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Posted on 04/15/2003 11:55:37 PM PDT by HAL9000
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 15 - He was here, and then, like a shadow, he was gone.
At the Adhamiya Mosque in northern Baghdad, people have made a legend of the half hour last Wednesday, around the time of the noon prayers, when they say Saddam Hussein appeared in public, in the square outside the mosque, and offered what may prove to have been his last promise, or his last deceit, to the people of Iraq.
"I am fighting alongside you in the same trenches," he told a cheering crowd in the square outside the mosque.
And then, people who were in the square at the time said today, the Iraqi leader and a small group of loyalists climbed back into their cars and drove off. Within 12 hours, American aircraft bombed the neighborhood, destroying part of a cemetery behind the mosque. American troops followed up with an assault on the mosque in which the minaret took a direct hit from a tank round and a shoulder-fired rocket was used to blast open the door to the catafalque containing the body of Abu Hanifa, an eighth-century Muslim saint, apparently in the belief that Mr. Hussein might be hiding somewhere in the darkness within.
But he was not. Where he went is almost certainly the most important unresolved issue of the American war in Iraq, now that even Mr. Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, is under American military control.
Saying the evidence of their own eyes belied the notion, common in American intelligence circles, that he was killed in the American airstrike that opened the war on March 20 or another one on April 7, some Iraqis believe the 65-year-old Mr. Hussein may still be somewhere in Baghdad, perhaps in Adhamiya, which has been a stronghold of support for him and the ruling Baath Party for decades.
Men who joined the Baath Party when it was an underground organization in Iraq in the 1950's and early 1960's say that many of its earliest cells were founded in Adhamiya, and that crucial party meetings were held there in secret. The social and economic makeup of the district - working class and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, like Mr. Hussein and most other top Baath leaders - made it a bedrock of the party's support, these people say.
Even today, crowds gathered in the streets of Adhamiya to praise Mr. Hussein, to deny that he ever was a murderous dictator and to pledge, proudly and defiantly, that if given the chance they would do all they could to hide him from American forces.
"Yes, we will defend him to the last drop of our blood, we will all be fedayeen in the service of our leader," said a man who gave his name as Muhammad Abdel Karim, though hours of discussion in Adhamiya indicated that few men were eager to give their real names or any other information that could help the Americans track them down.
As to where Mr. Hussein might be, the men, and in several cases their wives, said they did not know but if they did they would not be likely to tell an American reporter.
"Saddam Hussein was our country's leader, he was a statesman, and he was in authority over us," Maythem Shihab, the 55-year-old custodian of the mosque, said. "We don't know his whereabouts now, but even if we did, we would not betray him. What right do the Americans have to invade our country and overthrow our legitimate leader?"
In the streets and alleyways of Adhamiya today, nobody could remember any previous occasion, before his sudden appearance outside the mosque last week, when Mr. Hussein had visited the district, other than to disappear inside the high walls of one his many palaces, built in the district about 15 years ago.
But other things about the shrinking geography of Mr. Hussein's Baghdad make the reports that he appeared here more credible. By Wednesday, American troops had seized control of much of central and southern Baghdad, east and west of the Tigris. American success in seizing the main presidential compound around the Republican Palace had forced many diehard paramilitary fighters north up both banks of the river, into the Atifiya district on the west and Adhamiya on the east.
Reporters who returned to the mosque today found Iraqis initially reluctant to say anything about the events of last week. Instead, local leaders wanted to focus attention on the Adhamiya cemetery, behind the mosque. There, they showed the visitors a deep crater where they said an American bomb had fallen on Wednesday night and a cluster of graves where they said 18 people killed in the fighting, some civilians and some fedayeen irregulars, had been buried.
Some of the graves were marked with bottles stuck into the freshly turned earth, with pieces of paper stuck into the necks identifying those buried as martyrs for Islam.
Sitting on a wall at the edge of a cemetery in the hot spring sunshine, the reporters opened a discussion on Mr. Hussein and his years of rule. Within minutes, the eagerness to defend the toppled Iraqi leader appeared to get the better of the Iraqis' unwillingness to speak about what they had seen on Wednesday. Suddenly, one man after another began giving his account of the excitement in the square when, they said, Mr. Hussein suddenly appeared.
The accounts, offered by a dozen men in the next three hours, varied little in their details.
All the men said that Mr. Hussein and his party arrived in three cars, and that the Iraqi leader - unmistakably the real McCoy, not one of the doubles he is known to employ - was accompanied by his second son, Qusay, and by his ubiquitous bodyguard, Abid Hamid Mahmoud.
All the accounts spoke of Mr. Hussein appearing in his field marshal's uniform, and climbing on the hood of one of the cars and making a speech. "I salute the Iraqi people," one man recalled him as having said, "and I ask them to defend themselves, their homes, their wives, their children, and their holy shrines." The man who gave this account said that he noticed that Mr. Hussein had tears running down his cheeks.
"And then he said, `I am fighting alongside you in the same trenches,' " the man said.
But what about all the killing by Mr. Hussein's secret police? What about the torture and executions? A man in a flowing gray dishdasha gown who refused to give his name, smiled indulgently.
"We are only ordinary citizens, we know nothing about this," he said. Catching a look of incredulity from his questioner, he added: "In any case, there are political mistakes made everywhere. Saddam Hussein's were very small."
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