Bombing Aims to Silence

BAGHDAD, March 31 -- After successive days of pummeling the symbols of President Saddam Hussein's rule, U.S. and British forces have shifted the attention of their nearly two-week air assault on Baghdad to Iraqi communication facilities, wrecking telephone exchanges, television and radio transmitters and government media offices in the heart of the capital.

The shift, evident in around-the-clock bombing that continued today, has marked a new chapter in the emerging siege of Baghdad, spreading the war's impact on life in the capital and on the government's cohesiveness, and, some residents fear, increasing the risk to civilians.

In the war's early days, fierce but brief barrages targeted presidential palaces, government offices and the intelligence headquarters that dot the capital. Most buildings had been emptied of staff, files and equipment in anticipation of the war. The purpose of the strikes seemed less to cripple the government than to signal the impending demise of Hussein's 30-year rule by demolishing institutions that inspired such fear that many Iraqis dared not mention their names.

Since Friday, the strikes have intensified in both their scope and impact, with some of the heaviest bombing this evening.

Cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs have destroyed at least eight telephone exchanges, knocking out local phone service, debilitating ministries and further isolating the civilian population. Repeated attacks on television and radio transmitters have left Iraqi officials struggling to keep broadcasting with mobile equipment. The bombing has unleashed migration inside the city, with some residents fleeing to the homes of friends and relatives.

Although still, on the whole, striking for their precision, the bombing has spread fear among residents that they might be its next victims. In the first two days of bombing, Iraqi officials said only four people had died in Baghdad, even after U.S. forces delivered the promised "shock and awe" with 320 missile strikes. By contrast, in one 24-hour period over the weekend, the government said 68 people were killed in airstrikes. One senior aid official said the number of casualties might be even higher.

Suspicions run deep, too, that the shift in bombing could augur a more comprehensive dismantling of Baghdad's infrastructure, which has yet to recover from 43 days of airstrikes in the 1991 Gulf War.

"It's still a long war, and the targets are hit step by step," said writer Abdel-Amir Rabai, 55, as he gazed on the wreckage of the Bab al-Moadhim a telephone exchange in downtown Baghdad. "We're waiting to see what's next."

A barrage before dawn today left the three-story Bab al-Moadhim, which handled traffic of 25,000 phone lines, a smoldering mess of rubble and twisted steel with metal siding dangling from its top floor. Fluorescent light fixtures swung from the roof, hanging precariously by wires, and shards of brown glass littered the pavement of a bus stop that bordered the compound.

On one wall, a marble plaque hung askew, commemorating the building's reconstruction six months after the 1991 Gulf War. Perched on a bench along the sidewalk a sign read, "God protect Iraq and Saddam."

Along a hastily constructed fence around the site, residents gazed at the cratered building. At the sound of aircraft, they ran for cover, only to return a few minutes later. Some lamented the loss of a civilian building, while others marveled at the strike's precision.

"Speaking logically, they are precise, even if the goal is inhuman," Karim Hassan, a 43-year-old schoolteacher, said. "With all of America's power, we expected the strike to be more devastating, we expected it to be leveled to the ground."

Bab al-Moadhim was one of several targets struck today in Baghdad. The Information Ministry was attacked for the second day, and several sites in the already battered Republican Presidential Palace compound along the Tigris River were hit. Fierce assaults have persisted on the city's outskirts as well, targeting Republican Guard troops and the military buildup at the entrances to the capital.

But in a drive around the city, the most striking change in the landscape was the methodical dispatch of telecommunications facilities. Calls on Baghdad's phones today were answered with the recording: "All circuits are busy at this time. Please try again later."

At the Maamoun facility, across from Salaam Presidential Palace in the wealthy neighborhood of Mansour, the middle floors of an eight-story building were gutted. The bottom floors, built with stone, remained, as did the top floors swathed in metal siding. Next to the facility stood the relatively unscathed Saddam Tower, a spire with a blue globe at its center that is a Baghdad landmark.

The scene was similar at other facilities that take their names from neighborhoods -- Salhiya, Alwiyah and Sinik.

In Bayaa, on the road south to Najaf and Karbala, the telephone exchange was struck again before dawn; the facility had been devastated by a barrage of four missiles on Sunday afternoon. It was still smoldering today, its two stories reduced to 10-foot-high rubble. The bombing ruptured a sewage line, pouring waste into the street.

Two men, wearing blue overalls emblazoned with "Iraq Elec," wandered around the site, strewn with white cables. Slogans painted on the wall read, "All love the leader, Saddam Hussein." The workers kicked at the rubble and declared that, newly unemployed, they would join the local Baath Party militia, whose office was around the corner.

"We're going to volunteer to fight," Ahmed Karam, 31, said.

As in Bayaa, the facility in Adhimiya, in central Baghdad, was struck twice on successive days, leveling the exchange and gutting a barber shop, electrical appliance store and other stores along its entrance. Masonry was hurled into two streets that bordered the facility. A day after the second attack, a large computer was still hanging by cables from a second-floor window.

Many of the houses in the neighborhood were empty, their windows shattered, and residents talked about blocks emptied of civilians fearful of being too close to the telephone exchanges. Those who stayed pointed to the attack as evidence of the danger they face in trying to ride out the aerial assault. Of the three blasts that targeted the facility, one destroyed a nearby house, along with two shops.

The house belonged to Hassan Hadi Suweidan, 27. At 4:15 a.m. Sunday, he said he awoke to the Muslim call to prayer before dawn, in which the muezzin implores the faithful that "prayer is better than sleep." He left for the nearby Abu Hanifa Mosque, prayed, purchased his breakfast of yogurt, eggs and samoun, an oval-shaped Iraqi bread, and headed home.

When he arrived, his house was gone. "The prayers saved me," he said. "I thank God I'm alive."

He said he watched as residents and civil defense workers rushed to the site, where the missile had blasted a 20-foot-deep crater that soon became a pool of yellow sewage, a telephone floating in it. He said he counted his blessings that his 13-member family had already left for the relative safety of the countryside. He then sat down on the sidewalk and smiled.

"It was God," he said today.

In Jadriya, home to many of Hussein's palaces and a cluster of intelligence headquarters, the local exchange was struck by a missile Saturday morning, crumbling a large swath of the building's back entrance. Air conditioners were perched on top of a collapsed roof. Chunks of brick and mortar, steel rods and cement were in the street, and wood doors were ripped off their hinges.

Samir Nazzar, whose family of seven lives across the street, shrugged his shoulders at the destruction. He was safe, as was his family. But he said he worried that with telephones out, water, electricity and sewage would follow.

Iraq's infrastructure is already in a shambles due to bombing in the Gulf War, U.N. sanctions and the government's inefficiency. The United Nations estimated that before the war began, 500,000 tons of raw sewage were dumped into the Tigris, Euphrates and other waterways each day.

Aid officials say the government stored spare parts for the telephone exchanges and broadcast facilities before the war, a move that allowed it to keep Iraqi television on the air in Baghdad, despite repeated bombing of the Information Ministry, the nearby television station and transmission towers. But those officials predict infrastructure would probably collapse within days, if the United States chose to broaden its targets as it did in the Gulf War.

That prospect weighed heavily on Nazzar, as he stood outside the exchange. "Life would be much more difficult," he said. "It will be a problem for me, a problem for my children, and a problem for my family. That would be it."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company