The day the statue fell, as seen from Cairo to the Carolinas
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The symbol of the end of Saddam Hussein's three-decade reign was met with joy and despair worldwide
By
Danna Harman
| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
CAIRO, EGYPT –
They all saw the statue fall.
The sheikh in Cairo watched it as he poured some juice and muttered under his breath at the TV in the mosque kitchen. The marine's wife watched it, too, over and over again, her heart racing as she flipped channels in her living room in North Carolina.
A thrilled Iraqi expatriate in California held back tears; so did a young, angry Palestinian in Jordan - but for opposite reasons.
A mother of eight witnessed it in Baghdad, not sure at all what she felt about the destruction in her hometown. A young US captain in Baghdad, farther from his hometown than he ever imagined, was certain: It was, for him, "awful good."
After 21 days of fighting, US troops entered downtown Baghdad last Wednesday. Within hours of their arrival, crowds of celebrating Iraqis rushed to Paradise Square to tear down a massive statue of the man who had brutally ruled them for the past 25 years. Others heralded the end of dictatorship with looting - pillaging government buildings, stripping apart everything they could. US tanks roamed the streets of the ancient capital.
The war was not over, and winning the peace had not really begun, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stressed that day.
But for these people and many others - in apartments, houses, tents, and trenches across the globe - the fall of that statue and the chaos which ensued in Baghdad were defining moments of the military campaign. Overshadowed was news of fewer civilian casualities than might have been expected, or more-clinical details of a speedy advance. Last week brought the end many had been anticipating - or dreading - and began to shape how they will view for years to come a US war watched hour by hour around the globe.
• • •
"Come celebrate with us," Sabria Naama said as she woke her daughter Esra at 6 a.m. in Chula Vista, Calif. "They're bringing down Saddam's statues. Iraqis themselves are doing it."
And so they were.
Esra sank into the mauve couch, instantly awake. Like many other Iraqi expatriates across the US, her emotions toppled over one another - there was joy at the news, but profound sadness that it had taken all those many years to arrive.
"I thought of my uncles who were executed by Saddam and of my grandfather killed by his troops for how they yearned to see this day," says Esra. "I cried for them and for the men who died in jails and prisons and troops and their mothers."
"I wanted to go there and hit those statues myself," she said, "...anything to release my anger."
Esra's dad, Abbas, had been up almost all night, munching on cereal and marveling at the images on his TV screen. "This to me is the freeing of 23 million hostages," said Abbas, a former colonel in the Iraqi air force who fled with his family after the first Gulf War. He wondered where Mr. Hussein had gone and where the information minister and all his cronies had taken cover. Was it possible they had all disappeared?
• • •
The first glimpse Karima Selman Methboub had of the American troops came as she was walking on Baghdad's Karrada street with three of her eight children. "We started to cry," Karima says. "You don't know your feelings. It's a mix of shock and terror. You don't know whether to be happy or sad."
Even as looting and lawlessness swept across Baghdad, a portrait of Hussein still clung to the Methboub's wall. It is a symbol to this family more of fond memories of stability and order than of love for repressive dictatorship.
Many Iraqis, in fact, say the image of the falling statue and cheering crowds that has become a media icon in the West gives a wrong impression about their ambivalence about the toppling of the regime. "I was very sad, after [US troops] came and destroyed the statue of Saddam, and Iraqis beat it with their shoes and broke it into pieces," says daughter Amal, who sports a bump on her head a week after falling in the dark stairwell while carrying water up to the second floor apartment.
Many Iraqis feel that a suffocating burden has been lifted from their daily lives. Still, there is fear of the unknown. "I thought all the people of Baghdad would stand like one hand against America, but Baghdad collapsed," Amal says. "Iraqis are welcoming them, but they don't know what America has in store for them."
• • •
Barely out of his teens, Radhi Hamza, a private in the Iraqi army, was nonetheless wise enough to know that when the Iraqi leadership were defeated, he would have to fend for himself. That's what scared him the most. In fact, as the war wore on, he says, escape was all anyone in his unit could talk about. No one wanted to be around when the Americans showed up, he admits, much less be fighting for Hussein.
"We would start discussing our escape even before we said
as-salaam al-aikum in the morning," he recalls, of his last days in his military camp, 25 miles south of Kirkuk. "We never let anyone hear us."
The atmosphere in the camp was fearful, recalls Mr. Hamza. Their commanders were building shelters to defend against US air strikes, the troops were wondering whether American soldiers would parachute into the camp to attack them, and soldiers and officers alike were deserting every day. By the time the four privates fled, their unit - the first battalion of Infantry Brigade 847 in the Iraqi Army's First Corps - was down to half its normal strength of 500 soldiers.
Early last week, Hamza deserted together with his friend Hussein Alwan and two other Iraqi privates. They used extra pay they had recently received as incentive to stay and fight for the regime to bribe an administrative officer for forged passes out of camp. The young men then ducked out, hiding in the scrub until they were able to surrender to a Kurdish patrol traveling by.
The young men watched Wednesday's fall of Baghdad on a small TV in a Kurdish militia office, lounging around in civilian clothes borrowed from the Kurds and musing about their future. "We are glad," said Mr. Alwan, a farm boy turned soldier whose splayed toes and wide feet spoke to a life lived without shoes. "We want a new regime," said Hamza "A new and excellent regime," Alwan added with enthusiasm, "Mr. Bush's regime." Both men said they wanted to go home to their villages in central Iraq. Then, concluded Alwan, only half joking, "...we will wait to see if the American regime has any work for us."
• • •
"Those illiterates! They have no idea how they are humiliating themselves! And all of us Arabs! What a disaster!" protests Sheikh Eid Abdel Hamid Yussef, a high ranking cleric at Cairo's Al Azhar, the Muslim world's highest seat of Sunni learning. Three weeks ago, violent antiwar protests here were stopped only when the police brought in water cannons. Shoes were thrown, glass was broken, arrests were made. This week, the mosque is quiet.
"All those Iraqis capitulating and cheering the Americans," moans the sheikh, "...poor idiots. Illiterates... Shiites." He sighs. He is tired and depressed. "The Iraqis did not invite the Americans in, let us all remember that," he says. "Some are happy today, yes, granted." But, he stresses, "this does not make the Americans liberators. They are invaders. Invaders." And, he adds, "let us not forget what their original excuse was for attack. Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Where?...It's all lies."
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