The day the statue fell

[thedrifter]

The day the statue fell

They were the images that defined the fall of Baghdad - the slow-motion destruction of the imperious statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdous Square and the outpouring of rage and jubilation as the crowd set upon the giant bronze corpse. One year on, the Guardian's award-winning foreign correspondents, James Meek and Suzanne Goldenberg, tracked down several of the Iraqis and Americans who produced those riveting images of hope, relief, confusion and revenge

Friday March 19, 2004
The Guardian

The men with the noose
Ali Fares and Khaled Hamid

When the US armour arrived at Firdous Square on April 9, Ali Fares and Khaled Hamid gravitated towards the commotion. "I brought the ladder," says Fares. "We asked the Americans to bring us this rope with a noose. I climbed the ladder myself. To begin with, I was scared, but when I climbed the ladder, the Iraqis started clapping, even the American soldiers. I heard them saying nice things about me. I couldn't reach Saddam's head, but by that time there was no fear. I was sure we'd got rid of him."
In the end, he says, he managed to sling the noose around the dictator's neck. "I felt so strong then. I wasn't scared of him any more. My job was finished and, as the leader of our country, so was Saddam."

Hamid says: "We weren't able to catch Saddam himself, so the statue had to stand in. I was happy. I was proud. I know that even President Bush was watching us." But the pride was tinged with revulsion. "To be honest, I was upset about the Americans coming. Nobody accepted the occupation. But we were ready to be allied with the Jews, with Satan, just to get rid of Saddam."

In fact Fares and Hamid played their part in Saddam's downfall long before they helped to topple the statue. They were both deserters from the Iraqi army. Fares, who is 21, fled his unit, which was based in Tikrit, on the same day that he joined it. His friend Hamid, who is 10 years older, was more organised. His unit was based on the Kurdish front, north of Baghdad. Hamid never turned up. All he had to do was go to the Baghdad home of his commanding officer every once in a while and deposit a no show fee of 50,000 dinars (about $30).

"Saddam was a pain in the arse," observes Fares, a wary, diffident man who runs a tea shack behind the modern blocks of flats that overlook Firdous Square, where Saddam's statue stood. Hamid lives around the corner. A year later, Fares does not regret what he did, but he is not happy with the way things have worked out. It is hard graft in the tea shack. The kettle hisses on the hob and deafening music squawks from a radio, but there are not many takers for tea, and the half-dozen ornate hookahs go unhired.

"We're depressed and we're frustrated," says Fares. "We thought the coalition forces came here for reconstruction, for the prosperity of the people. It hasn't happened. I was glad to get rid of Saddam, but that doesn't mean I like the Americans. I don't regret pulling down his statue, because if I hadn't done it somebody else would have, but if the situation had remained as it was under Saddam I personally would have been better off now."

Fares' complaint is characteristic of Iraqis; high expectations unfulfilled, and an unending affront to their dignity. Fares lives with his mother and stepfather. He wants more money. He wants a car. Most of all, he wants to be able to go and work in Europe, but besides the fact that Europe does not want him, the temporary travel documents that the Coalition Provisional Authority is issuing are not valid for crossing any border.

Since the international bonhomie of April 9, Fares hasn't met any Americans. "Even if they passed me by, I wouldn't wave at them," he says. "They are in the same position as we are. They are scared of us, and we are scared of them."

Hamid, who has trained to be a sports schoolteacher, is unemployed. He is as ambivalent a year after the toppling of the statue as he was at the time. His immediate response when asked how his life has changed since April 9, is to say that it has improved, for one reason: his brother Raed Hamid, an engineer, has found a good job in the postwar oil industry in Basra. His salary has increased tenfold, to more than $150, which supports the family of four unmarried sons and their parents.

I visit the Hamid family house on the day of the bombings in Kerbala and Baghdad, which left scores of people dead. The Hamids are Shias. Khaled says that he was supposed to have gone to Kerbala, but the car didn't turn up. Khaled has a scratch on his nose from their cat, Kuti, who was born on the day the statue fell. Their house is an unlived-in space that looks as if it were offices until recently; the family say they rent it from the religious affairs ministry. There is a suspicious mound of fire extinguishers and old pipeline parts in the garden. The Hamids say that they are just looking after them for a friend.

Khaled talks about his life since the day the statue fell. He occasionally goes to the education ministry to ask if it has jobs for sports teachers, but it says it does not have the money. In October, he went down to Basra as he had heard the British there were handing out back pay to demobbed soldiers. He witnessed a riot in which the British were attacked by hundreds of former soldiers, and they mistakenly shot a school watchman who they thought was firing at them. "It was a hell of chaos," he says, sitting cross-legged on a fine rug.

Raed Hamid, who also witnessed the fall of the statue, is there, too, on leave from his job. "I think our country is like other countries occupied after wars, like Germany, like Japan," he says. "What happened in this year happened in those countries, definitely ... what I need from Iraqis is for them to be patient. Everything isn't going to calm down in a moment."

Khaled says: "The Americans should leave our country, but I'm 100% sure they're not going to. They came all this way. They experienced all that sacrifice, lost hundreds of men and spent so much money. Do you think they will leave this country so easily? No. There will be American bases outside our cities."

Later, Khaled takes me across the road to visit a friend, Hussein Abdul Bari Obeid, whose house was broken into by US troops on a raid on Eid, the last day of Ramadan. Khaled went to see if he could help, but the soldiers warned him off. "They started shouting 'Go! Go! Leave this area!'," he says. "I wasn't in a position to tell them that I was one of the ones who had toppled the statue. There were machine guns pointed at my head."

Obeid explains what happened to him. Three American soldiers entered the yard, told Obeid and his friends to put their hands up while they searched for weapons, took hold of Obeid's chin, moved his head from side to side, and ordered him to take his shirt off and stand facing the wall. He refused. He was handcuffed and taken into the street. Against a background of screaming, weeping and protesting by the family, male and female, the Americans broke into the house and searched it, finding two Kalashnikovs, which they confiscated, although Obeid insisted he needed at least one for his job as watchman at a car park.

"After that, the American officer untied me. I didn't say anything. They wrote some words on my forearm, three lines: the day, the date, the kind of weapon, the serial number. Then the officer said: 'Happy Eid!' And he left."

Later, another US unit came through with a kind of "How's my driving?" mopping-up operation, asking locals whether the first unit had treated them courteously. They handed out leaflets with an Arabic translation of a speech by George Bush talking about the spirit of peace and love in Ramadan.

"Well, they gave me this paper, but they hadn't respected their own president," says Obeid. "They went into my house with their shoes on and they pointed a gun at my mother. That wasn't done under Saddam. We were repressed, and now we're going to be repressed again." JM

The officer
Marine Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman



When the definitive history of the war is written, Marine Lieutenant Casey TK Kuhlman would like to add a tiny codicil on how, inadvertently, a grave insult was done to Iraqi honour on what should have been a joyous day, and how that wrong was set to rights. Actually, Kuhlman is writing the story himself. He says he has a six-figure advance for a war memoir, based on his time with a marine sniper outfit.

At its core will be the story of two flags: American and Iraqi. Both were draped across Saddam Hussein's bronze features that day. Both were invested with enormous meaning because of the gaggle of television cameras in the square that day. A heedless gesture from a group of marines turned into a symbol of conquest and occupation.

Kuhlman says he has the inside story. He screamed into Firdous Square that afternoon in a Humvee, narrowly ahead of a column of tanks. He was with a sniper unit, and had been briefed to expect brutal street battles. "We were thinking Grozny, Stalingrad, street-to-street, door-to-door, window-to-window fighting," he says.

"Then we started looking around and asking where everybody is at. I kept thinking we were getting sucked into an ambush. We were 100% ready."

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It soon became apparent, however, that Kuhlman could take his guard down. He settled back with his men, and watched the scenes unfold. The sky flickered with the flash of dozens of cameras. He watched Iraqis gather their strength to approach and practise their English. He tried to work out the difference between Iraqi local time and the most heavily watched slots on the American network news programmes.

For the first time in the war, Kuhlman was living in the moment. So were the marines. After three weeks in the desert, having been the advance troops of the US military for virtually the entire war, the Third Battalion/Fourth Regiment were feeling that they deserved a trophy of some sort. The great bronze statue of Saddam was the obvious prize. An hour or so after the troops pulled into the square, they hitched a tank-recovery vehicle up to the giant statue of the Iraqi dictator, and were preparing to drag him off his perch.

In their exuberance, the marines handed up an American flag, which fluttered down over Saddam's head. The flag was there for barely a minute, but the message had been registered: Iraq was under occupation. Kuhlman had his back to the statue at that point, but he felt a sudden change in the mood.

"I heard a kind of a collective gasp from the crowd and I turned around and saw an American flag go up and for about a split second I thought: 'That's cool.' And then I thought: 'Oh my goodness, that's not cool at all.' "

Several people in the crowd had a similar reaction. Kuhlman remembers a woman correspondent for a Middle Eastern television company begging the marines to take it down, as well as angry mutters and scattered shouts from Iraqis.

The stars and stripes was already being plucked from Saddam's head when Kuhlman had his moment of inspiration. During his travels up to Baghdad, he had somehow come to possess an Iraqi flag - he is reluctant to reveal exactly where. "I had seen out of the corner of my eye they were already starting to take it down," he says, "but I thought: 'I've got something that should do the crowd OK.' This was going to make a much better memory."

He handed the flag through the crowd. Although Kuhlman didn't realise it at the time, the tricolour was an old version of the flag, without the line of Arabic script across the centre stripe, reading God is Great. The addition had been ordered by Saddam after the first Gulf war, a time when he regularly made shows of piety to try to give some legitimacy to his regime. For the Iraqis in the square, the return of the old flag was redolent with feeling. Saddam's craven exploitation of nation and faith was being undone.

Also unbeknown to Kuhlman, the American flag that had been draped over the statue also had an impressive pedigree. Its owner, Lieutenant Tim McLaughlin, had worked at the Pentagon, and had just left to go jogging when the building was hit in the September 11 terror attacks. From across the Potomac river, McLaughlin heard two faint thuds. "I turned around and looked at the Pentagon and saw what appeared to me to be a mushroom cloud," he says. The next day, a family friend handed him a flag.

McLaughlin treated it like a treasure. When the time came to go to war, he folded it into a box wrapped with duct tape, and stored it at the very bottom of his tank, waiting for the day when he could get his picture taken with it on Iraqi soil. He had tried to raise it twice before. The first time, he was shot at, and the other occasion the flag pole snapped. He was running out of time - and film - when the company commander, Captain Bryan Lewis, came by, asking McLaughlin if he wanted to have another go at putting up his flag. McLaughlin handed it over.

One year on, Kuhlman has no idea what became of his flag. McLaughlin, who is at a marine base in California, keeps his folded next to his books. Both men are unapologetic about the gaffe with the flags. Kuhlman sees no contradiction between the scenes of joy on that day, and Iraq's descent into a bloody guerrilla war. "I think it meant more to the Iraqi people than it meant to us," he says. "To me, personally, it was more of a participating in history moment ... to me, it was just a bronze statue. It wasn't a regime I was pulling down at that moment in time."

But it still remains one of his most cherished memories of the war, and of a phase in Kuhlman's life that is now categorically over. After returning from Iraq, he left the marines and, at 27, is on the verge of building a new life.

Kuhlman was always a bit of an unusual candidate for the marine corps. He graduated from high school with a smattering of prizes, and seemed cut out for college, and a professional career. But in America, military service comes with significant sweeteners - including assistance with college tuition. At the University of Illinois, where he studied structural engineering, Kuhlman went into the officer reserves. The summer after his first year he went off to train with the US navy. He came back convinced that he wanted to be a marine, but not merely for the action-man lifestyle. He wanted to develop leadership skills, to round himself out.

After leaving the marine corps in June, Kuhlman spent the winter working at a ski resort in northern California. Now he is calculating his next move. He has his book to finish. Then he would like to start his own business in adventure tourism. If that doesn't work, he will go to law school.

The events in Baghdad seem like another lifetime now. Some of his friends who stayed in the marine corps are back in Iraq, and Kuhlman knows that some of them may not return. The moment that was to symbolise the end of a regime instead set the switch from a conventional conflict to a guerrilla war. In that sense, the momentary kerfuffle with the American flag, and the symbolism of conquest and occupation, was perhaps prescient. But Kuhlman says that for him, nothing will ever erode the positive memories of that day.

"You can't touch a moment in time," he says. "Even if Iraq were to fall all to hell, it would not negate the powerfulness of that moment." SG

The strongman
Kadhem Sharif



On April 9 2003, as Saddam's regime disintegrated in Baghdad, friends pleaded with Kadhem Sharif "al-Yabani" Hussen to use his famous strength to help them break open safety deposit boxes in nearby banks. He refused, he explains, because there was something else he wanted to do. Stripped to a black vest, taut over his enormous muscles, he took a 10kg (22lb) sledgehammer and drove the few hundred metres to Firdous Square, where the now infamous statue of Saddam Hussein stood.

Wielding the hammer with ease, he swung it at the tiled plinth supporting the dictator. The tiles shattered like biscuits. The rage of years flowed through al-Yabani's arms. It was the first blow against the statue - even before the US tanks entered the square, he says.

"Sometimes I wake up suddenly in the night and I can't believe Saddam's gone, because I'm always dreaming about him," he says. "Saddam sent me to jail. He killed 11 of my relatives. I couldn't control myself ... At that moment, I felt Saddam himself was there. With every blow of my hammer, I wanted him to be there. But if he had been there, I wouldn't have used the hammer. My hands would have been enough."

So passionate was al-Yabani's wielding of the hammer that his palms bled. When the Americans arrived, they tended his wounds. "After that, one of the American soldiers climbed the statue and got the American flag, and at that time I told him: 'No,we should find our own Iraqi flag.' So I brought an Iraqi flag and put it on the head of the statue."

Hussen is known in Baghdad as "al-Yabani", "the Japanese", because of his skill with Japanese motorcycles. Bikes are a large part of his life; the other part is wrestling and bodybuilding. He is a strongman, deputy coach of the Iraqi national wrestling team. He is also a bit of a dandy. When I turn up unannounced at his bike garage in a Baghdad backstreet he is wearing a white bomber jacket and white trousers.

Gradually, after April 9, Hussen became pleasantly aware of the way television and newspapers around the world had turned his actions into part of a sacramental event. He shows me a sheaf of cuttings from English language news magazines showing his face creased in effort as he swings his hammer. He describes how an American raid on his garage, hunting for weapons, turned friendly when the US commander discovered he had helped to pull down the statue. The commander got his men to take a picture of him with al-Yabani.

Up to the moment of the toppling of the statue, al-Yabani's relationship with Saddam's family was long and intimate. Less with Saddam himself, to be precise, than with the deposed president's late son, Uday, the violent, sadistic murderer, who first achieved infamy in 1988 for beating his father's food-taster to death. As a world-class wrestler and weightlifter, al-Yabani endured the wrath and whims of Uday's leadership of Iraqi sports. Every time the team did badly, they would return to have their heads and eyebrows shaved on Uday's orders. On at least one occasion, they were put in prison.

As a champion bodybuilder, al-Yabani became Uday's personal trainer. He helped to design a gym for him - "the best gym in the Middle East," says al-Yabani, worth a million dollars. With doctors, he drew up a course of weights and diet supplements for Uday, to build up his arms, shoulders and chest. According to al-Yabani, Uday spent a quarter of a million dollars on muscle-building pills, which, he claims, included anabolic steroids. "Steroids affected him," says al-Yabani. "He became an addict. The doctors said he should not mix alcohol and steroids, but he did and it drove him mad. He was trying to be a hero by taking more and more tablets. But he failed."

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The two men had a shared passion for powerful motorbikes. Uday had a big collection, and al-Yabani used to service them. After the most serious of a sequence of assassination attempts on Uday, in...

[thedrifter]

The day the statue fell (part two) <br />
<br />
They were the images that defined the fall of Baghdad - the slow-motion destruction of the imperious statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdous Square and the...

[thedrifter]

Lambert's memories of that day are overlaid with images of his journey from Kuwait. Almost every day was a battle. The third battalion/fourth marines lost men, including an entire tank crew. A day or two before, he had his own close call when two missiles slammed into the dust on either side of his vehicle, spitting up dust and debris. Lambert was stuck in that cloud for what felt like an eternity, waiting for the next missile to hit, before he was able to move.

It's not easy for him to tell the story of those days. Lambert stops often, and gulps for air. He makes no mention of his own role, though he has every reason to be proud. Last week, at his base in Yakima, Washington state, Lambert received a commendation for valour during wartime. As maintenance chief for company B, he put a tank back on its tracks again by improvising spare parts out of an MRE (meal ready to eat) packet and cardboard - all while under enemy fire. The citation calls it a "heroic achievement".

But Lambert's pride is tempered with grief. "I feel what we did that day did not compare to the three weeks of us trying to get there," he says. "We fought and we bled, and some people died every day all the way up to that day and I just believe: why should that day be seen as greater than any other day for my guys that were actually out there doing the fighting?"

He says nothing in his life compares with the experience of those days - and Lambert has lived through an enormous amount in his 36 years. He grew up poor in the Colorado Rockies, the son of a car mechanic. His father could never quite earn enough for his five children; Lambert got his first after-school job, as a dishwasher, when he was about 12 years old.

When the Lambert boys reached high school, they made the choices poor Americans often do. The eldest Lambert son joined the army straight out of high school, the second joined the airforce, and Leon became a marine.

It wasn't only the money. Lambert had had options - an athletics scholarship to an Oklahoma college. But he partied too hard, and he could feel himself drifting. Four years in the marines would put him on the straight and narrow, he decided.

He has been in the service for 17 years. The war started on his 10th wedding anniversary - an ironic coincidence given that his wife refuses to believe that he will ever retire. At the time, he never imagined it would be worse than anything else life had dealt him. Within the space of a few years, he and his wife, Denise Irons-Lambert, suffered three miscarriages, and the death of three parents between them. When it came time to ship out to Iraq, Lambert had had so many dealings with death, he couldn't bring himself to make a will - although it is standard procedure before a deployment.

"It had been very rough," he says. "Even before the word came out that we were leaving for Iraq, we had been through so much and through so many tough times that this was just another notch in our belts." He laughs now to think how wrong that was.

By the time Lambert's M-88 tank-recovery vehicle rolled into Firdous Square on April 9 after sweeping up through the southern fringes of Baghdad, his mood was oscillating rapidly between fear and elation. The elation was winning. "I radioed to my executive officer," he says. "I was just messing around with him and I said over the radio: 'Hey, sir, we got the statue over there. Can we go knock it down?' And he said: 'No, Gunny, that's not what we are here for. We are not here for the destruction of property'."

But some Iraqis in the crowd had a similar idea. One, whom Lambert remembers as a fairly large man, came up to ask for help. Lambert, under orders, had to turn him down, but from his M-88 vehicle, he handed over a sledgehammer and some rope.

As many as 50 men threw their weight on the rope looped around Saddam's neck, others flailed at the statue's base. The statue remained unharmed. After about an hour, Lam bert's captain came over, and put him on notice. Orders had come that the statue was to be taken down. "I said, 'Roger that, sir. Give me about five minutes.'"

Lambert moved his vehicle closer to the statue. High up in the Pentagon, others might have been thinking of the propaganda power of that moment; Lambert's concerns were far more immediate. He feared that he and his vehicle were becoming a target for any potential Iraqi snipers in the area. He was also worried at the prospect of six metres of bronze tumbling off its plinth into a heaving crowd of civilians, or of a broken cable scything through them.

It would take some ingenuity to get the job done safely.

With his mind thus preoccupied, Lambert was only dimly aware of the scenes taking place only a few metres above his head. His rigger, Corporal Edward Chin, had scaled the mast of the marine recovery vehicle to connect a cable from the M-88 to the statue's neck. So had another marine, Staff Sergeant Dave Sutherland. While Lambert calculated angles of fall and cable strengths, an American flag was draped over the statue's head. A minute later, it was removed, and replaced with an old Iraqi flag from before the first Gulf war.

Moments later, Lambert got the go-ahead from Lt-Colonel Bryan McCoy, the ranking officer in the square that day. Lambert had the driver throttle up the engine in expectation of a heavy load, and started reeling in the cable. "I was afraid because the cable was wrapped around the head that it was going to break in half," he says. He had no choice but to finish Saddam off. He cleared the square and put the vehicle in reverse, hoisting Saddam off his metallic shins. "That's when it actually fell," he says.

The result was pandemonium. "People had such hatred and anger for this man that, literally before I could take the chain off the statue, they started beating it with the soles of shoes, and they took the sledgehammer and were flailing at it. They were literally tearing apart the statue with their bare hands, and I am talking bronze metal, and all this is is a symbol of him."

The scenes convinced Lambert. America had been right to go to war.

By last June, his own part in the invasion was over, and Lambert went home to await the birth of his first son, also called Leon. He will definitely tell Leon Jr about the Iraq war one day, and show him the tiny piece of metal that is his souvenir of the statue.

For Lambert, it remains a proud moment, but he is equally aware that his son's generation may have a different view of those hours in Firdous Square. "I don't know how my daughter or son are going to perceive it 20 years from now. I know that one day it is going to be in the history books, but how will it be in the history books?" he says. "There is still so much controversy going on right now, so many allegations, so much stuff still happening over there in Iraq that I don't think this page of history is done being written yet." SG

The Sculptor
Khaled Izzat



Sitting at home, Khaled Izzat watched live on satellite television as US troops and Iraqis tore down his 5m statue of the dictator Saddam Hussein on Firdous Square. The moment will be replayed on the screens of the world for generations. Few artists achieve such immortality. I ask Izzat what he felt when he saw his work being destroyed. "I felt nothing," he says.

Izzat is 66, although he seems younger. When I first meet him, in the courtyard of a private gallery near Baghdad's art school, he looks like some German intellectual lion of the 1960s, frozen in time, with his Günter Grass moustache, curly hair touching the collar of his black polo neck, and teal-green blazer with a foppish satin handkerchief folded in the breast pocket. "I expected that when the regime changed, these statues would be brought down," he says. "But I thought they would put them in a museum, at least."

Izzat did not go down to the square on the day they destroyed his statue. He seems like a man in a state of shock. He says he doesn't know what happened to the pieces, although he has had offers from shady individuals to recreate parts of the statue for sale to collectors. "I'm from the realistic school," he says. "I don't believe in surrealism." What did Saddam think? "He didn't believe in modern art. He was a realistic person."

We sit in the large, European-style living room of Izzat's comfortable bungalow in Baghdad on a morning in March. There are red plush chairs, and the walls are lined with paintings and sculptures by Izzat and his friends.

Saddam did not sit for the Firdous Square monument, a commission from the municipality of Baghdad in 1992. Instead, Izzat used a photograph to fashion his stiff tribute to the tyrant. But he knew him. Saddam would often visit his studio to deliver critiques of his work. Izzat met him most recently in 2002. His first encounter with the dictator as art critic came in 1983, when, with the Iran-Iraq war in full flow, Izzat was commissioned to sculpt a monument to a young bride killed by Iranian bombardment in the border town of Mendali.

"I'd finished the model," says Izzat. "It was a statue of the whole bride. But when Saddam came and saw it, he said: 'Look, the bride was killed in a bombing raid. Her hands and legs were cut off. Why are you showing the woman whole?' So I changed the model."

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It is difficult to get Izzat to talk about how he thought of himself then - artist, regime hack - or what he thought about Saddam. He claims that he lost money on the Firdous Square monument because he took the blame for a worker's accident that damaged the first attempt at casting. But he does not deny that he made good money out of glorifying Saddam. "As an artist, when you're finished, you're going to be happy when you see your work on the plinth. I'm not a politician. My only aim was to work. I was always busy. Our relations with the president were good."

Izzat is still getting a pension of about $27 a month. The family is clearly not in want. I sense Izzat is unhappy about the US occupation, but he does not like to say so directly. He seems a little frightened. He does not want to talk about his former subject's crimes. "If Saddam made mistakes, he should have been toppled peacefully," he says vaguely. "I don't have any specific information about him. Was he a problem?"

I arrive at Izzat's home just as news is coming in of the carnage caused by bombs among pilgrims in Karbala and Kadhimiya. Kadhimiya is a few miles away; close enough to hear the dull boom of the blasts, but they are common enough in Baghdad. "You see?" says Izzat as we walk from the front gate past a yellowing lawn to his front door. "The war continued."

Izzat suffered the humiliation of having to buy back some of his sculptures from looters after they were plundered from the national museum. He points to a large wooden object like something from a trendy 1970s salad set. It's called "Dancing Woman". He paid the looters the equivalent of $50 to ransom it, and intends to give it back to the museum.

Now that the warm weather has returned, the old artists sit out on white plastic garden chairs in the little garden in front of the gallery, drinking tea and coffee and chatting. One day, the gallery owner, Qassem al Sabti Hewar, brings in an old oil lamp he has found. Everyone starts making jokes about Aladdin.

"Where's the genie?" says Izzat.

"The looters looted it," says Hewar.

"Those days are gone," says Izzat, without conviction. "We're going to start a new life."

"The greatest favour given us by God is forgetfulness," says Hewar. "If you're able to forget all the terrible things that have happened, you should be honoured. There should be a medal of forgetting." JM

One year on



Firdous Square is quiet now. In a city whose world image is one of district-to-district traffic jams, bombs, shootings, hysterical crowds shoving stretchers into ambulances, frenzied dealing in consumer goods, and US soldiers, armoured to anonymity like imperial stormtroopers in Star Wars, the square is a backwater.

It is not a meeting place. You seldom see people sitting and chatting there. A small amount of traffic flows around it, and moneychangers have set up stalls around the edge, but the square itself is largely deserted. Weeds grow through the gaps in the paving stones.

The gap left by the extraction of Saddam has been filled. A consortium of Iraqi artists, the Najeen group, took it on themselves to deposit on the vacant plinth a curious monument made of gypsum and painted a violent shade of green. Basim Hamad's work is intended to represent hope, the Tigris, the Euphrates, Islamic civilisation, the Sumerians, and the family, but from most angles it looks like a great sagging pudding, with horns.

The square was never much of a focal point. Only a few modern blocks of flats overlook it directly; most of the small crowd that entered the square on April 9, 2003 was from streets a little further away.

One of the reasons the square is so quiet is that it is partially blocked off. One road from the square leads down to the Tigris embankment and the rows of fish restaurants, now shut, that used to thrive there. It goes past the two hotels, the Palestine and the Sheraton, where the foreign journalists who spent the war in Baghdad were concentrated.

Soon after they arrived, the Americans barricaded that road and began controlling access to it by Iraqis. The barricade has grown steadily thicker, higher and stronger, until now all that can be seen is a solid barrier of concrete, with razor wire curling around it, and beyond that, a tank and the dim blobs that are the heads of US military guards at their posts.

Most of the journalists have moved to other parts of Baghdad now, but on April 9 the two hotels were packed with them. Dozens of TV stations, including the big US networks and the BBC, had live broadcast positions on a cascade of roofs on different levels overlooking the square. From the ground, they were a curious sight: dozens of nodding, gesturing figures stacked in pools of arc lights, telling the world that the Americans had arrived, Saddam was finished and the war was over.

Talking to ordinary Iraqis now, it is striking how none of them gets the chance to meet the American occupiers as human beings, only as helmeted violators, who raid their houses, or as distant, forbidding ghosts, frightened and frightening.

There was an implicit contract in the US military's blitzkrieg of Baghdad a year ago; that they were driving, through miles of sand and blood, to attain a rendezvous with the Iraqi people, to be able to shake the Iraqis' hands and tell them that they were free. Yet the real rendezvous, on April 9, was between the invading troops and the resident foreign media. The other rendezvous, the meeting of America and Iraq, has yet to take place. JM

· Guardian Films' extraordinary film about the characters involved appeared on Channel 4 News last night. Distributed by the PA. Contact Scott White Tel: 020-7963 7423

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1173123,00.html

Ellie