The U.S. invasion of Iraq began 10 years ago Tuesday.
The ferocity of the American attack in 2003 took many Iraqis by surprise.
Across the country, regime propaganda and media blackouts had made it difficult for Iraqis to get a sense of how massive the force gathering at their borders was in the months before the invasion.
And many inside Iraq believed up to the end that a last-minute political solution would allow the crisis to stop short of all-out war. Perhaps some punitive airstrikes would lead to the return of UN inspectors, many Iraqis thought. And surely the Americans were not seriously considering coming all the way to Baghdad…
This is the way many Iraqis thought. They were not naïve. Saddam Hussein and the United States had a history of anti-climactic standoffs, and both the Bush Administration and the regime in Baghdad fostered a perception, publicly, that war could be avoided. We know now, of course, that the Bush Administration was bent on invasion and occupation.
Iraqis began to realize this much sooner, in a far more terrifying way, as the U.S. war machine bore down on them. The experience seared scenes of carnage and destruction into the minds of thousands of Iraqis that went far beyond anything they had seen in the Persian Gulf War or even the Iran-Iraq war.
Here are some memories of those days I heard when collecting oral histories in Iraq, where I covered the war for Time from 2006 to 2009:
Ra’ad Obaeid Hussein was an artillery officer stationed in southern Iraq near Nasiriyah at the time of the invasion:
A few nights before the bombardment began the Americans started dropping leaflets in our area. On them were instructions detailing how to surrender, how to drive your car slowly so as not to seem like a threat, and how to approach on foot and all that. They even told us to lower the cannons so they would know we were not in the fight.
We gathered up all the leaflets we could find—and burned them in a huge pile. Honestly, we were not expecting such a huge invasion. We thought maybe the Americans would attack for three or four days, and then it would be over…
About eight o’clock on the night it started I was having tea with my commanding officer, Hamis, at our main camp. Suddenly we saw two red flashes toward our northernmost position. And then it started raining Hell on us. I think they were using B-52s. I don’t know. But everything started exploding around us.
We had ordered our soldiers to dig trenches for cover, and we dove into the ground. But the damn trenches were too shallow! They had not dug deep enough, because they did not take it seriously. We could barely cover up as we all hid together.
Almost as soon as the bombing started we began getting word about casualties. So and so is wounded. So and so is dead. Names came with every bomb. Most of our soldiers were very young then and had not seen any fighting, much less a bombardment like this. Most started crying, so I took out a Koran and started reading from it to try to calm them down.
Gassan Abdul Wahed Ined was a young corporal in an Iraqi army unit tasked with defending the southern city of Najaf:
Most of us were young soldiers and had not been in a war before, and now we were expected to fight the U.S. army.
We put a lot of hope in the Republican Guard.
They were the experienced soldiers, and we thought if we had some of them among us we might have a chance. A unit of Republican Guard troops was supposed to join us from Baghdad, but they were all killed trying to reach us by the Americans…
Even after the Republican Guard troops failed to reach us, we were getting messages from the Baghdad command saying the Americans had not entered Iraqi territory. We were led to believe that the campaign was just a bombing, not a ground invasion.
There was a hotel in the city with a good rooftop view, the Zam Zam Hotel. We set up a lookout position on the roof.
Very quickly we came to see U.S. troops maneuvering northward in the distance. We saw tanks and troop carriers and Humvees and all kinds of armored vehicles. We saw paratroopers dropping from the sky.
That’s when we basically just started ignoring messages from the Baghdad command.
We knew we were on our own.
Mohammed Abbas Abdul al-Hur was a grocer with a shop in Baghdad. He left the city during the bombardment but quickly returned to try and save his store from looters:
When I got back into Baghdad, it was not the city I had left just a week before.
It was like some other place. And it was a depressing sight.
You saw people walking everywhere carrying looted goods. All kinds of things. When I got into my neighborhood, I found the streets littered with weapons and Iraqi military uniforms.
All those soldiers had just vanished and left their things. Nowhere could you see any sign of law and order. No police. No military. No government. Nothing. Everything had collapsed.
Baha’a Nouri Yasseen was a senior officer in the Iraqi army’s air defense wing, stationed in Baghdad. His unit abandoned its post once American forces entered the capital He began making his way home to find his family like many other officers from the shattered regime:
Bodies were all over the streets. Smoke was flowing everywhere blackening the sky.
Warplanes were roaring overhead, and I could hear tanks rolling in streets nearby. There was no water. No power. The streets were totally empty. It looked as though all life there had been crushed out in one afternoon.
My wife and my three children assumed I was dead.
In those early days, amid all that destruction, any family with a man in the military figured they would never see him alive again.
Honestly I was ready to die at any time. I was a military man in uniform on the streets of a city at war. I could have wound up killed or captured by the Americans at any moment.
But I made it home, and I found everyone okay despite the scene outside. Only then did I take off my uniform.
Mohammed Khalil Hamed was a colonel in the Republican Guard. He was in charge of an army depot, which was overrun by looters shortly after U.S. forces reached Baghdad. After that he went to find his family at their home in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, where heavy fighting was beginning to subside:
Man, my neighborhood was a disaster scene when I got there. The wreckage of destroyed tanks and artillery pieces was strewn everywhere. Bombed-out buildings were still on fire. Bodies were rotting in the road.
The only signs of life to be seen were the warplanes in the skies and the U.S. soldiers roaming the streets.
I felt so helpless when I looked at them, these occupiers.
The Kuwaitis looked at us the same way when we invaded there, and they had the right. Now I knew how they felt…
We all understood that our lives as we knew them were over. It was the moment when we all began counting backwards, and we would go down, down, down until we had less than zero.
Mark Kukis is the author of Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003 – 2009.