"How would you like it if I were to cut up a poster of President Bush?" demanded one of Safwan villagers, but his remarks were quickly drowned out by catcalls from the crowd around him.
All across Safwan and the vast desert that surrounds it, one startling image after another tumbled forth from the chaos of battle. The horizon, marked by the fire of a burning oil well, glowed orange. Up the road toward Basra, a group of Iraqi soldiers stood before a carload of Western reporters, waving white surrender flags.
A little farther up the road stood an Iraqi tank, not surrendering, with its barrel pointed in a menacing way.
As the afternoon ebbed away and the Marines secured their hold on Safwan, a crazed Iraqi man drove up to the same checkpoint in a white pickup truck. This one contained two Iraqi villagers, both severely burned in the American bombardment overnight.
One of the men, Mishtaq Thuwaini, had suffered horrific burns across most his body. The outer layers of his skin, scorched dry, had peeled away from his legs and curled up like dried paper.
Thuwaini lay motionless in the bed of the truck, groaning occasionally, as a group of Marines did their best with the inadequate instruments at hand. The troops had outrun their medical care, and help was not expected soon.
"Take me out of Iraq," Thuwaini moaned from his spot on the truck bed.
After a time, the Iraqi man drove his truck underneath a bridge and prepared for a long wait. The two men lay inside.
The American and British commanders that led their troops over the border here overnight said they had faced almost no organized resistance. Marines here said on Friday that so many Iraqi soldiers were surrendering that in many cases, they simply took their guns and sent them home.
If the fight for Safwan ended on Friday, the immensity of the job that still awaits the United States in Iraq began to suggest itself in conversations with the locals. Here, the most degraded human sentiment seemed to be the inclination to trust, broken by so many years of state-sponsored betrayal.
One of the men from Safwan who explained this was named Haider, who spoke openly about his fear of Saddam's government and Iraq's isolation from the rest of the world. But he said he feared that the Saddam government would somehow return to Safwan, and he feared that he would be punished for speaking so freely.
"If Mr. Hussein's government came back, believe me, many of my friends here standing around me would turn me in," Haider said. "In Iraq, we have learned. I don't trust even my own brother."
RSS