A City Braces For Battle

By Bobby Ghosh/Basra

In the fading light, two flatbed trucks trundle slowly up the highway from Basra to Baghdad, bearing a precarious cargo: a pair of Soviet-era T-52 tanks, their long gun barrels pointed defiantly at the sky. Rumor has it that Iraqi heavy armor is deliberately being moved around in full display to allay public concerns about the army's fighting capabilities. If that is indeed the intention, then the T-52s are being hauled in the wrong direction. The folks who most need that kind of reassurance are the citizens of Basra.

Iraq's southernmost city is just an hour's drive from Kuwait. If the U.S. goes to war with Iraq, American forces will almost surely secure Basra early on as they push north toward Baghdad. They will want a continuing presence in the area to keep potentially rebellious Iraqi Shi'ites, who are concentrated around Basra, under control. And if the stories about Saddam Hussein's scorched-earth strategy are true, then Basra, ringed as it is with oil fields, could turn into an environmental deathtrap. "We know we're heading for a disaster," says surgeon Akram Hamoodi, director of the Saddam Teaching Hospital, the city's largest. "We're doing whatever we can to prepare for it. And we're praying a lot."

It's a familiar predicament for Basra. Strategically poised on the bank of the Shatt al Arab, one of the Middle East's busiest waterways, the city has been a juicy target for raiders, including the Persians, Turks and British, for more than 600 years. It was heavily shelled by the Iranians during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. In the 1991 Gulf War, allied forces controlled access to the city but did not need to enter it in strength; the Iraqi army had pulled out without much of a fight. Could Iraqi soldiers turn and run again? That's a prospect nobody here wants to contemplate. "It's not possible," says Hamoodi. "I can't imagine that the army will allow Basra to be separated from Iraq."

So, drawing from long experience and with a minimum of fuss, Basra is preparing for a prolonged conflict. The hospital is building up its blood bank, aiming for at least a month's supply of 100 pints daily, from the normal demand of 20 pints. "The one good thing about the war with Iran is that it made us experts at this kind of situation," Hamoodi says.

In recent weeks, free government rations of such essentials as flour, rice, sugar and tea have been doubled to allow for household stockpiling. Remembering the fuel shortages of 1991, many Basrans are hoarding gasoline and cooking gas as well. It's accepted wisdom that power stations would be destroyed in the first wave of U.S. bombing, so the longest, most chaotic lines in the city are at the kerosene depots, where residents bring every kind of container--from soft-drink bottles to steel drums--to fill up with fuel for lamps and stoves.

The one thing people aren't doing is leaving. Basrans know that the army would not allow a mass exodus. And besides, where would people go? "During the war with Iran, people sent their children to the north, away from the front lines," says Abdul-Razak Mohamed, vice president of Basra University. "But now no place is safe from American bombs."

People here are still talking about Dec. 1, when American bombs struck the office compound of an oil company in the center of town, killing four civilians and wounding 27 others, according to official Iraqi figures. The Pentagon says its forces were responding to Iraqi fire. "Bush has enough rockets to hit every home in Basra," says a homemaker who lives next to the compound. "Why should we bother to stock up food when we're all going to be dead soon?"

Being openly fatalistic is rare in a country where questioning Saddam's invincibility can be injurious to your health. Ask a Baghdadi about the prospects of war, and you will almost always get the official line: Iraq's mighty military, led by its beloved President, will vanquish the foolish Americans, God willing. But in the Iraqi stereotype, southerners always tell it like it is.

In many other ways too, Basra is the anti-Baghdad. It is a sleepy, haphazard sprawl, short on Saddam's favored monumental architecture--and, in fact, on Saddam himself. There are entire streets in Basra without a single depiction of the dictator. Basra's most notable statues are not of Saddam but of such historic figures as the poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and the philologist Al-Khalili bin Ahmed al-Farahidi and of "martyrs" from earlier battles. The most poignant of Iraq's countless memorials is on the corniche along the Shatt al Arab: 100 bronze statues of war heroes, each pointing an accusing index finger in the direction of the old enemy, Iran.

The statues point east, but the next war would come to Basra from the south, the scene of Iraq's humiliation in 1991, when U.S.-led forces drove the Iraqi military from Kuwait. A sand barrier and trench constructed by Kuwait after the Gulf War to prevent infiltrators from crossing over now separates Iraq from Kuwait, and beyond it are the massing ranks of the invasion force. As he peers into the distance in the midday haze, vegetable farmer Shadat Dafeh Hamed mumbles, "I can't see them, but I know they are there." Hamed, 70, lives closer to the enemy than any other Iraqi. His mud-and-concrete house is scarcely 500 yards from the ridge; his village, Khardeh (pop. 280), adjoins the border post of Safwan, where Iraq signed the cease-fire agreement to end the Gulf War. Hamed is head of a family of 32, including two wives, 11 sons and 12 grandchildren. His memories of 1991 are a bit muddled, but he remembers how one morning American troops quietly and swiftly surrounded his village, cutting off communications with Safwan. Saddam's forces, in full flight, were in no position to defend Khardeh.

The G.I.s were not unrespectful, he recalls: "They never entered my home." But they ordered out all the adult males and trucked them to a prison camp in Saudi Arabia, he says. Hamed was spared because of his age, and his sons escaped the punishment because they were all away, in Basra. Hamed says it was five months before the young men of Khardeh returned. In the meantime, the womenfolk and old men had to tend the crops and collect the harvest. "It was a terrible, terrible time," Hamed says, squatting on a carpet in his furnitureless living room. "It's because we know what war is like that we don't want it to happen again."

If American G.I.s return to Khardeh, they will again find it undefended: the village is in a U.N.-mandated demilitarized zone, and the nearest armed Iraqi is six miles away. "We may have to defend ourselves," Hamed says, "like the Palestinians, using rocks." But this attempt at a brave face is betrayed by a weak smile and a resigned shrug. "God willing, our army may be able to get here quickly and save us," he says, without conviction. Does he feel safe in Khardeh? "Our safety," he says, "is in God's hands."