Where Dread Fills the Air

By SCOTT MACLEOD/BAGHDAD

Jamil Roubayee, a 32-year-old doctor, glances around the emergency room and tugs nervously at the stethoscope in the pocket of his white coat. On one side of the ward lie four elderly men who were rushed to Baghdad's biggest hospital, the 12-story, powder blue Saddam Hussein Medical Center, after suffering heart attacks. On the other side are two ailing women as well as a little boy afflicted with sickle-cell anemia. Because of the international blockade against Iraq, Roubayee says, the hospital lacks antibiotics and other medicines necessary to treat the patients. At least one of the men will soon die, he predicts, and the boy may lapse into a coma.

As conditions deteriorate by the day, Roubayee, the hospital's chief resident, can hardly bear to contemplate what will happen next. Once the U.N. deadline for Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait expires this week, he fears that American and allied planes will bomb Baghdad and that his hospital will be overwhelmed with the wounded. "It will be a disaster," says Roubayee, who once served as a medic in an Iraqi army tank unit. "Doctors are very anxious. You have patients dying in front of you, and there is nothing you can do about it. We hope there will be no war."

Yet the mood in this city of nearly 4 million is that there will be war, and as each day passes, the gloom deepens. As foreign diplomats evacuate their embassies and prepare to fly out of the country, Iraqis wait at service stations in lines 30, 40, 50 cars long to buy enough gas to make sure they can drive out of the city in case of attack. The government closed the museums and moved its Babylonian and Abbasid treasures to bomb shelters. Many Iraqis were putting tape over their windows to prevent shattering in case of bombing. Others are laying in a month's supply of food, getting ready to sit out what their leader has promised will be the "mother of all battles."

Spirits grow darker with each government pronouncement and directive. Officials ordered families to learn safety precautions at 342 hastily organized civil-defense training centers. Some 10,000 doctors, nurses and other medical personnel began undergoing mandatory civil-defense instruction. Officials told the owners of buildings in Baghdad to convert their basements into well-equipped bomb shelters. Iraqi TV showed lengthy footage of soldiers at the front chanting patriotic slogans and saying how ready they were to defend Iraq if attacked by the U.S. The Baghdad newspaper al-Jumhuriyah published advice on how to identify a chemical-bomb attack: there will be a muffled explosion with a lot of smoke, leaves will fall from trees, and the ground will quickly become littered with dead insects.

On the palm-studded grounds of Saddam Hussein's opulent presidential palace, antiaircraft batteries have been moved into position, including two perched atop the triumphal arch at the palace's main gate. Barracks inside the city appear deserted as the bulk of Iraq's army has moved to the front lines in the southern part of the country. Few men of military age can be seen in the city's famed fish restaurants and cafes along Abu Nawas Street. Despite the abundant signs of war readiness, some Iraqis remain perversely secretive about their plans. When a foreign journalist innocently asked his escort whether his family was making preparations for a war, he replied curtly, "I cannot tell you anything. I am from the Ministry of Information."

Saddam Hussein himself put in an appearance at a conference of Islamic leaders, where he promised a jihad against the U.S. unless the grievances of Palestinians were redressed.

Many Iraqis saw the evacuation of diplomatic missions as the most ominous sign of impending war and the possible bombing of Baghdad. Only hours after the failure of the U.S.-Iraqi talks in Geneva, Ambassador Harold Walker and other British diplomats formed a convoy and left the country by driving 300 miles across the desert to the Jordanian border. Three days later, charge d'affaires Joseph Wilson IV and five other American diplomats evacuated the U.S. embassy and left on a chartered Iraqi Airways flight for Frankfurt. Before their departure, an Iraqi woman was turned away from the embassy with tears streaming down her face.

Even senior government officials, when their guard slipped for a moment or two, appeared wary of what the future might hold. Sitting in his eighth-floor office overlooking the muddy Tigris River, Naji al-Hadithi, director general of the Ministry of Information, turned up the volume on his TV set when CNN aired a story about Iraq. Afterward, fingering red worry beads, he boasted to his American visitors that Iraq held a considerable military advantage in the event of war. "During our war with Iran," he explained, "we lost 53,000 men in order to recapture Fao, one small Iraqi town. In the entire Vietnam War, America lost only 50,000. The party that can endure the most sacrifices is the party that will win."

But later, a little after a muezzin's call to prayer rang out from a nearby mosque, he abandoned his stock lecture. "It seems that Iraq and the U.S. are like two trains headed toward each other on the same track," he said. Pondering that reality for a moment, he looked up and asked quizzically, "What do you think will happen?"