NINE
THE PARTY IS ABOVE ALL
Talal Ahmed al-Doori was up early on the morning of April 7, driving through the narrow streets of the Al Mamoun neighborhood in downtown Baghdad. He had heard rumors that American tanks were approaching the city, and he wanted to make sure his assigned sector was secure. Doori was a Baath Party militia leader, responsible for a tight swath of his neighborhood at the western edge of Highway 8 where it split at the airport and Qadisiya interchanges, or what soldiers from the Second Brigade called the spaghetti junction. In more normal times, Doori’s job was rather straightforward. He was to make sure no one challenged or undermined the regime of Saddam Hussein. A hulking man of thirty-two, with a weight lifter’s physique and powerful hands, Doori was an intimidating enforcer with a black goatee and a massive shaved head. He was a well-known figure in the neighborhood, the son of a popular soccer coach. He had also worked as a bodyguard for Saddam’s son Uday, and he had a certain reputation as a man who was not to be trifled with. He kept his neighborhood under control.
But now, driving through the streets with the sounds of explosions echoing in the distance, Doori felt somehow inadequate. With Baghdad under siege by American forces, his responsibilities had changed. They had become both broader and less precisely defined. He wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to be doing. The previous week, for instance, the Baath Party had issued orders to arrest anyone with a Thuraya satellite phone, for fear that spies would relay global positioning system coordinates to American warplanes. But many senior Baath Party officials had Thuraya phones. Doori wasn’t about to confront them. He ignored the order.
There was also the matter of bunkers. Doori was responsible for five bunkers, all of them manned by Baath Party militiamen from his neighborhood. But some of the militiamen had disappeared, and the bunkers were lightly manned. They were supposed to form the core of the neighborhood’s limited defenses. Doori had not been supplied with heavy weapons; he and his men had RPGs and AK-47s, but no recoilless rifles or armored vehicles. The Republican Guards had heavy weapons, but Doori had not seen many Guards in his neighborhood since April 5, when the Americans had sent tanks up the airport highway on Al Mamoun’s southern rim. Doori had not heard from his immediate superior, a deputy defense minister, since that day. He had heard rumors that the minister had fled with his family to his ancestral village north of Baghdad. Doori had heard, too, that a senior Republican Guard commander had issued orders for troops to take their weapons and go home to await further orders. Things were falling apart.
Driving through the streets, armed only with an AK-47, Doori began to wonder why he had even bothered to venture out. If the Republican Guards weren’t capable of protecting his neighborhood, what could he possibly achieve on his own? He had once considered the Guards elite and invincible, but not since April 5. That afternoon, he had been summoned to the airport highway to help shore up Iraqi defenses. But the fight was over, and all Doori could do was help remove Republican Guard corpses from a bus that had been incinerated by an American tank round. He counted twenty-seven bodies. They were burned beyond recognition. They didn’t look like human beings. They looked like something you’d clean out of a fireplace.
Doori drove on. The neighborhood was emptying out. Many residents had fled after the highway battle on the fifth, and more were packing up now. He had received no orders to stop anyone from leaving. In fact, he had received no orders at all. He steered the car down a street that dropped down to a dark tunnel beneath a highway overpass. As the tunnel came into view, Doori saw something blocking the road. He looked closer and realized it was a tank—an American tank. He hit the brakes and skidded. He heard the squeal of brakes from the car behind him and felt the jolt of the car skidding into the back of his vehicle. Doori saw the tank’s turret swivel slowly toward him. He threw the gearshift into reverse, slammed the other car out of the way, and swung his own car in a sharp U-turn. He sped away, anticipating a sudden blast from the tank. There was nothing. He escaped. He was several blocks away when he decided that a few militiamen in bunkers could not possibly protect Al Mamoun from American tanks. He drove home to wait out the war.
Across downtown Baghdad that morning, the city’s concentric circles of defense were collapsing. The chaos that David Perkins had sought to create was reverberating outward from the government complex. It was like watching an onion being peeled. The elaborate series of roadside bunkers that had been dug and reinforced in the weeks prior to the American invasion were emptying, first in the city center, then outward through the residential districts. Soldiers stripped off their uniforms and fled, some with their weapons, some completely unarmed. The graceful tree-lined roadways of Saddam’s palace complex were littered with abandoned green uniforms made of poor-quality wool or cheap polyester and Soviet-surplus AK-47s and RPG launchers tossed into the grass. Some uniforms were the thin, plain fatigues of the regular army; others bore the crimson unit patches of the Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards. Black berets dotted the landscape, still pinned with the red, black, and green metal eagle insignia of the Baath regime. Cement huts where the soldiers had bunked were empty except for tubes of toothpaste and plastic bottles of cheap cologne. There were containers of lentil soup and rice, and stale bread, the soldiers’ daily rations. (They received meat twice a week.) Some of the men had left behind diaries and duty rosters and snapshots of lovers and wives and children. Certain units had received orders as early as March 27 to change into civilian clothes in order to confuse the Americans. Other units had received no orders at all, deciding on their own initiative to strip down and slip away.
Many commanders did not have maps or radios. Command and control was sporadic. There was little unit-to-unit communication and few orders from the party or military leadership. Even during peacetime, Saddam’s disjointed military apparatus barely communicated. Now radios had been banned for many regular army units on the pretext that American warplanes would hone in on the radio signals. The real reason, officers knew, was that Saddam and the senior leadership feared that military units would coalesce and conspire to overthrow the regime. Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units were issued radios and satellite phones, but only for communication within those units. The Guards did not communicate regularly with the Baath Party militia, which had little contact with the Fedayeen, which had only face-to-face contact with the four thousand to five thousand Arab mercenaries and jihadis who had poured across Iraq’s borders to join the fight. By the morning of April 7, commanders had been reduced to dispatching soldiers in cars to find out what other units were doing. An officer sent out that morning by Baha Ali Nasr, an air force general, never returned. Nasr found the officer’s car later that day, destroyed by an American tank.
The independent military units competed for weapons and supplies. That morning, a regular army captain named Ahmed Sardar was trying to mobilize the thirty men who remained from his original company of eighty when a Republican Guard unit appeared at Sardar’s base on Baghdad’s southeastern edge and commandeered every last one of his company’s working vehicles.
At a warehouse facility in northeast Baghdad, General Omar Abdul Karim, who was in charge of repairing vehicles and equipment, had managed to hold on to most of his unit’s supplies. Karim had been told during the last week of March to stand by for orders to deliver vehicles and equipment to units in the city. He waited all day on the seventh, and into the evening, for the orders. They were not issued. The equipment never left the warehouses.
Colonel Raaed Faik was riding with fellow Republican Guard officers on a civilian bus thirty-two kilometers northeast of Baghdad that morning, trying to obey an order to rush to Baghdad to join in the defense of the city. They were to help keep Highway 8 open for a counterattack. Faik was a senior signal officer in the Republican Guard, but he was dressed now in civilian clothes. The chief of staff had radioed an order for his division to fight without uniforms in hopes of mounting an effective guerrilla
war against American forces on the streets of Baghdad. But some officers had not received the order, and they were still in their uniforms. They bickered with the plain-clothes officers over how to dress for the battle.
Faik was disgusted. He took pride in being a member of an elite unit, but now they were like women trying to decide what outfits to wear. They were fools led by imbeciles. Their commanders were incompetent. Sometimes they issued several conflicting sets of orders each day. Sometimes they issued no orders at all. That very morning, Faik had overheard the Second Army commander, Fazi al-Lihaiby, cursing into his satellite phone upon learning that one of his brigades had been ordered to disband pending further orders. “Traitors! Cowards!” Lihaiby had screamed.
The capricious and indecisive commands originated at the very top of the chain of command—the supreme commander of the Republican Thunder Run Guards, Saddam’s son Quasi. During the last week of March, Quasi had issued a new order every day for Faik’s armored brigade to reposition its tanks. Each handwritten “order for movement” contradicted the order from the day before. And each time the tanks were removed from their bunkers, a few more were exposed and destroyed by American warplanes. At the same time, another armored brigade was ordered to disable its tanks—based solely on Quasi’s irrational paranoia that Kurdish militias based hundreds of kilometers to the north might somehow capture the tanks and use them against the Iraqi regime.
Faik had watched helplessly as discipline evaporated. Even as American tanks were moving up from the south, commanders were granting leaves to soldiers who wanted to go to Baghdad to check on their families. With his brigade decimated by leaves and outright desertions, Faik decided that he, too, would request a brief leave to check on his family. He had a wife, two sons, and a daughter in the middle-class Yarmouk district of west-central Baghdad. He arrived home on a six-hour leave on April 5, finding his family safe but his neighborhood under attack by an American armored column firing along the airport highway. On his way back to rejoin his unit, Faik encountered a group of Fedayeen fighters marching through the streets. They were cheering and celebrating, claiming that they had driven the Americans from the airport. They were displaying charred corpses—American soldiers killed, they claimed, in the battle along the nearby airport highway. Faik got a good look at the remains. He was horrified. They weren’t Americans—they were Republican Guard soldiers.
Faik had spent twelve years in the Guards. He knew a Guard uniform when he saw it—even a badly burned one. When he retuned to his unit and told fellow officers what he had witnessed, they called him a liar. They said they had been told that the Fedayeen militiamen were hoisting American corpses on bayonets and that Quasi himself had been presented with the severed heads of American soldiers.
Now, riding on the bus toward Baghdad on the morning of April 7, Faik was convinced he was being sent into the city to be slaughtered. For weeks, the military command had been preparing for a siege of the capital. Faik and other commanders had been told to prepare to fight street by street against American infantry units they expected to parachute in or unload from helicopters. They even named the units—the 101st Airborne Division and the 82nd Airborne Division. Iraqi forces would fight them from bunkers and rooftops and alleyways, taking advantage of the familiar urban terrain. A long siege would produce steady American casualties and the United States would be forced by American public opinion to negotiate a truce. And Iraqi forces would not have to confront tanks, the commanders were told, because the Americans were afraid to expose tanks to street fighting.
But even though spotty intelligence reports were confirming that American tanks were in the city center, Faik and his fellow officers were being dispatched to confront them as if nothing had changed. They were armed with nothing more than AK-47s and RPGs. They were on a civilian bus; their military vehicles had been stolen by officers intent on repainting them in civilian colors for personal use after the war. Faik was secretly relieved when the bus came to a stop, blocked by a crush of civilians and soldiers fleeing Baghdad. The highway was impassable. The officers on the bus decided there was no point in trying to reach the city. Faik agreed. He was thirty-three, a father of three, a blue-eyed man with a sad, jowly face, the owner of a fine home stocked with modern conveniences—a refrigerator-freezer, a color TV, computer games for his children. He wasn’t willing to be butchered in Baghdad for a regime that was collapsing all around him. He got off the bus and started walking home.
Brigadier Baha Ali Nasr spent the morning of April 7 in his military office in north-central Baghdad, awaiting orders. Nasr was an air force commander without an air force. On March 24, he and his fellow commanders had received orders to dismantle their planes and bury them. It was a preposterous order, but they obeyed. Iraq’s entire fleet of MIG-23s, MIG-25s, and Mirage fighters had been disassembled and buried underground. Now Nasr, a paunchy man of forty-two with a droopy mustache, was at his post in his office as he listened to explosions from the battle in the city center. He had been told to await orders to move to prearranged battle positions in the government complex. He had arrived at work armed only with his standard-issue 9mm pistol, but a supply of weapons had just arrived. Nasr was issued an RPG launcher and several grenades. He was a desk officer. He hadn’t fired an RPG since military school two decades earlier. He felt useless. He didn’t see the wisdom of heading into the government complex where, it was rumored, Iraqi forces had abandoned the Republican Guard headquarters, the Baath Party headquarters, and the Presidential Security Services building over the weekend. But if the orders came, he decided, he would obey. He was a professional soldier. He sat and waited the rest of the day.
Inside a sandbagged bunker in north-central Baghdad, Nabil al-Qaisy spent the morning of April 7 trying to find out what was going on in the center of the city. Qaisy was a Baath Party militiaman, a member of the Al Kuds squad, a local civil defense unit charged with defending the neighborhood. He was no soldier. He was a painter and calligrapher who taught art to elementary-school kids. He had joined the Baath Party only because a party card—stamped with the message THE PARTY IS ABOVE ALL—was required for his teaching position at a government-run school. Qaisy was thirty-one, meticulous in dress and manner, with smooth skin, perfect teeth, and the tapered fingers of an artist. Qaisy resented the Baath Party and the demands it made on his time. He had been manning the bunker since March 20, when he was summoned to active duty. He was issued an AK-47 but was required to buy his own uniform. He was supposed to be fed three meals a day, but the money for the food had been appropriated by the local militia commander. He walked home every day for lunch and dinner.
Qaisy had been given no specific orders, other than to man the bunker twenty-four hours a day, except for meal breaks. He and his fellow militiamen—merchants, accountants, office workers—had undergone perfunctory training. They were shown how to fire AK-47s and how to load and fire an RPG. They had been told to anticipate nighttime helicopter and paratroop assaults from the Americans. Their orders were to climb onto rooftops, await a signal—the cutting of the local power supply to plunge the neighborhood into darkness—and then fire their rifles at helicopters and paratroopers. Qaisy didn’t think he could possibly hit anything in the dark with an AK-47. He thought it was more likely that the helicopter gunships would kill anyone foolish enough to expose himself on a rooftop in the middle of an air assault.
But now, lounging in the bunker with his fellow militiamen, Qaisy did not feel a particular sense of urgency. His unit had no radio and no way to contact the neighborhood party leader. Qaisy had no idea where the man was. From time to time, a car was dispatched to drive toward the city center to forage for information. There had been rumors of American tanks in the government complex. But even after three forays, no information was forthcoming. Qaisy could hear the distant rumble of tanks and artillery, but in his neighborhood it was a fairly quiet spring morning. Everything seemed so ordinary. He had anticipated a great rush of emotion and fear when the Americans f
inally invaded. Qaisy settled down with his rifle, waiting for the Americans to descend on his neighborhood—and silently prayed that they would leave it alone.
Just south of the city, near the spaghetti junction, retired army general Juawad al-Dayni had volunteered to help Fedayeen and Syrian fighters manning bunkers along Highway 8. Dayni was fifty-six, retired for the past four years, and streaks of gray were creeping into his black mustache. But as a former officer he felt an obligation to answer the call for volunteers to fight the Americans. He walked from his comfortable two-story stucco home, which was about one and a half kilometers west of the highway, and climbed into a bunker with an AK-47. Dayni had survived the American armored attack along the highway on April 5, but he had been deeply disturbed by the carnage inflicted by the tanks and Bradleys. He had served in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and in the first Gulf War, but he had never seen such lethal weapons. The tanks and Bradleys were remarkable. They were able to fire in a 360-degree radius, and from incredible distances, even while on the move. Their guns reduced some of the Fedayeen militiamen to hunks of meat; their remains had to be slopped into plastic bags for burial.
Dayni was distressed by the way the regime was defending the capital. He thought the highways and bridges leading into the city should have been destroyed to deny the Americans easy access. He had heard from former colleagues in the military that Saddam and his advisers had not originally expected an American invasion; they had expected to delay, to bluff, to negotiate their way out of a military confrontation. But even after the invasion began March 20, Dayni was told, the leadership believed Republican Guard divisions arrayed south of the city would blunt the American advance. The roads and bridges were kept open to allow for supplies of fuel and ammunition, and for commanders to report back into the government complex downtown. Dayni thought the leadership had learned nothing from its humiliating defeat in Kuwait in 1991. The country’s leaders seemed to be in denial. They seemed unwilling to accept the hard truth that the American military was vastly superior and could not be defeated in a head-to-head confrontation. It seemed to Dayni that they were repeating the mistakes of a decade earlier.
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