Happiness and sorrow rose together on Friday from this desolate border village, where some of the first Iraqis in towns captured by American and British troops found the joy of their deliverance muted by the memories of what they had endured.
As hundreds of coalition troops swept in here just after dawn, the heartache of a town that felt the hardest edges of Saddam Hussein's rule seemed to burst forth, with villagers running into the streets to celebrate in a kind of grim ecstasy, laughing and weeping in long guttural cries.
"Oooooo, peace be upon you, peace be upon you, peace you, oooooo," Zahra Khafi, a 68-year-old mother of five, cried to a group of American and British visitors who came to the town shortly after Saddam's army had appeared to melt away. "I'm not afraid of Saddam anymore."
PHOTO: AP
Two years ago, Khafi said, her 26-year son, Masood, was killed by Saddam's men, for devotion to a branch of Islam out of official favor. As Khafi told her story, her joy gave way to gloom, and she began to weep, and then to moan, and finally she pleaded with her visitors to stay and protect her.
"Should I be afraid?" Khafi said, mumbling and wiping her eyes. "Is Saddam coming back?"
Saddam, of course, is not gone, but his shadow loomed less large here on Friday. All through the day, as American and British tanks and troop carriers rumbled through the town on their drive on the nearby city of Basra, the town of Safwan seemed to celebrate the collapse of Saddam's local rule with a glance over its shoulder.
With trepidation still strong among the Iraqis, much of the celebrating was performed by Marines, who tore down every larger-than-life image of Saddam that decorated the town. They pried one loose by tying it to the bumper of a troop carrier, and another by cutting it up with his K-Bar fighting knife.
"Feels good," Oscar Guerrero, a Marine from San Antonio, Texas, said as he ran his blade through the canvas likeness of the Iraqi leader. "I wish he were here in person."
Only hours before, the local Iraqis said, the Mukhabarat, Saddam's security force, had held Safwan in a state of near-permanent terror. Even now, the villagers said, Saddam's agents were still among them, waiting, as they did 12 years ago at the time of the first Gulf War, for their moment to return.
"There, there are Saddam's men, and if you leave me, they will kill me right now," said a trembling Najah Neema, an Iraqi soldier, who said he had torn off his uniform, thrown down his gun and run away as the American Army approached at dawn.
Like many townspeople here, Neema feared that the Americans would lose their will, as they did in 1991, when an American-encouraged uprising across southern Iraq fell before a withering assault by Saddam's forces that drew no American riposte.
One of those people whom Neema pointed to with such fear was Tawfik Muhammad, a well-dressed man who stood a few yards away. Muhammad laughed at the suggestion that he had ever worked for Saddam's government. He was headmaster of the local school, he said, and a respectable man.
"God willing, the Mukabarhat will return," Muhammad said with a wave, and he walked away. A crowd that had gathered round him gave a nervous laugh.
Some of the Iraqis looked on as if in a daze. Others seemed to be resisting the temptation to cheer. A few, perhaps recalling Saddam's many comebacks, worked themselves up into an angry lather.
"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."
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