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AMMAN, Jordan -- Amer Ahmed recalled the television pictures of Iraqi fighters resisting U.S. soldiers in the sleepy port of Umm Qasr, unlikely Arab heroes pinning down the invaders as soon as their boots stepped onto Iraqi sand. Then only days later, Ahmed watched from his home in Amman as Baghdad abruptly fell. American troops were practically joyriding through the storied Arab capital, with no one to challenge them. The dream of Arab champions putting up a fight against the superpower was shattered. "In Baghdad, the Iraqis had weapons. They had an army. If you fought only with your hands,...

THE MARKETS ARE treating the fall of Saddam and the extraordinary history we've been watching this past week as a non-event. In my view, they couldn't be more short-sighted. Let's sidestep for a moment the admittedly fascinating, complex and profound geopolitical implications of the stunning coalition military victory and focus on the one thing that will mean the most to markets world-wide: oil. Relatively little is being written on this vitally important aspect of the conflict, which is surprising given that many accused the U.S. of fostering a war in Iraq for the primary if not sole purpose of getting...

  Sky's Chater in Baghdad ME AND SADDAM'S HEAVIES First light came with gunfire throughout the city.A fat, waxing American moon hung over Baghdad. The armoured wagons of the US Marine Corps surrounded our hotel, writes Sky's Baghdad correspondent, David Chater. The pools of burning oil had been extinguished...but fresh flames were being set by the looters.My last night in the Iraqi capital after three weeks of war.Paranoia punctuated the dawn drive westwards to Jordan.In the outskirts of the city, we passed a checkpoint still manned by the Iraqi militia.Then through the Coalition's surrounding chokeholds where all questions were...

Final Assault I got wind that the climactic raid of the 82nd Airborne's liberation of Samawah will take place starting around midnight tonight, and culminating in an infantry assault across the bridges spanning the Euphrates. The dense north side of the river--the stronghold of the guerillas who had poured withering fire onto the 325 during the first push to take the bridges a couple days earlier--will now be frontally attacked and occupied. This time, the men will be immediately preceded over the bridges by Bradleys and other armored vehicles from the 41st Infantry Regiment, assigned to support the 82nd here....

BAGHDAD - Among the Iraqis who have recovered bodies from shallow mass graves at the country's largest prison is the family of a retired general they say disappeared after meeting with UN weapons inspectors. "We came to this place because someone told us that he may be buried somewhere here," said Abu Haldoon, the brother-in-law of retired Air Force Gen. Engineer Ali Hussein Habib. Habib retired in 1991 after heading a team of military officers in developing Iraq's chemical weapons program, Haldoon said. In early February, UN experts searching for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction interviewed the...

With the Iraqi people dancing atop a dictator's fallen statues, the pundits who forecast an American bloodbath have begun to change their story. Implying that our military achievement wasn't all that grand, they tell us Saddam didn't even have much of a plan to defend his country. Absolute bull. Saddam had a classic 20th-century, industrial-age war plan. But our forces fought a 21st-century, post-industrial war. We have witnessed the end of an era along the road to Baghdad. Every other military establishment and government in the world witnessed it, too. We shall hear a great deal from think tanks in...

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq -Iraqi military commanders, certain they could never counter overwhelming American air power, thought they could defeat the United States by making a bloody stand for Baghdad that would so sicken the American public that the United States would withdraw its troops and go home.</p>

File photo of Arab volunteers flashing victory signs aboard a bus leaving from Baghdad   TUNISIA, April 19 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - After three tough weeks in Iraq, Tunisian volunteers who fought against the U.S.-led invasion forces returned home with haunting memories and bitter feeling of betrayal and hatred."We left for Iraq as volunteers to join the Iraqis who are die-set to defend their country, but returned victims to betrayal by some Iraqi army members and hatred - and even attacks - by some Iraqi civilians," recalled Al-Tayeb Bin Othman, a 27-year-old teacher."Upon reaching Baghdad, we stayed for...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 19 - On the gilded marble tablets posted at the gateways of a score of presidential palaces, it was known as "The Era of Saddam Hussein." Yet in the 26 days of American warfare it took to bring that era down, the hallmark of Mr. Hussein's rule was revealed not as one of grandeur, but of gangsterism and thuggery. On the pediments of his palaces, Mr. Hussein mounted 30-foot bronze busts of himself as Saladin, the Mesopotamian warrior who conquered Jerusalem with his Islamic army in the 12th century. But Mr. Hussein's legacy, revealed with merciless...

London, Iraq Press, April 19, 2003 – Republican Guard commanders turned their guns against Saddam Hussein and his top aides shortly before Baghdad fell to U.S. marines, according to a prominent exiled Iraqi writer and journalist. Saad Bazzaz, editor-in-chief of the respected London-based Arabic daily Azzaman newspaper, told Iraq Press that members of the Republican Guard command killed Saddam Hussein, his two sons, Uday and Qusay, along with other senior Iraqi leaders. The killing took place shortly before the fall of Baghdad. The commanders, Saddam's most trusted military leaders, wanted to spare the country further suffering and destruction, Bazzaz said....

As a guarantee (for Saddams senior Commanders not opposing American forces and laying down their weapons) the United States disclosed some of its agents whom it had planted among the 'human shields' who were guiding the American Military to positions that were being bombed and where President Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Leadership could be found.A brief meeting was held between one of the Central Intelligence Agents serving as a 'human shield' and some members of the Republican Guard during which the latter were handed official written documents addressed to the First Echelon of the Republican Guard. The documents provisions...

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - An Iraqi envoy loyal to Saddam Hussein said Friday he believes the Iraqi leader was killed in the coalition bombing of Baghdad. "I know his character," Iraq (news - web sites)'s ambassador to Belgrade, Sami Sadoun, told The Associated Press in an interview. "The defense of Baghdad would not have collapsed so quickly if he was not dead." Sadoun, who headed the Iraqi Cabinet for 25 years, said he lost all contact with his superiors in Baghdad early this month after a U.S. warplane dropped four bunker-busting bombs near a restaurant where Saddam was believed to be...

On the eve of Saddam's fall on April 9, hundreds turned out in Bethlehem to offer their condolences to the relatives of Imad Humabi, a Palestinian who had volunteered to fight in Iraq and had been killed in battle. Humabi, who had grown up in Amman and was virtually unknown in the town, was rumored to have been an attempted suicide bomber. But as the villagers poured in, most simply expressed their regret that the young man had given his life for nothing. For some in the Middle East, the war in Iraq was the last stand for Arab nationalism....

While the U.S.-led coalition forces were tightening their lasso around Baghdad, a committee of Ba'athist dignitaries was putting final touches to what it hoped would be "the mother of all feasts." Scheduled to start on 23 April for 10 days, the feast was to mark Saddam Hussein's 66th birthday. Uday, Saddam's eldest son and commander-in-chief of his Fedayeen, headed the committee. The festivities were to include a football tournament, the first round of which was held in Baghdad on 8 March, for the coveted Saddam Cup. Professional and amateur artists were due to produce tens of thousands of paintings depicting...

On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, I watched Saddam's statue lurch sideways, and my fingers itched to pick up the phone. But I didn't give in to the temptation. For the past few weeks, my Left-wing friends and I have operated a non-aggression pact, organised around a simple rule: don't mention the war. This is not out of respect for each other's views. It's because we don't want the police to be called. It was at a dinner party, inevitably, that the friendship-wrecking potential of the Iraq conflict really sank in. I have known Gregory since the 1980s; he...

<p>How could Saddam Hussein have been so fatally wrong? How could he have so misjudged President Bush? How could the late Iraqi dictator, with access to informed judgments by his allies like French President Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, not have realized that President Bush would go to war?</p>

An al-Jazeera reporter had to be rescued from a crowd of Iraqi Americans celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime after they turned on him and his cameraman. Nezam Mahdawi, Washington correspondent for the Arabic-language broadcaster, was set upon by angry demonstrators in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, where he had travelled to cover the spontaneous demonstration. Dearborn is home to one of the largest populations of Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims outside the Middle East. Police were forced to intervene and asked the pair to leave following a long stand-off with crowds hurling insults and shouting "Down Jazeera". Al-Jazeera is widely...

NYT online article (Palestinian behind cruise-ship attack caught) originally contained two added paragraphs: ... In another development, CIA officials said Tuesday that their analysts believe Saddam's government collapsed so rapidly last week in part because many of his top aides had become convinced he was dead. Intelligence officials say they still are not certain whether Saddam is dead, but they say that the belief within the ranks of the Iraqi government that he had been killed in an April 7 bombing raid appears to have spread swiftly, prompting many Iraqi officials to desert their posts. ...

When the war on Iraq broke out, the main question that many were asking was not whether the Iraqi troops would prevail over the American army, but how long they would last. The sudden collapse of the Republican Guards took the Arab world by surprise, and raised many questions: did Saddam betray Baghdad to the invaders in return for a safe passage for himself, his family and his entourage? Or were he and his staff killed in one of the air raids, which prompted his military commanders to negotiate surrender with the American-British forces? But if this were the case,...

Iraq: Lessons of Terror Learned by Sean Finnegan   If a man is slain unjustly, his heir shall be entitled to satisfaction. But let him not carry his vengeance to excess, for his victim is sure to be assisted and avenged. - The Koran, 17:33  Like many, I was not convinced during the long wind-up for Operation Iraqi Freedom. There didn't appear to be compelling evidence for action against Iraq in the name of the War On Terror while the terrorists seemed to be active everywhere but Iraq. However, my mind was changed when I read Caleb Carr's The Lessons of...