- BAGHDAD -- "They are
trying to destroy our history," shouted Dr Zaki Ghazi, waving his
arms in anguish, as he stood by the smouldering remains of a building in
an old quarter of Baghdad that is crowded with small bookshops.
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- An explosion had torn apart and set on fire the tall
houses supported by white pillars on either side of al-Mutanabi Street's
book market, where Iraqi intellectuals have shopped for decades.
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- "I have lost everything," said Munaf Fatah
Mahmoud. "I had two shops with books on Iraqi folklore and they were
both burnt. I have sold books here for 20 years and how am I going to feed
my children?"
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- It was the latest blow to the tottering morale of Baghdad
residents after a week that began with half a dozen rockets striking al-Rashid
Hotel, symbol of the American presence in the capital. The next day four
suicide bombers hit the Red Cross and the police stations, killed 40 people
and wounded several hundred.
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- People rushed to take their children out of school and
many parents have kept them at home all week for fear of more bombings.
Outside a secondary school close to al-Jedida police station in north-east
Baghdad, where a suicide bomber was caught after his car failed to explode,
a nervous-looking security guard, said: "I am very frightened I will
die if this happens again."
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- The explosion in al-Mutanabi Street came on Thursday
evening, killing a tea-seller called Bassim and setting alight buildings
on both sides of the street, which burnt fiercely for hours. At first the
police said it was a time bomb. Later they thought it might be an exploding
gas cylinder. People on al-Mutanabi street were convinced it was a mortar
bomb - and Iraqis have unrivalled experience on what it is like to be on
the receiving end of all sorts of ordnance. One resident even suspected
that, in one of the poor tenements on al-Rashid street, somebody had been
making a bomb, which had blown up.
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- Dr Ghazi, distraught at the sight of the damage, said:
"This area is at the heart of Iraqi history and the Iraqi people's
struggles. First we lost the museums. Now they are letting Arabs into the
country to do things like this." Most people in Baghdad believe that
the suicide bombings were the work of al-Qa'ida or the Arab Fedayeen, possibly
allied to former Baathists. But they also distinguish between the suicide
bombers, whom they contend could not possibly be Iraqi, and the insurgents
who attack US troops. It was difficult to find an Iraqi who did not approve
of the attack on al-Rashid Hotel because the US is blamed for failing to
prevent al-Qa'ida getting into the country.
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- Not everybody in al-Mutanabi Street was despairing. Friday
is the day that the book-sellers lay out their books on oil cloth on the
street itself. Despite the explosion and devastating fire they were still
selling books yesterday. Books by Shia clerics in Arabic lay side by side
with Shakespeare, Dickens and works on the history of Iraq. Often the books
were brought back by Iraqi students studying in Britain in the 1950s and
1960s.
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- Selling books in Iraq over the past 30 years was never
a business for those easily intimidated. Al-Mutanabi Street was frequently
raided under Saddam Hussein's regime in the hunt for banned political and
religious books smuggled in from abroad, photocopied and secretly sold.
Booksellers caught with a banned book were arrested, jailed and sometimes
executed.
-
- But overall the mood in Iraq is darkening as people fear
that they may face years of turmoil, as seen in Lebanon after the beginning
of the civil war in 1975. Paul Bremer, the head of the US-run civil administration,
which is called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), says that nobody
notices the good things the CPA has done.
-
- This is hardly surprising since America has failed to
get a credible local television channel going, possibly because the contract
was given to a US contractor with no experience. President Bush even boasted
that satellite antennae were sprouting over Baghdad, while failing to notice
that the Arab TV channels that viewers regularly watch are deeply hostile
to the occupation.
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- The vacuum of real information is filled with rumours,
which sweep Baghdad in a few hours from one end to the other of this city
of five million people. The rumour, discussed in every street yesterday,
was that the suicide bombers would return this morning and many Iraqis
with jobs said they would stay away from work.
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- * A purported al-Qa'ida leader said in an e-mail sent
before the latest string of bombings in Iraq that the terrorist network
was preparing devastating attacks against Americans during the Islamic
holy month of Ramadan, an Arab magazine reported yesterday.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=459371
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