Iraqis seethe, watching a continued occupation

By Anthony Shadid
The Washington Post

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — The family of Firas Ismail stood anxiously around the corner from Firdos Square, a site made historic by the televised images of Saddam Hussein's bronze statue crashing to the ground a year ago yesterday. Almost in unison, family members flailed their arms as Ismail approached. Then they shouted in desperation. "Get back!" they yelled. "Get back!"

Ismail was trying to cross a street along the square to come home. But on this day, the anniversary of Saddam's fall, no one was allowed close. New rolls of razor-sharp wire, glinting in the sun, encircled the tattered park — a precaution against attacks at nearby hotels or to prevent potentially embarrassing protests.

Tanks stood vigilant with names like "Beastly Boy" and "Bloodlust" scrawled across their barrels. U.S. soldiers had orders to shoot anyone with a weapon, and they fired in the air to warn Ismail.

Instead of helping pull down a statue of Saddam, U.S. troops yesterday tore down posters of Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical, anti-American Shiite cleric, that were hung in the square.

This time there were no cheering Iraqis. "It's like we're in a military base," said Ismail's father, 62. "Look here," the father grumbled, pointing down the street to towering concrete barriers. "Look there," he said, gesturing down another street where knots of edgy soldiers stood guard.

A friend, Raad Fouad, looked on. "We live in a city of ghosts," he said.

The toppling of Saddam's statue was a rare, indelible moment, the lasting image of the U.S. entry into one of the Arab world's great capitals. It was a war tidily won, the government it fought disappearing in just hours.

On its anniversary, in a city still at war, the scene was no less stark. Along a deserted street, toward an abandoned square, residents of this weary city bemoaned the promises broken, describing anger at their fate and dread over what lies ahead.

Firdos Square was again at center stage yesterday — in a city returned to the precipice.
 
"The people were oppressed for 35 years and now this?" asked the father. "It's gone from worse to even worse."

Iraqis have often remarked that they wish they could have overthrown Saddam themselves. The thought comes up in conversations about Saddam's legacy — relentless repression, mass killings and, as a final insult, that he brought an occupation.

"They got rid of Saddam for us. None of us could have done it," Ismail said. "But they should have provided us with something better. Instead we got something worse."

Fouad nodded. It was a question of respect, he said. "The example is in front of you," he said. "Someone enters the street and they shoot him. Is that respect?"

It is an irony many Iraqis have noted in recent days that the first, tentative signs of unity in a country deeply riven by sect and ethnicity have come in the face of a U.S. military that ended Saddam's apparatus of repression.

"By any means, we have to get rid of them," said Ahmed Mohammed, 21, a Sunni Muslim sitting along Saadoun Street across town, swaths of the thoroughfare lined with concrete barriers, its curbs crushed by tank treads. "They lied, they lied to Iraqis. They have done nothing. We didn't take a step forward. We've taken a step backwards."

Yet along the street were the tokens of Iraq's freedom, things banned under Saddam. A Shiite banner hung near the gas station. Drifting from a speaker inside were the chants of mourning to mark a Shiite holiday that begins today.

"They came to overthrow Saddam," said Samir Abed Wahid, 32, a notary public, standing nearby. "Why are they fighting his victims?

"We have to fight the United States. Now this war is not against Saddam. It's against the religion of the people. I'm ready to fight with my family — in Karbala, in Fallujah. I don't care anymore."

Material on the ripping down of posters was provided by The Associated Press.

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