The Eyes of Amal

The blackout signaled a new chapter in a war that would prove surprisingly brief, at least for the Iraqis, who expected (and feared) so much more from Hussein. Now there was more than just bombing to contend with. In the last week of the invasion, a foreign army had laid siege to Baghdad for the first time since World War II. In their seclusion, Amal's family tried to grasp its progression through sounds, glances, fleeting words on the radio, all of them shrouded. Neighbors popped their heads through the apartment's battered wood door, speculating to anyone who would listen on how far the American soldiers had advanced -- the airport, the Rashid camp, their own neighborhood of Karrada. Abu Saif, a neighbor, predicted soldiers would begin parachuting into a city cloaked in dark.

"Why?" Amal wrote, her questions listed in rapid fire. "What's the fault of those soldiers who were killed? What's the fault of the families of the dead, or their mothers, who must be crying over their sons? Why is this war happening?"

As American troops hurtled across southern Iraq and approached Baghdad's outskirts, the explosions became fiercer. One neighbor suggested the loudest blasts were cluster bombs. "We didn't know what that meant," Amal wrote.

'God Have Mercy on Us'

On April 5, the Americans broke through Baghdad's defenses for the first time. The exploratory foray by 30 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles was brief but devastating. The wreckage smoldered long after the attack: burned-out Iraqi tanks and charred troop carriers were strewn along a thoroughfare.

For Amal, a city that had faced war from the air now, briefly, took on the posture of a capital positioned for battle. The numbers of Baath Party militiamen multiplied dramatically, outnumbering residents in the streets. Members of Saddam's Fedayeen, a poorly trained but particularly zealous paramilitary force, gathered under bridges and mingled with groups of soldiers beneath the canopy of palm trees.

The final days were the bloodiest in Baghdad, as U.S. troops advanced on the city's suburbs. As is their tradition, they deployed overwhelming force, often blurring the line between civilian and military vehicles in their way. Hospitals overflowed with wounded, and emergency rooms were suffused with hordes of flies and the stench of blood, dirt and disinfectant. At one hospital, refrigerators in the morgue were breaking down, leaving corpses stacked on top of one another to rot in a warming sun.

"We heard the sound of gunfire, very close to the building," Amal wrote. "Um Mohamed came and said the Americans are landing in Baghdad."

By April 7, two days after the first U.S. raid into the capital, American soldiers had pushed into the very heart of the city, capturing the Republican Palace. The battle was not yet over, but streets that so quickly had assumed a martial air just as quickly lost the spirit of a fight. The fear that enforced discipline began to fade as the government's end neared, its reach receding inexorably across the longtime bastion of its power.

There were scattered scenes of a functioning bureaucracy, most notably the red buses that still, spectacularly, ran their routes. But more common were sights of a city crumbling. Sandbagged positions that dotted the city's bridges and intersections were deserted, leaving the slogan "death through martyrdom" emblazoned across their front alone in irony. In a rapidly disintegrating police state, the police were nowhere to be seen. Highway signs that once directed traffic to Mosul in the north, where Ali was stationed, were crumpled along the median. Even before it fell, Baghdad began to look conquered.

"Planes flew over our building," Amal wrote on April 7. "Each time, we repeated, 'God is greatest! God is greatest!' We feel scared and tense. It is dark, smoke filling the skies and rising up. God have mercy on us."

Inside Amal's home, the urban battle sowed only confusion. No one knew the precise situation in the city. The family listened to the BBC, which reported the fall of the Republican Palace to U.S. troops. Then they heard Iraqi radio, whose announcers pleaded with Iraqis to join any military unit they could find: "Rise up against oppression and tyranny. Draw the swords of righteousness in the face of falsehood."

"What's going to happen now?" Amal wrote. "We don't know."

The hours that ensued were replete with scenes she had never encountered: Abu Saif told them of burned corpses he saw littering the bridge. Amal heard the roar of American tanks lumbering near her home. Her sister saw a U.S. helicopter in the distance. On the night of April 8, her entries were short, in quick succession. Airplanes passed overhead, blasts shook their building and gunfire could be heard down the street. As midnight drew near, the clouds opened up, and in a trickle, it rained briefly. The water danced across an enervated landscape of browns, tinged in smoke lofted by war and fire.

For a moment, fleeting, it washed Baghdad.

The next day, a sunny April morning, Amal woke up to news on a neighbor's radio. The entry was shorter than most. It ended with just a handful of words.

"And so," she wrote, "Baghdad has fallen to the Americans."

NEXT: Life under occupation