THE CAPTURE OF SADDAM HUSSEIN: It's not hard for an Iraqi to become schizophrenic ...it's a national disease FOREIGN Edition

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: ROBERT FISK IN BAGHDAD
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 17.12.2003
• Subjects: Hussein, Saddam
• ISSN: 0951-9467

AL-ADIL IS is as good a place as any in Baghdad to understand the meaning of occupation. And fear. And betrayal. It's a leafy little road, middle-class in an Iraqi way, educated families living in villas shadowed by palm trees. But when I drove past, the 82nd Airborne were paying a social call with two M1A1 Abrams tanks and six Humvees and a company of soldiers and - here was the rub - a group of armed and hooded men. An Iraqi interpreter for the US forces, his bespectacled face cowled in an Arab kaffiyeh scarf, showed me a photocopy of a bearded man dancing at what must been a wedding, his hands held aloft, grinning at the camera. "We are looking for him," the interpreter said. Several middle- aged men looked at the picture and shrugged their shoulders. The American soldiers were weighed down with flak jackets and helmets and rifles and they were trying to be friendly. They had learnt some basic Arabic and were saying shukran - thank you - each time they finished speaking to the locals. "We've had some attacks here on the Iraqi police," he said. "They are having a harder time than us. One was killed close to here and we want to find the people who did it." And the masked men, some of whom had dark blue helmets and jungle fatigues that looked like Bangladesh army uniforms, stood behind us. "They're the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps, they're locals and they don't want to be recognised. We take them with us to areas they don't live in but there's always a chance someone will know them, which is why they hide their faces."