyalists and Al Qaeda terrorists were responsible for a car or truck bomb explosion here on Wednesday that left at least 27 people dead.

The minister, Antonio Martino, told Italian state television that Italy had "fairly reliable intelligence" that the Saddam Fedayeen, the ousted leader's former paramilitary force, was responsible, along with "regrouped Al Qaeda terrorists."

Mr. Martino arrived in a military police helicopter, which circled continually over the bombed site during the minister's visit.

An Italian military ambulance, heavily guarded by trucks in front and behind, left today on the 180-mile trip to Baghdad carrying Italian wounded or dead. Soldiers were extremely jumpy, indicating that traffic in the rear of the ambulance should stay well clear.

Some of the local residents, who fear that the attack might prompt the United States to pull troops out of Iraq and abandon them to the whims of "Saddam's henchmen," began to be moved back into the homes that remain after the blast in the middle-class neighborhood of Zaitoon.

Some sat for several hours at barbed-wire checkpoints manned by Italian forces guarding access to the area. Many continued to express their outrage and distress over the attack. Bandaged women in black cloaks and head coverings, and bandaged men, could be seen in the streets.

The clearing of rubble continued, and coalition investigators were present but said nothing to reporters.

The explosion in the courtyard of an Italian paramilitary police headquarters in this southern Iraqi city on Wednesday killed 18 Italians and at least 9 Iraqis, and wounded more than 105 others. The Iraqi death toll was given on Wednesday by the doctor in charge of the casualty unit at the Nasiriya hospital.

It was the most lethal single attack on forces of the American-led occupation since Mr. Hussein was swept from power in April.

Hours after the blast, American forces launched a pair of ferocious strikes against suspected loyalists of Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad, signaling a new and more aggressive strategy. Tonight Iraqi time United States forces continued to pound targets in Baghdad.

A British military spokesman, Maj. Charlie Mayo, confirmed today that the number of Italians killed had risen by one, to 18. He also said that it was very difficult to put an exact number on the number of Iraqis who may have died, and said that news agency reports that a total of up to 32 people were killed could not be confirmed.

Major Mayo, the multinational division spokesman based in Basra, said that on occasion many Iraqis who have been wounded in such incidents "aren't necessarily taken to a hospital," or transported by ambulence, adding that is is "therefore extremely difficult to know exactly how many people" are involved.

Major Mayo said his information was being supplied by the Italian military police at the scene, the local police and local residents.

Elsewhere in Iraq, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division in the northern city of Mosul, in captured 20 people on Tuesday suspected of violence against United States forces, the United States Central Command said today.

The command also said today that a First Armored Division soldier died on Wednesday after being wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in Baghdad.

The Nasiriya bomb exploded at 10:40 a.m. local time on Wednesday, ripping apart the three-story building and an annex that stand beside a broad stretch of the Euphrates river in the center of Nasiriya, 180 miles south of Baghdad. The lightly protected buildings, formerly the city's Chamber of Commerce, served as offices and accommodation for 200 members of the Carabinieri, the Italian military police force, and most were in the buildings at the time of the attack.

"A truck crashed into the entrance of the military police unit, closely followed by a car which detonated," a spokeswoman for the British-led multinational force in southern Iraq said shortly after the blast.

An Iraqi witness said he saw a blue-and-white Russian-built truck approach the building at high speed along a boulevard leading to the river, with a bearded man in the front passenger seat firing at Italian guards before the vehicle swung past the guards and a line of low, earth-filled barriers before exploding.

There were no claims of responsibility for the attack, the latest in a series that have struck at not only Americans but other foreigners and the Iraqis that support them. Earlier targets have included the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Jordanian Embassy.

In Nasiriya, the force of the bombing of the Italian compound left a crater 50 yards from the main building that was more than 50 feet across and 10 feet deep. The front and side of the building was sheered off, with iron beds, desks and other equipment and personal belongings strewn in the wreckage.

Ammunition stored in the building exploded, and vehicles in an adjacent parking lot caught fire, sending a huge plume of flame and smoke curling for hours into the clear autumn air. A wide area around the site was immediately sealed off by Italian and Romanian troops.

Many of the Italians killed and wounded in the attack had been due to head back to Italy at midweek, at the end of a four-month stint.

In addition to the dead, there were 21 Italians among the wounded. At the Nasiriya hospital, doctors said 85 Iraqis had been injured, 30 seriously. They said the dead included three schoolgirls of about 10 who died in a passing minibus, as well as a 10-day-old infant whose mother survived. At least 10 of the injured Iraqis were women and children.

In Rome, Italy's defense minister, Antonio Martino, blamed loyalists of Mr. Hussein for the attack but presented no evidence to support his claim. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said Italy would not be shaken from its commitment to Iraq and the United States.

An Italian official representing the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led governing body, told reporters 12 hours after the blast that its force left little that was immediately identifiable from any vehicle or attacker. Whether the attack was carried out by a car and a truck, or only one vehicle, was in doubt, the official, Andrea Angeli, said.

He said the Italians killed were 11 military police officers, 4 soldiers and 2 civilians, one a television documentary filmmaker.

Attacks have killed more than 40 American soldiers since the beginning of November, and a total of 154 Americans since President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, contributing to a sense of crisis in Washington as administration officials seek ways to stabilize the situation.

The immediate question raised by Wednesday's bombing was how it would affect the United States' faltering efforts to draw other nations into committing troops and police to the occupation forces.

American officials say 33 nations are represented in the occupation effort, but an American diplomatic drive to draw contingents from Muslim nations like Turkey and Pakistan has failed, and several nations in Europe, including France and Germany, have also refused. Italy's role has been prized by Washington in the face of broad European resistance.

Among international agencies seeking to bring relief to Iraq's 22 million people, morale has been battered by the bombings of the United Nations headquarters in August, which killed 22 people, and the blast that struck the Baghdad compound of the International Red Cross late last month, killing at least 12. Both organizations have ordered all non-Iraqi personnel to leave Baghdad.

The attack on Wednesday was followed by reassurances for Washington from nations that have said that they will send troops here. In Portugal, which had pledged to replace some of the Italian paramilitary troops who were the target of the bombing, officials said plans to send 128 police officers to Iraq were unaltered. But opposition parties demanded that Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso's conservative government review the plan, which has drawn limited support in Portuguese opinion polls.

Poland, which has 2,500 soldiers in Iraq, mostly in the British-led southern sector of the country, said that its troops would stay. The Polish units suffered the country's first combat death since World War II when a Polish soldier died in an Iraqi ambush last week.

For the occupation forces, the bombing was a disturbing change in the pattern of suicide attacks, which have been mainly concentrated in Baghdad and other cities in the central part of Iraq, close to the centers of Sunni Muslim population that were the core of support for Mr. Hussein's government.

But the most lethal of all the bomb attacks, outside a Muslim shrine in the city of Najaf in August, which killed more than 80 people, including one of the country's leading Shiite Muslim clerics, occurred in a city with a majority Shiite population.

Until Wednesday, Nasiriya had been something of a model for the occupation forces. Although paramilitary forces loyal to Mr. Hussein put up a fierce resistance at Nasiriya to American troops pushing north to Baghdad during the war to overthrow Mr. Hussein, the city has been mostly quiet for months. It was garrisoned first by marines, and then by Italians and Romanians. Iraqis interviewed across the city after Wednesday's blast that the occupation forces had been broadly popular, riding a wave of gratitude for ridding the country of Mr. Hussein.

It was a marked contrast to the Sunni cities of central Iraq like Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit, where attacks on the Americans have drawn cheering crowds. That was the pattern last week, when two American helicopters were shot down, killing 22 American soldiers. In those areas, Mr. Hussein remains a hero.

In Nasiriya, the common attitude was grief for the Italians and support for the occupation forces. Reporters were assured that the attackers had to have come from the north, or perhaps from Islamic fundamentalist groups elsewhere in southern Iraq. On street corners, and in homes as much as a mile from the blast where doors were blown out and wrought-iron window grills buckled, people competed with one another to say that they did not want the attacks to drive coalition forces from Iraq. They were also proud of the role played by doctors at the Nasiriya hospital, where most of the wounded were taken, in treating Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was taken prisoner after her maintenance unit was ambushed outside Nasiriya during the war and rescued in a helicopter raid. On Wednesday, many people asked after her.

Italian officers and officials lingered deep into the night outside the bombed buildings' shattered hulks. They said that the attack was a terrible blow for Italy, which had taken great pride in the role its military police had played in Bosnia and Kosovo, and in Albania. "Our policy has been to be quite open, and to have a genuine dialogue with the people," said Mr. Angeli, the spokesman for the occupation authority. "This is a real tragedy."

ATTACKS

At Least 26 Killed in a Bombing of an Italian Compound in Iraq

November 13, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

People ran from the site of a bombing Wednesday at an Italian paramilitary police headquarters in Nasiriya, Iraq. It was the most lethal single attack on forces of the American-led occupation since April.

NASIRIYA, Iraq, Nov. 12 — A car or truck bomb exploded in the courtyard of an Italian paramilitary police headquarters in this southern Iraqi city on Wednesday, killing 17 Italians and at least 9 Iraqis and wounding more than 105 others. It was the most lethal single attack on forces of the American-led occupation since Saddam Hussein was swept from power in April.

[The Associated Press reported Thursday morning that the death toll had risen to 32.]

The bomb exploded at 10:40 a.m. local time, ripping apart the three-story building and an annex that stand beside a broad stretch of the Euphrates river in the center of Nasiriya, 180 miles south of Baghdad. The lightly protected buildings, formerly the city's Chamber of Commerce, served as offices and accommodation for 200 members of the Carabinieri, the Italian military police force, and most were in the buildings at the time of the attack.

"A truck crashed into the entrance of the military police unit, closely followed by a car which detonated," a spokeswoman for the British-led multinational force in southern Iraq said shortly after the blast.

An Iraqi witness said he saw a blue-and-white Russian-built truck approach the building at high speed along a boulevard leading to the river, with a bearded man in the front passenger seat firing at Italian guards before the vehicle swung past the guards and a line of low, earth-filled barriers before exploding.

There were no claims of responsibility for the attack, the latest in a series that have struck at not only Americans but other foreigners and the Iraqis that support them. Earlier targets have included the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Jordanian Embassy.

Hours after the blast, American forces launched a pair of ferocious strikes against suspected loyalists of Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad, signaling a new and more aggressive strategy.

In Nasiriya, the force of the bombing of the Italian compound left a crater 50 yards from the main building that was more than 50 feet across and 10 feet deep. The front and side of the building was sheered off, with iron beds, desks and other equipment and personal belongings strewn in the wreckage.

Ammunition stored in the building exploded, and vehicles in an adjacent parking lot caught fire, sending a huge plume of flame and smoke curling for hours into the clear autumn air. A wide area around the site was immediately sealed off by Italian and Romanian troops.

Many of the Italians killed and wounded in the attack had been due to head back to Italy at midweek, at the end of a four-month stint.

In addition to the dead, there were 20 Italians among the wounded. At the Nasiriya hospital, doctors said 85 Iraqis had been injured, 30 seriously. They said the dead included three schoolgirls of about 10 who died in a passing minibus, as well as a 10-day-old infant whose mother survived. At least 10 of the injured Iraqis were women and children.

In Rome, Italy's defense minister, Antonio Martino, blamed loyalists of Mr. Hussein for the attack but presented no evidence to support his claim. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said Italy would not be shaken from its commitment to Iraq and the United States.

An Italian official representing the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led governing body, told reporters 12 hours after the blast that its force left little that was immediately identifiable from any vehicle or attacker. Whether the attack was carried out by a car and a truck, or only one vehicle, was in doubt, the official, Andrea Angeli, said.

He said the Italians killed were 11 military police officers, 4 soldiers and 2 civilians, one a television documentary filmmaker.

Attacks have killed more than 40 American soldiers since the beginning of November, and a total of 154 Americans since President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, contributing to a sense of crisis in Washington as administration officials seek ways to stabilize the situation.

The immediate question raised by Wednesday's bombing was how it would affect the United States' faltering efforts to draw other nations into committing troops and police to the occupation forces.

American officials say 33 nations are represented in the occupation effort, but an American diplomatic drive to draw contingents from Muslim nations like Turkey and Pakistan has failed, and several nations in Europe, including France and Germany, have also refused. Italy's role has been prized by Washington in the face of broad European resistance.

Among international agencies seeking to bring relief to Iraq's 22 million people, morale has been battered by the bombings of the United Nations headquarters in August, which killed 22 people, and the blast that struck the Baghdad compound of the International Red Cross late last month, killing at least 12. Both organizations have ordered all non-Iraqi personnel to leave Baghdad.

The attack on Wednesday was followed by reassurances for Washington from nations that have said that they will send troops here. In Portugal, which had pledged to replace some of the Italian paramilitary troops who were the target of the bombing, officials said plans to send 128 police officers to Iraq were unaltered. But opposition parties demanded that Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso's conservative government review the plan, which has drawn limited support in Portuguese opinion polls.

Poland, which has 2,500 soldiers in Iraq, mostly in the British-led southern sector of the country, said that its troops would stay. The Polish units suffered the country's first combat death since World War II when a Polish soldier died in an Iraqi ambush last week.

For the occupation forces, the bombing was a disturbing change in the pattern of suicide attacks, which have been mainly concentrated in Baghdad and other cities in the central part of Iraq, close to the centers of Sunni Muslim population that were the core of support for Mr. Hussein's government.

But the most lethal of all the bomb attacks, outside a Muslim shrine in the city of Najaf in August, which killed more than 80 people, including one of the country's leading Shiite Muslim clerics, occurred in a city with a majority Shiite population.

Until Wednesday, Nasiriya had been something of a model for the occupation forces. Although paramilitary forces loyal to Mr. Hussein put up a fierce resistance at Nasiriya to American troops pushing north to Baghdad during the war to overthrow Mr. Hussein, the city has been mostly quiet for months. It was garrisoned first by marines, and then by Italians and Romanians. Iraqis interviewed across the city after Wednesday's blast that the occupation forces had been broadly popular, riding a wave of gratitude for ridding the country of Mr. Hussein.

It was a marked contrast to the Sunni cities of central Iraq like Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit, where attacks on the Americans have drawn cheering crowds. That was the pattern last week, when two American helicopters were shot down, killing 22 American soldiers. In those areas, Mr. Hussein remains a hero.

In Nasiriya, the common attitude was grief for the Italians and support for the occupation forces. Reporters were assured that the attackers had to have come from the north, or perhaps from Islamic fundamentalist groups elsewhere in southern Iraq. On street corners, and in homes as much as a mile from the blast where doors were blown out and wrought-iron window grills buckled, people competed with one another to say that they did not want the attacks to drive coalition forces from Iraq. They were also proud of the role played by doctors at the Nasiriya hospital, where most of the wounded were taken, in treating Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was taken prisoner after her maintenance unit was ambushed outside Nasiriya during the war and rescued in a helicopter raid. On Wednesday, many people asked after her.

Italian officers and officials lingered deep into the night outside the bombed buildings' shattered hulks. They said that the attack was a terrible blow for Italy, which had taken great pride in the role its military police had played in Bosnia and Kosovo, and in Albania. "Our policy has been to be quite open, and to have a genuine dialogue with the people," said Mr. Angeli, the spokesman for the occupation authority. "This is a real tragedy."

Blast at Italian Base in Iraq Reportedly Kills at Least 27

November 12, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS with TERENCE NEILAN

Security forces guarded the Italian military compound in Nasiriya, Iraq, after an attack that killed at least 27

NASIRIYA, Iraq, Nov. 12 — A gasoline truck crashed through a fence around an Italian military police compound in Nasiriya, Iraq, today, followed by a car that blew up, leaving at least 18 Italians dead, including 2 civilians, a British military spokesman in Basra said today.

Twenty-one Italians were wounded and 12 Iraqis were missing or wounded, the spokesman said by telephone.

A witness to the blast said from a hospital that only one, not two, vehicles were involved. He said he was in sight of the compound gate at the time and believed that someone in the Russian-made truck opened fire at guards and then set off the blast.

Nine Iraqis were reported killed.

In addition to the 2 civilians, Italian fatalities included 11 military police officers and 4 soldiers, the Italian defense minister, Antonio Martino, said in Parliament in Rome. Mr. Martino put the number of Iraqi wounded at 25.

Tonight reporters were kept some 500 yards from the compound, but it was possible to see that the building had been largely destroyed. A great deal of rubble was visible as well as the remains of the attack vehicle.

When the Americans took Nasiriya after a tough battle on their drive north to Baghdad, the building, housing the Chamber of Commerce, was used by the Marine Corps as its headquarters.

Later the building, in a middle-class area, was handed over to the Italians and Romanians.

Under the Americans, who were welcome by the local people, security was extremely tight, with even traffic rules being enforced, residents said today.

The Italians were also welcomed and liked, for such acts as handing out candy to children, but they were widely criticized by the same people for being too relaxed in security, both for themselves at the compound and in the city itself.

Checkpoints erected by the marines were taken down, and approaches to the compound were opened, residents said.

Tonight Italian military police and Romanian forces in armored vehicles were trying to clear the area beyond security barriers for fear there would be other attacks.

Security was extremely jumpy. One Iraqi guard who fired off two shots, apparently by mistake, had his weapon taken away.

The force of the blast was felt up to 1,000 yards away, bringing down wrought-iron gates on houses and buckling other buildings. Wooden doors of other buildings were blown out, ceilings came down, and crockery was thrown around kitchens.

The overwhelming reaction of people in Nasiriya has been against the attack.

The Basra spokesman said casualties had been evacuated to hospitals and coalition forces were at the scene. Local Iraqis assisted with the evacuation of the wounded and the dead, he added.

In Washington, President Bush offered his "deepest condolences" to the families of the victims. "We appreciate their sacrifices," Mr. Bush said at a ceremony in which Lord Robertson, the secretary general of NATO, received the presidential medal of freedom.

The blast, which happened at 10:50 a.m. Iraqi time, threw up a huge plume of dust and smoke and shattered windows hundreds of yards away, Reuters reported. Several houses around the base were badly damaged.

About 2,300 Italian troops are serving in southern Iraq as part of the British-led multinational force based in Basra. Nasiriya, on the banks of the Euphrates River, is about 52 miles northwest of Basra.

Today's blast was the first attack on Italian forces since their arrival in Iraq in July. Last week insurgents shot dead a Polish major serving in a separate multinational force in central Iraq.

The blast is part of a widening pattern of daily attacks by insurgents against coalition forces. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the American commander in Iraq, said on Tuesday that attacks on United States troops averaged six a day when he took command five months ago. In the last 30 days attacks had risen to 30 to 35 a day, he said.

An American soldier was killed on Tuesday, and two were wounded, when their military vehicle struck an improvised explosive device northwest of Baghdad, the United States Central Command said in a statement today. The two wounded soldiers were treated in a hospital and returned to duty.

Officials in Italy were quick to condemn the attack and reaffirm Italian resolve, but a large majority of Italians were against the war in Iraq. When police officers were sent to Iraq after the announced end of hostilities there, the operation was presented to Italians as a strictly humanitarian one with minimal risks.

Political analysts in Italy said Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would now face pressure from Italian voters to get those police officers out of harm's way — meaning out of Iraq — but that he would not be likely to yield to it just yet, given the closeness of the Italian government's relationship to the United States.

Indeed, Mr. Berlusconi said that "no intimidation by a bombing will budge us from our willingness to help that country rise up again and rebuild itself with self-government, security and freedom."

He added: "Pain is at this time a feeling shared by the entire nation. But we also feel pride for the courage and humanity with which our troops have worked and still work to make the situation tolerable for children, women, the elderly and the weak who live in that martyred region."

During Pope John Paul II's regular Wednesday audience, the pontiff expressed his most firm condemnation for the latest terrorist attack, which he called "a vile attack against a mission of peace."

President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi said: "My first thought is for the families of carabinieri killed by this ignoble act of terrorism. I express to the carabinieri my complete solidarity. They are soldiers who have fallen as they performed their duty."

An opposition leader, Piero Fassino, said: "It's a grave fact that confirms the barbarous nature of terrorism, for which there can be no justification."

He said the attack showed that more than ever there was an urgent need to transfer political power into the hands of Iraqis, a thought that has been expressed widely across Europe and is believed to be the subject of talks now going on in Washington involving the top civilian administrator in Iraq for the United States, L. Paul Bremer III.

In Rome, the lower house of Parliament observed a moment of silence after news of the attack became known.

Attacks in Iraq have killed at least 154 American and 12 British soldiers since major combat was declared over by President Bush on May 1.

Frank Bruni and Jason Horowitz contributed reporting to this article from Rome.

MILITARY

General Vows to Intensify U.S. Response to Attackers

November 12, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

An assault-team member of the Fourth Infantry Division carried an Iraqi child out of a house early Tuesday during a raid northeast of Baghdad.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 11 — Stung by the deaths of nearly 40 American soldiers over the past 10 days, the top American military commander in Iraq spoke of a "turning point" in the conflict on Tuesday and outlined a new get-tough approach to combat operations in areas north and west of Baghdad, strongholds for loyalists of Saddam Hussein.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said operations would be stepped up against shadowy groups behind the increasing tempo of attacks on American troops in the Iraqi heartland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Those groups have been mounting ambushes, triggering roadside bombs and shooting down American helicopters. He confirmed that the Black Hawk that crashed Friday, killing six soldiers, had been shot down; a missile strike on a Chinook on Nov. 2 left 16 dead.

"We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country where we continue to face former regime loyalists, criminals and foreign terrorists, who are trying to isolate the coalition forces from the Iraqi people and break the will of the international community," General Sanchez told a heavily guarded news conference in the Iraqi capital. He added, "They will fail."

Hours after he spoke, the attackers struck anew with two mortars that were fired at midevening into the so-called green zone, the fortified area of central Baghdad where General Sanchez and top American civilian officials have their headquarters. A third mortar shell struck in an unfortified area to the south of the headquarters in what was Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace, but an American military spokesman said that the volley that struck in the palace complex had caused no damage, and that there were no reports of casualties.

Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many Bush administration officials in recent months, General Sanchez, commander of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq, described what they were facing as a war.

He was blunt in assessing the challenge posed by armed opponents who faded away as American troops overran the country in April, only to regroup, mainly in the area known as the "Sunni triangle," between Baghdad, Tikrit and Ramadi. From those Sunni Muslim areas, the major beneficiaries of Mr. Hussein's rule, attackers have mounted an increasingly sophisticated campaign that the general said accounted for more than 90 percent of strikes on allied forces.

Citing a deadly Oct. 26 rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad, timed to coincide with the visit to the hotel of the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the general said the attack was intended to "weaken the will of the coalition forces" and cause the United States to "walk away" from Iraq.

"It's not going to happen," he said. "We are not walking away, we are not faltering, we are going to win this battle, and this war."

Aides to General Sanchez said the choice of the word "war" was part of a conscious effort by senior military officers to inject realism into debates in Washington. American officials disclosed Tuesday that the chief American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, had left abruptly for talks in Washington.

General Sanchez confirmed another setback for American forces: that the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City, a Baghdad suburb of about two million Shiite Muslims, had been killed Sunday. The general said the mayor, Muhanad al-Kaadi, had tried to drive into an area forbidden to vehicles, then had engaged in a "wrestling match" with an American soldier during which the soldier's gun had gone off, inflicting fatal leg wounds on the mayor.

"It was a very unfortunate incident," the general said, adding that it was under investigation.

On another issue with American political overtones, General Sanchez said interrogations of 20 people suspected of links to Al Qaeda had failed to confirm such links.

Perhaps unwilling to fuel criticism of the Bush administration for overstating links between Mr. Hussein's Iraq and Islamic terrorists, General Sanchez said that while there was no proof, "we believe there is in fact a linkage, if nothing more than ideology and some training and possibly some financial linkages." He said American estimates of the number of foreign-born fighters were "about 200," who "come and go" in and out of Iraq, and that the attackers included "some fundamentalists."

Several times, he returned to what has become a central tenet of American commanders here: that their problems are not a result of inadequate force levels but of sketchy intelligence that leaves them unsure whom they are fighting, the extent to which the attacks are coordinated at a national level, and, if so, by whom.

The general described a stark picture of the attacks on American troops, saying they averaged six a day when he took command five months ago, rose to "the teens" 60 days ago, and had increased to 30 to 35 a day in the last 30 days. He predicted that the attacks would increase still further before the intensifying American military campaign began to curb them, an outcome he said was not in doubt.

"The enemy has increasingly embraced terrorist acts designed to intimidate the Iraqi people, and just as importantly to create a picture of chaos," he said. But, he added: "The stark reality is that they cannot defeat us, and they know it. I am supremely confident of this reality."

At another point, he responded brusquely to a reporter's question that cited concerns among some in Europe and the United States that Iraq was turning into a new Vietnam.

"It's not Vietnam, and there's no way you can make the comparison to the quagmire of Vietnam, when you look at the progress that's being made, when you look at the lack of popular support for the previous regime," the general said. "There's no alternative political structure that the people of Iraq are going to embrace that is connected to this anticoalition element. I think it's just amazing that anybody would think that it's an alternative to go back to that oppressive, brutal regime."

General Sanchez, a 52-year-old Texan, joined the Army from college, American officers at the news conference noted, after his family persuaded him to defer plans to follow his older brother into the Army in Vietnam.

In his remarks on Tuesday, he struck a harsh tone, saying that American forces' determination to "win the hearts and minds" of the 25 million Iraqis with reconstruction programs remained firm, but that so did the determination to meet attacks with full force.

"Although the coalition can be benevolent, this is the same lethal instrument that removed the previous regime, and we will not hesitate to employ the appropriate levels of combat power," he said in prepared remarks. In response to questions, he added, "What we are embarking on here is the absolute necessity to defeat the enemy," in pursuit of which the "application of all combat power that is available to us" would be used.

He defended, in particular, the American forces' decision to call in combat aircraft to bomb targets close to the areas where the Chinook and the Black Hawk were shot down, near Falluja and near Tikrit.

The bombings, apparently aimed at targets close to villages near the crashes, were the first that American forces had acknowledged since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1. American officers have declined to say whether the bombings killed Iraqis thought to be responsible for the helicopter attacks.

General Sanchez said investigators had determined that the Black Hawk was shot down with what he described as a rocket-propelled grenade in a rural area south of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown and the focus of some of the most intensive American military operations since the fall of Baghdad.

General Sanchez acknowledged that the failure to capture or kill Mr. Hussein was a major problem, providing a rallying point for "former regime loyalists."

"Do I believe it is critical?" he said, referring to the hunt for Mr. Hussein. "I do believe that." Capturing or killing the fugitive Iraqi leader, he said, would "relieve the people of Iraq of the fear of his return."

"How close have I gotten to Saddam Hussein?" he said. "Not close enough. I don't know how close I've got to him, but by God I've got to get closer."

U.S. Commander in Iraq Outlines Tougher Strategy

November 11, 2003

By JOHN F. BURNS

Reuters

An explosion on a road frequently used by British troops killed six civilians in Basra, hospital officials said on Tuesday.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 11 — Stung by the deaths of nearly 40 American soldiers over the past 10 days, the top American military commander in Iraq spoke of a "turning point" in the conflict on Tuesday and outlined a new get-tough approach to combat operations in areas north and west of Baghdad, strongholds for loyalists of Saddam Hussein.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said operations would be stepped up against shadowy groups behind the increasing tempo of attacks on American troops in the Iraqi heartland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Those groups have been mounting ambushes, triggering roadside bombs and shooting down American helicopters. He confirmed that the Black Hawk that crashed Friday, killing six soldiers, had been shot down; a Chinook struck by a missile on Nov. 2 killed 16.

"We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country where we continue to face former regime loyalists, criminals and foreign terrorists, who are trying to isolate the coalition forces from the Iraqi people and break the will of the international community," General Sanchez told a heavily guarded news conference in the Iraqi capital. He added, "They will fail."

Hours after he spoke, the attackers struck anew with two mortars that were fired at midevening into the so-called green zone, the fortified area of central Baghdad where General Sanchez and top American civilian officials have their headquarters. A third mortar struck in an unfortified area to the south of the headquarters in what was Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace, but an American military spokesman said that the volley that struck in the palace complex had caused no damage, and that there were no reports of casualties.

Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many Bush administration officials in recent months, General Sanchez, commander of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq, described what they were facing as a war.

He was blunt in assessing the challenge posed by armed opponents who faded away as American troops overran the country in April, only to regroup, mainly in the area known as the "Sunni triangle," between Baghdad, Tikrit and Ramadi. From these Sunni Muslim areas, the major beneficiaries of Mr. Hussein's rule, they have mounted an increasingly sophisticated campaign that the general said accounted for more than 90 percent of attacks on allied forces.

Citing a deadly Oct. 26 rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad, timed to coincide with the visit to the hotel of the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the general said the attack was intended to "weaken the will of the coalition forces" and cause the United States to "walk away" from Iraq.

"It's not going to happen," he said. "We are not walking away, we are not faltering, we are going to win this battle, and this war."

Aides to General Sanchez said the choice of the word "war" was part of a conscious effort by senior military officers to inject realism into debates in Washington. American officials disclosed Tuesday that the chief American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, had left abruptly for talks in Washington.

General Sanchez confirmed another setback for American forces: that the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City, a Baghdad suburb of about two million Shiite Muslims, had been killed Sunday. The general said the mayor, Muhanad al-Kaadi, had tried to drive into an area forbidden to vehicles, then had engaged in a "wrestling match" with an American soldier during which the soldier's gun had gone off, inflicting fatal leg wounds on the mayor.

"It was a very unfortunate incident," the general said, adding that it was under investigation.

On another issue with American political overtones, General Sanchez said interrogations of 20 people suspected of links to Al Qaeda had failed to confirm such links.

Perhaps unwilling to fuel criticism of the Bush administration for overstating links between Mr. Hussein's Iraq and Islamic terrorists, General Sanchez said that while there was no proof, "we believe there is in fact a linkage, if nothing more than ideology and some training and possibly some financial linkages." He said American estimates of the number of foreign-born fighters were "about 200," who "come and go" in and out of Iraq, and that the attackers included "some fundamentalists."

Several times, he returned to what has become a central tenet of American commanders here: that their problems are not a result of inadequate force levels but of sketchy intelligence that leaves them unsure whom they are fighting, the extent to which the attacks are coordinated at a national level, and, if so, by whom.

The general described a stark picture of the attacks on American troops, saying they averaged of six a day when he took command five months ago, rose to "the teens" 60 days ago, and had increased to 30 to 35 a day in the last 30 days. He predicted that the attacks would increase still further before the intensifying American military campaign began to curb them, an outcome he said was not in doubt.

"The enemy has increasingly embraced terrorist acts designed to intimidate the Iraqi people, and just as importantly to create a picture of chaos," he said. But, he said: "The stark reality is that they cannot defeat us, and they know it. I am supremely confident of this reality."

At another point, he responded brusquely to a reporter's question that cited concerns among some in Europe and the United States that Iraq was turning into a new Vietnam.

"It's not Vietnam, and there's no way you can make the comparison to the quagmire of Vietnam, when you look at the progress that's being made, when you look at the lack of popular support for the previous regime," the general said. "There's no alternative political structure that the people of Iraq are going to embrace that is connected to this anticoalition element. I think it's just amazing that anybody would think that it's an alternative to go back to that oppressive, brutal regime."

General Sanchez, a 52-year-old Texan, joined the Army from college, American officers at the news conference noted, after his family persuaded him to defer plans to follow his older brother into the Army in Vietnam.

In his remarks on Tuesday, he struck a harsh tone, saying that American forces' determination to "win the hearts and minds" of the 25 million Iraqis with reconstruction programs remained firm, but that so did the determination to meet attacks with full force.

"Although the coalition can be benevolent, this is the same lethal instrument that removed the previous regime, and we will not hesitate to employ the appropriate levels of combat power," he said in prepared remarks. In response to questions, he added, "What we are embarking on here is the absolute necessity to defeat the enemy," in pursuit of which the "application of all combat power that is available to us" would be used.

He defended, in particular, the American forces' decision to call in combat aircraft to bomb targets close to the areas where the Chinook and the Black Hawk were shot down, near Falluja and near Tikrit.

The bombings, apparently aimed at targets close to villages near the crashes, were the first that American forces had acknowledged since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1. American officers have declined to say whether the bombings killed Iraqis thought to be responsible for the helicopter attacks.

General Sanchez said investigators had determined that the Black Hawk was shot down with what he described as a "rocket-propelled grenade" in a rural area south of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown and the focus of some of the most intensive American military operations since the fall of Baghdad.

General Sanchez acknowledged that the failure to capture or kill Mr. Hussein was a major problem, providing a rallying point for "former regime loyalists."

"Do I believe it is critical?" he said, referring to the hunt for Mr. Hussein. "I do believe that." Capturing or killing the fugitive Iraqi leader, he said, would "relieve the people of Iraq of the fear of his return."

"How close have I gotten to Saddam Hussein?" he said. "Not close enough. I don't know how close I've got to him, but by God I've got to get closer."