The Talk Is Tough, but Baghdad Turns Quiet

BAGHDAD —  Everybody in the room at the Palestine Hotel knew that U.S. forces had arrived on the outskirts of Baghdad. In fact, they were about to seize Saddam International Airport.

Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf, in his crisp, olive-green uniform and black beret, was having none of it.

“They are not even [within] 100 miles,” he proclaimed at his news briefing Thursday. “They are not near Baghdad! Don’t believe them!”

He portrayed the Americans as being on the run across Iraq, mired in “traps” laid by loyal troops and paramilitary fighters. “They are trapped in Umm Qasr. They are trapped near Basra. They are trapped near Nasiriyah. They are trapped near Najaf,” Sahaf said. “They are trapped everywhere.”

To which a British correspondent asked coolly: “Are they also trapped near the airport, sir?”

By early today, it must have become impossible for Sahaf and fellow members of the leadership to maintain their disbelief about the rapid U.S. thrust pointed at President Saddam Hussein’s capital.

U.S. warplanes screamed overhead, and from the direction of the airport itself nine miles from downtown came wave after wave of thunderous explosions amid reports that American troops were standing on the tarmac after having won their first battle in Baghdad.

With the Baghdad press corps hemmed in by an official edict barring reporters from leaving the premises without their government-issued “guides,” rumors raced through the super-heated confines of the Palestine about what the U.S. forces were up to.

There were fragmentary accounts of civilian casualties near the airport, reports that a presidential palace had been entered and that the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the western approach to Baghdad had been seized by U.S. commandos.

The news that the invaders were close had persuaded most of the people of Baghdad to stay indoors Thursday, and many more shops were shuttered and barricaded than in recent days.

But on Rashid Street, the old men still gathered for their tea and water pipes in the Hassem Ajmi cafe. A timeless place of dusty benches and cracked pictures on the walls, it was noticeably unaffected by the tides of war rolling elsewhere.

“Of course we are relaxed,” businessman Thaher Jouadi said. “Up to now we live with pride and will not abandon our honor. And when the time comes we will fight.”

Told that the U.S. troops were only a few miles away, he was unperturbed. “It makes no difference to us.”

Compared with the lethargy of the cafe and the ghostlike streets of the center, and with government ministries themselves long abandoned, the Palestine by default seemed to have become for a few days the de facto capital of Baghdad, the only real center of activity in the city.

Although infested with cockroaches, its downtown commercial district location overlooking the east bank of the Tigris had won it the unofficial designation of hotel least likely to be bombed -- and journalists descended on it in droves just before the war began.

They abandoned the more luxurious hotel, the Rashid, which seemed a more likely bombing target, with its mosaic of a satanic-looking George H.W. Bush on the floor of its entryway. It also was rumored to have more listening devices per square foot than any hostelry in the world.

By default, then, the Palestine became the Information Ministry’s new headquarters when the ministry itself was emptied in anticipation of a U.S. bombing attack, and then, indeed, was bombed to rubble Saturday.

By Thursday, the Palestine was the only center of life in central Baghdad as the entire city turned preternaturally calm under a sudden cloak of darkness.

Lights had been snuffed out abruptly, shortly after 8 p.m., when Baghdad’s electricity flickered and died for the first time since the war began 15 days earlier. The blackout had followed a series of distant explosions, but Iraqis who remembered the Persian Gulf War 12 years ago said the outage was more likely a decision by the government to try to make the city invisible from the air.

Gone suddenly were the streetlights that had reflected prettily each night, defining the lazy bend of the Tigris River. The river now looked like a wide, steely black belt, and the rest of this city of 5 million might have well been a desert. Nothing shone except two or three pairs of isolated headlights, the only cars visible for miles on the empty streets.

The outage disrupted -- and augmented -- the normal hubbub of the hotel. It sent journalists scrambling to recall where they had stored the candles, kerosene lamps, jerry cans of gasoline and generators that they had carefully laid in before the conflict but had not needed until now.

For days, various Iraqi officials have paraded through the hotel to make the case for Hussein’s government and to condemn the U.S. and British invasion as immoral. Sahaf was the impresario, producing at various times Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz, Defense Minister Sultan Hashemi and a host of lesser ministers.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri was around, also wearing his Baath Party uniform. He told reporters in one of the hotel’s corridors that the rumors that Hussein had been killed or injured were lies being concocted in the United States and Britain.

But asked whether he himself has seen the president, Sabri answered sharply: “It is none of your business to ask me such a question.... He is well and the leadership are well. They are leading and functioning as normal.”

Despite the sounds of explosions just a few miles away, he and Sahaf continued to accuse the allies of having “illusions” that they were winning. “We shall beat the invaders and we let them go defeated with shame forever,” Sabri declared.

Sahaf left the journalists on this surrealistic note: “They will fail, I am sure, they will fail even to come near to Baghdad.”