Baghdad and other captured cities continued on Friday to face anarchy. In Baghdad, Mosul and the southern city of Basra, law and order crumbled.
In Washington on Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied Iraq was falling into chaos, saying at a news conference television images of isolated acts of looting and violence were being played "over and over again" for sensational effect.
"The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase," said Rumsfeld. "Where they (U.S. forces) see looting, they're stopping it. And they will be doing so."
In Baghdad, gunmen apparently from the Shi'ite Muslim community in the east-side slums battled paramilitaries loyal to Saddam overnight, U.S. military sources said. Throughout the day, armed men and youths roamed the streets, robbing buildings and hijacking cars.
"Is this your liberation?" screamed one shopkeeper at the crew of a U.S. Abrams tank as youths helped themselves to everything in his small hardware store.
At Saddam Hussein's military intelligence headquarters, crowds of desperate Iraqis hacked through concrete floors looking for relatives they believed were trapped in dungeons.
But the hope of reaching fathers, brothers, friends turned into bitter disappointment when the cells turned up empty. "They must be all dead, God rest their souls," said one sobbing woman who had been looking for her brother since 1980.
Reuters journalists in Mosul saw no military clashes after an entire Iraqi army corps surrendered and its forces abandoned the city. There were just crowds in a frenzy of arson and plunder, stripping buildings and torching a market.
Looting also raged in Basra, where British troops on Friday killed five men trying to rob a bank. Two U.N. humanitarian agencies said it was not even safe to visit Basra during daylight hours.
Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Baghdad's medical system had all but collapsed due to combat damage, looting and fear of anarchy. It said in a statement, few medical or hospital support staff were reporting for work and patients had either fled or been left without care.
Rumsfeld said U.S. forces were moving medicine and medical personal in to meet civilian needs and were acting to stop looting wherever possible. "They're already going to hospitals that are being looted and stopping it," he said.
A Reuters witness said bodies were being buried in hospital gardens and corpses rotted by roadsides or in cars blown up by coalition forces as they captured Baghdad earlier in the week. "This is going to cause a major problem for sanitation and the water system," a U.S. Army engineer officer told Reuters.
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
