Loyalists 'still in control'

At the Karkh bus station on Tuesday, near the Ibn Buniyya Mosque, drivers loaded their ramshackle green buses with pilgrims, soldiers and families. The road is open, the drivers said, but two weeks into the war, travellers describe the cities of southern Iraq as besieged and beleaguered.

In conversations with bus drivers, families travelling to and from Baghdad and relatives who have stayed in contact by telephone, stories are recounted of isolated and fearful residents, dependent on dwindling government rations, terrified by relentless U.S. air assaults.

In more candid moments, they complain of being trapped in the middle - between a U.S. attack they fear will lead to an occupation and a brutal, unpopular government flashing an iron fist in the traditionally restive south.

Without exception, they insisted that the ruling Baath Party remains in unyielding control - "at least 90 per cent," in the words of one - with thousands of cadres deployed in green uniforms and Kalashnikovs block by block, intersection by intersection to prevent the fall of cities such as Basra, Nasiriya, Hilla and the sacred Shiite town of Karbala.

"If you take your shoe off and throw it outside, it will land on one of the Baath Party guys," one relative told a traveller here.

The conversations shed light on the loyalty of Shiites in southern Iraq to President Saddam Hussain. They provided insights, too, into the fragility of their fealty.

Residents say the Baath Party's numbers in the southern cities burgeoned in the 1990s - the $15 a month members received was one of the few sources of income in the miserably poor region.

Their ranks have, in part, allowed the government to saturate the streets with an almost blanket control that has yet to show any fissures. For how long remains a question. "They didn't know they would have to fight a war," one relative said.

For now, residents say, the government retains control despite a deep unpopularity. In the past two weeks, the government has played on the deep resentment the U.S. bombing has provoked among residents, the visceral suspicion many appear to have of U.S. intentions and anger over the suffering they endured after they rose up in 1991, only to be abandoned, in their view, by the United States.

Many of the first-hand accounts come from Karbala, a 90-minute trip from Baghdad. Since fighting started near Karbala, two drivers said the intelligence headquarters was destroyed and that shattered glass litters the streets in the heart of the city, one of Shiites' most sacred sites.

The intelligence office was less than a mile from the tomb of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).

Few tanks or other heavy weapons are stationed inside Karbala, but the drivers said that the Baath Party has divided the city into a grid. One of their offices sits 500 yards from the shrine, and militiamen have taken up residence inside Hussein's tomb.

"In every location, at every point, the party is there," said Ali Mijbil, who visited his family in Karbala over the weekend.

Last week, the charred carcasses of six cars sat in the streets, and fighting on the outskirts has forced hundreds of farmers and villagers to seek refuge in downtown Karbala, with its cheap and plentiful hotels for visiting pilgrims, they said.

By all accounts, the bombing has remained intense, engendering growing resentment among civilians as the siege persists. The drivers were interviewed in the presence of a government minder.

"Everybody is in his homes," said Mohsin Udai, 33, a driver who returned from Karbala Tuesday morning. "Some families felt safe because they thought they would hit only the Baath Party offices, but there were close, and they got hurt."

The roads to Karbala and Najaf, plied by pilgrims, are among the most travelled in Iraq. Drivers said Republican Guard soldiers - with distinctive red triangle badges on their uniforms - were manning at least three checkpoints to Karbala.

The road to Najaf has been closed, with the presence of U.S. troops and some of the war's most intense fighting making it too precarious for civilian traffic. The U.S. Army entered Najaf on Tuesday after an intense battle with Iraqi fighters there.

One family tragedy was recounted on Tuesday in a room lit dimly by a lantern during one of Baghdad's frequent electricity outages.

Nijim Abdel Ridda described how, last week, the family of Aida Afus ignored warnings and set out to bury her body in one of the vast cemeteries that gird Najaf - by tradition, an act that brings blessings. They loaded her wooden coffin on Thursday on top of a gray minibus and, with five relatives and a driver, set off at 6 a.m.

Two hours later, near the town of Alkifl, he said, a U.S. missile struck their car. Two passengers were killed instantly. Under a hail of gunfire, the four others, some bleeding profusely from shrapnel wounds, fled the scene.

One of Afus' sons, 58-year-old Ali Abdel Ridda, ran north along back roads for two hours, according to Nijim, his brother. Ali had shrapnel in his knee, left arm and thigh and left a trail of blood dripping behind him.

Before he collapsed, he stumbled upon farmers tilling verdant fields along the Euphrates River. They took him to a hospital in Hilla, where he received first aid. He then got a shared taxi to Baghdad, returning at 5 p.m. to his home in Rahmaniya, a poor Shiite neighbourhood in Baghdad, Nijim recalled.

The driver, Habib Ali, returned soon after. Raysan Saghir made it back by 10 p.m. Muhannad Hadi, the last survivor, showed up in Rahmaniya three days later. They said they didn't know what happened to the bodies of the other two relatives or their mother's coffin.

"They want to terrify the people," said Nijim. "It's inhuman, and any person who has no humanity becomes brutal and savage."

Drivers and people with relatives in cities such as Basra, Nasiriya and Hilla spoke of deserted streets and secluded families, their isolation growing with the bombing of telephone exchanges that severed phone lines.

Iraqi television no longer broadcasts outside the capital, but some families still receive a signal transmitted by satellite. Others try to glean news from Arabic-language broadcasts of the BBC and Radio Monte Carlo.

In the southern city of Nasiriya, the family of Fawzi Malek lugged his body a few feet outside their door, dug up the flowers in their garden and thrust his corpse, draped in a white dishdasha, into a hasty grave.

A veteran of two Iraqi wars, the 50-year-old Malek had ignored the warnings of his family huddled on the ground floor of their house. But when the bombing started, he hurried into a bathroom, away from fragile windows.

Within minutes, he was struck by a heart attack. His son Qusai, 25, called an ambulance, but it took two hours to arrive, overwhelmed with casualties elsewhere and hassled by Baath Party checkpoints. It was at least an hour too late.

The family of 30 considered their options: take him to the cemetery 150 yards away, exposing themselves to U.S. bombing and the presence, they believed, of American snipers.