Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Mr. Ed]

More on the Baghdad greeting...

Love the last line of this.

Looters Strike as Authorities Disappear From Baghdad
By REUTERS

BAGHDAD, April 9 -- Iraqis looted major sites in Baghdad on Wednesday as uniformed soldiers and police disappeared from the streets ahead of a U.S. onslaught.

Reuters journalists watched cheering crowds sack the United Nations headquarters in the Canal Hotel to the east of the city centre, a scene unthinkable under the rule of President Saddam Hussein.

One witness saw looters ransack sports shops around the bombed Iraqi Olympic Committee building, the effective headquarters of Saddam's elder son, Uday.

Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis said authority appeared to have broken down in the capital as U.S. troops moved in on the city from several directions. He could see no police in the main streets.

He said the only shooting in the city centre was from Iraqi paramilitaries firing sporadically at U.S. forces across the river.

The firing came from around the Palestine Hotel, home to many foreign journalists, but the U.S. military did not return fire.

Two foreign journalists were killed in the hotel on Tuesday when a U.S. tank fired a shell into the Reuters office in the building.

"This has been in the air for days. People have just been waiting for a sign that the Americans are in the city," Oweis said. "People heard the Americans were in Saddam City."

U.S. Marines combed through Saddam City, a teeming Muslim Shi'ite district in the northeast of the capital on Wednesday, meeting no resistance.

Residents threw flowers at the armoured column as it swept past, just three km (two miles) east of the central Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris river.

U.S. infantry prepared to push in from the west of the city.

Oweis said looters drove off in U.N. cars.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/09/international/worldspecial/09WEB-LOOT.html