Editor's Note: When I heard Robert Fisk earlier this year in Boston, and spoke with him after, I was struck that such an amalgam of self-evident honesty, courage and humility could be found in a single man.  He has spent 30 years reporting under the heat of missle-strikes, high altitude bombing, small arms fire-fights, suicide bombings, bulldozed homes, tank fire on stone-throwing boys - all this while confronting the raw grief of broken families and weeping loved ones. 

Following the attack on him by Afghan villagers and his compassionate response to his attackers, I knew that this was not an ordinary journalist, reporting to the world with a spirit of excitement and hubris.  While corporate news-anchormen affect their erudite, liturgical tones, Robert Fisk quietly and graphically describes first-hand the bloody aftermath of a suicide bombing, the dead muslim child in a coffin, and the hungry children with missing limbs, from a missle attack or a bomb.

His descriptions au courant are so penetrating and simple that no honest reader or listener can question their veracity.  No "embedded reporter" here.  Robert Fisk stands above the rabble of corporate news-reporters in league with the governments they serve. The pictures he makes remain in the memory. His simple observations find their home in the universal conscience. His words do not share space with busy prattle of would-be journalists who cower under the whip of their corporate masters. With the opportunity to read Robert Fisk about Iraq, no person can be excused for being uninformed or misinformed. One must wonder how those exposed by his brutal pen have allowed him to survive.  I have wondered if he would live this long in the chaotic mess of the U.S./British invasion of Iraq. I asked him last winter how he could get away with doing what he does.  With an enigmatic smile, he simply replied, "Our readers will not accept anything less".  - Les Blough

25 Days in Iraq with Robert Fisk 

Iraqi broadcasters risk being closed if they put Saddam's voice on air, by Robert Fisk in Baghdad, September 24, 2003

Sewage is coming through the manhole covers, there's still only 15 hours electricity a day and anarchy grips the streets of Baghdad, but yesterday America's toothless Iraqi "interim council" roared like a lion, issuing a set of restrictions and threats - against the press, of course.

Aimed primarily at the Arab satellite channels al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, which always air Saddam Hussein's tape recordings, the almost Orwellian rules -- each of which begins with the words "do not" -- mean Iraqi or foreign press and television news organisations can be closed if they "advocate the return of the Baath party or issue any statements that represent the Baath directly or indirectly [sic]".

The council, which was appointed by Paul Bremer, the US proconsul, admitted yesterday that it had consulted his legal advisers before issuing its set of restrictions. True to the chaos that governs Baghdad, the council's spokesman Intefadh Qanbar - Ahmed Chalabi's man - initially said al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya were to be closed in Iraq. Within two hours, news emerged that the two Arabic-language channels would be punished for their alleged transgressions by being refused all co-operation from the "interim council" for two weeks - a punishment many journalists here would wish to have inflicted on them.

But the list nevertheless provides an intriguing reflection on the "democracy" that Mr Bremer - who ordered his legal advisers to draw up censorship rules in the late spring - wishes to bestow on Iraqis.

Some of the restrictions are so self-evident as to be naive. "Do not incite violence against any person or group," for example, could have been enshrined in any civil law. But the references to the Baath party are clearly intended to prevent Iraqis hearing Saddam's voice. The rule shows just how fearful the US authorities have become of his sympathisers.

After telling the world that most Iraqis are delighted with their "liberation" and forthcoming "democracy", the authorities are obviously aware that many Iraqis don't feel that way at all. Journalists must also inform the authorities of "any acts of sabotage, criminal activity, terrorism or any violent action ... before or after an attack takes place".

Journalists - even those with al-Jazeera - do not receive advance warning of ambushes. The rule is in effect asking them to become assistants to the occupation authorities.

There have been instances in the flourishing new Iraqi free press - there are now more than 100 newspapers in Baghdad - of incitement to "jihad" against the occupation authorities and false information on the behaviour of American troops. As it is, even reporting yesterday's killing - or killings - near Falujah by a missile- firing American helicopter could fall into "incitement to violence". US forces say they came under fire from a house in the city and killed "one enemy" (sic). But hospital doctors gave the names of three men killed, all members of the same family.

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Suicide bomber attacks UN Baghdad headquarters, by Robert Fisk in Baghdad, September 23, 2003

The United Nations. Again. Only last week, I'd stood at the little desk in the morning sunlight where the UN's Iraqi guards checked visitors to what's left of the headquarters after the previous suicide bomber came calling.

And the rumble of sound that moved across Baghdad yesterday morning came from those very same few square yards. A car bomb, detonated by the driver, so the Americans would say two hours later, as the Iraqi UN guard checked his vehicle.

But why would a car bomber - a suicide bomber if that is what he was - drive up to a checkpoint where the security men were bound to discover his bomb? "He tried to enter the UN compound but he wasn't going to make it," a US officer called Kirley told us in the hot morning sunshine.

His men were protecting the wrecked UN headquarters, devastated in last month's suicide murder of 22 UN officials. "He couldn't make it, so he decided to kill civilians." 

But when I asked if perhaps the driver had been unaware of the bomb in his car, that maybe someone else had planted the bomb and that it was destined for a different target - maybe an innocent driver had decided to pull up at the UN on his way to another location - the officer said he didn't know. Yet why not the UN? Wasn't Kofi Annan, the secretary general, opening a conference on the "war on terror" in the United States yesterday? Wouldn't yet another bomb at the UN finally knock the stuffing out of any army that wanted to travel to Iraq under a UN flag to pull the American army out of the mire? America's only chance of exchanging its own soldiers for an international force therefore took another body blow yesterday. One Iraqi driver - or car bomber - dead and one Iraqi UN security guard dead.

Was he the man who gave me my UN visitors' pass last week? It's the kind of question we all ask every time a bomb goes off in Baghdad. An Apache helicopter circled the smouldering wreckage of the sedan car as a truck-load of American troops turned up with sandbags.

Always sandbags. Walls of sand and concrete and earth are now climbing around Baghdad, outside police stations, outside US bases; a concrete wall 20ft high and miles in length now snakes along the western side of the Tigris river through Baghdad to protect the American proconsul Paul Bremer and his staff. Approach any American facility and you will be met by a tank barrel and barbed wire. And we all ask: "Who's next?" It felt safer on the streets of Baghdad yesterday, even reporting the bombing of the UN car park, than it did in one's own hotel.

A couple of weeks ago, the Baghdad Hotel - where CIA agents reportedly live - was apparently due for attack. Snipers fired at the security guards and, so the story went, a car bomber was waiting to drive to the building. But the guards fought back and the car never appeared.

Then there's the story - apparently true - that someone planted three bombs underneath one of the biggest river bridges in Baghdad, allegedly the Jamhouriya bridge; three bombs, each made of mortar shells, which would have brought the bridge down when an American tank crossed the river. And of course, you can imagine the pictures on CNN if the Americans had to haul an Abrams tank out of the Tigris.

On Sunday night, there was shooting near my hotel, bursts of fire that lasted, on and off, for 10 minutes. In the morning, no one could say what happened. Was a local trying to protect his property? Was someone firing at the US military compound, which is quite close - rather too close, in my opinion - to the back of my hotel, a former Saddam family villa that is now occupied by US line troops? When he took over, Mr Bremer promised better security in 60 days. His 60 days are up. And the results of his promise definitely merit "Non satis".

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An Italian diplomat, his translator and another Iraqi tragedy, by Robert Fisk in Baghdad, September 21, 2003

Pietro Cardone is an elegant, discreet man, an Italian diplomat who hates polemics and who pleaded with me that his story should speak for itself.

It does. Three days ago, he held in his arms his dying Iraqi interpreter, shot through the heart by an American soldier. Mr Cardone, 69, works for the occupation authorities. So did his translator. So did the soldier who killed his translator. But here tragic irony must give way to a terrible narrative.

On the day after two more US soldiers were killed ­ and 13 wounded ­ by guerrilla mortar fire at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, Mr Cardone's story might seem mundane, even prosaic. But it is a poignant Iraqi tragedy.

Saad Mohamed Sultan was 36 and had two children, aged three and five. Mr Cardone's wife, Mirella, who was travelling with her husband in the back of the car in which their interpreter died, says she can still hear the shot that killed him. "I came here on 15 May, sent by my Foreign Ministry at the request of the American government," Mr Cardone says. "They were looking for an adviser on culture. I have spent all my career in the Arab world. I speak the language. I understand the mentality." Indeed, Mr Cardone served in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and Morocco and was Italian ambassador in Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. But nothing could have prepared him for last Friday. He had set out for archaeological sites in north Iraq with a project that would provide guards and police to protect the ancient cities.

"I was driving in a Land Cruiser with a second car behind," he says. "Saad and my driver were in the front of my car, my wife and I in the back. At 1.45pm we approached two American Humvees, both driving in the same direction as us." Mr Cardone's hands shake as he approaches the convoy again in his memory, now sitting in the lobby of the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad.

"Our driver started to overtake the first Humvee. The young soldier at the back made a gesture as if to say, 'Don't overtake, go back'. Perhaps our driver was slow and this created a suspicion in the soldier. We were five metres from him ­ which was a bit close. The American soldier fired one shot from his machine-gun. That shot came through the car and hit Saad in the heart and came out of the back of the poor guy and scratched my arm and exited through the roof of the car." Then the Americans drove on. They didn't stop, Mr Cardone says.

"Mirella had been talking to Saad when the shot came into the car. Our driver turned and shouted, 'My God, my God, why?" We pulled to the side of the road but the Americans had gone. He was a very young soldier who killed Saad. I guess he was 19 or 20. I was keeping Saad's head upright but there was a lot of blood. He was making noises, saying 'Ugh! Ugh!' But when we reached the hospital, the doctor examined him and just said, 'There is nothing to be done'. The bullet had broken his heart."

Mr Cardone left Saad at the hospital and returned to Baghdad in their second car. "This morning, his sister and brother came to see me," he says. "They were very dignified. I expressed my sorrow and assured them the Americans would carry out a thorough investigation and that they would receive compensation. I am confident the Americans will have an investigation because they take these things seriously." Ask Mr Cardone for his opinion of what happened and he remains a diplomat. "I think it has been a needless death, generated by a misinterpretation of behaviour." Iraqis might interpret events differently.

"I hate the phrase," Mrs Cardone says. "But I think they call these things 'friendly fire'."

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Iraqi councillor 'critical' after attack, by Robert Fisk in Baghdad, September 21, 2003 

The assassins of Baghdad struck yesterday at one of the only three women on the American-sponsored Iraqi governing council, gravely wounding Akila al-Hashimi, a Shia Muslim who had worked at the country's foreign ministry under Saddam Hussein's regime.

At least six gunmen in two cars ambushed Ms Hashimi outside her Baghdad home in the morning, firing Kalashnikov rifles - and throwing at least one grenade - at her car, which drove at speed into a garage as her driver made a desperate attempt to escape.

Ms Hashimi, who was due to return to the United Nations in New York with an Iraqi delegation to seek Iraq's seat at the General Assembly, was wounded in the abdomen and taken to Baghdad's Yarmouk hospital. After emergency surgery, she was then driven under heavy US military protection to an American military field hospital outside the city in a "critical" condition. Two of her bodyguards are also reported to have been wounded in the attack.

For days now, US agents in Baghdad have been trying to second-guess the growing resistance army here, building concrete defences around prestige targets in the city - hotels, American bases and bridges over the Tigres river - while fearful American troops have been shooting at civilians on the mere suspicion of hostility.

The American civil administrator, Paul Bremer, appointed the council as an interim measure before Iraqi elections that will decide the future government of the country. Two-thirds of the council is made up of Iraqis who have returned from overseas exile or of Kurdish leaders, and their decisions are taken in secret.

Ms Hashimi is the only member of the ancien régime to have been given a place in the council. She was a colleague of Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's principal advisers, and an Iraqi civil servant intimately involved in the oil-for-food programme that existed under American-inspired UN sanctions.

Two men have supposedly been arrested in connection with the attack, although the announcement of arrests - usually to placate public opinion - is often followed by news of the release of suspects.

The attack on Ms Hashimi came two days after an ambush and gun battle that killed three US soldiers and wounded two on Thursday night near Tikrit. Fifty-eight Iraqis were captured after the attacks on Thursday, described as some of the fiercest and best-planned resistance in months. And on Saturday, US tanks and armoured fighting vehicles rumbled through Tikrit in a show of force meant to discourage more attacks and flush out armed resistance.

* An American soldier shot dead a rare Bengal tiger at Baghdad zoo after the animal injured a comrade who was trying to feed it through the cage bars. The zoo's manager said yesterday that a group of soldiers were having a party in the zoo on Thursday night, after it had closed. "Someone was trying to feed the tigers," he said. "The tiger bit his finger off and clawed his arm. So his colleague took a gun and shot the tiger." There was no immediate US comment.

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Another day in the bloody death of Iraq: At least 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been gunned down since the end of the war. Robert Fisk in Baghdad visits a mortuary where many of these unreported victims are taken, September 21, 2003

Ahmed Qasm Hamed was dumped in a black sack at the mortuary of the Yarmouk hospital last week. Taleb Neiemah Homtoush turned up at the city morgue with three bullets in his head. Amr Alwan Ibrahim's family brought him to the morgue five minutes later with a bullet through his heart. Amr was to have married his fiancée Naghem in a week's time.

There are flies around the mortuaries and the smell of death, and up at Yarmouk they had so many bodies the other day that I found them lying in the yard because the fridge was already filled with corpses. On stretchers with blankets thrown over them, on the hot concrete beneath the sun, the flies already moving to them in the 45 degree heat. At the city morgue, the morticians appear in dirty green overalls, scarcely glancing at the wailing relatives by the gate, slumped in tears beside a lake of sewage.

After a while - after hours, day after day at the mortuaries - you get to know the victims. Their fathers and wives and cousins tell you how they dressed, how they worked, how many children they have left behind.

Often the children are there beside the cheap wooden coffins, screaming and crying and numb with loss. The families weep and they say that no one cares about them and, after expressing our sorrow to them over and over again, I come to the conclusion they are right. No one cares. "Al baqiya fi hayatek," we tell them in Arabic which, roughly translated, means "May his lost life be yours in the future." But it is lost for ever - his life, and, by even the most conservative estimates, those of 10,000 other Iraqi civilians gunned down since we "liberated" Baghdad on 9 April.

Here, for the record, are just a few of last week's cull. Hassan Ahmed was 26. At the morgue, his cousin Sadeq produces a photograph of the young man for me. Hassan is smiling, he has a thin, slightly bearded face and is wearing a bright purple shirt. His father, a soldier, was killed in the Iran-Iraq war in 1982, when Hassan was just five years old. At 3pm last Wednesday, he was walking in the street in his home neighbourhood of Al-Biyar in Baghdad when someone - no one knows who or why - shot him twice in the head.

Old Sarhan Daoud is almost toothless and bespectacled and is standing outside the doors of the Baghdad city morgue in a long white "dishdash" robe. A few hours earlier, his only sons, 19-year-old Ahmed and 27-year-old Ali were gunned down outside their Baghdad home. There is talk of a revenge killing but the father isn't certain. "We are just trapped in this tragedy," Sarhan says. "There were very few killings like this before. Now everyone uses guns. Please tell about our tragedy." After half an hour, waiting beside the pool of sewage, shoved aside as other corpses are brought into the morgue - the coffins come from the mosques and are re-used day after day - Ahmed and Ali are brought out in their plywood caskets and roped to the top of a minivan into which cousins and uncles and the old father climb for the funeral journey to the family's home village near Baquba.

The family of Amr Ibrahim say they know who shot the 30-year-old construction worker on Wednesday. They even gave the name to the American-paid Iraqi police force. But the police did nothing. "It is anarchy that we live through," his uncle Daher says. "Then, when we get here, they charge us 15,000 dinars (£5) for the autopsy - otherwise we can't have a death certificate. First we are robbed of life. Then they take our money." For many in Iraq, £5 is a month's wages.

Twenty-six-year-old Fahad Makhtouf was knifed to death near his home on Tuesday night. His uncle speaks slowly. "No one cares about our tragedy. No one cares about us."

Up at the Yarmouk, they've had a bad week. Mortada Karim has just received the bodies of three men, all shot dead, from local police stations. All are believed to have been murdered by thieves. "Four days ago, we had one of the worst cases," he says. "A mother and her child. There had been a wedding party and people had been shooting in the air. The Americans opened fire and the woman and her child were hit and killed." On the same day, they received an Iraqi man, killed by his father because they had quarrelled over the loot they had both stolen in Baghdad.

Last month, a family of nine were brought to the Yarmouk. The mortuary attendants believe the five women were found by their brothers in a brothel and in the subsequent "honour killings" their brothers were caught up in a gun battle.

On the walls of the city mortuary, families have for weeks left photographs of those who have simply disappeared. "We lost Mr Abdul-emir al-Noor al-Moussawi last Wednesday, 11 June, 2003, in Baghdad," it says beneath the photograph of a dignified man in suit and tie. "He is 71 years old. Hair white. Wearing a grey dishdash. A reward will be paid to anyone with information." Or there is 16-year-old Beida Jaffer Sadr, a schoolgirl apparently kidnapped in Baghdad - her story has already been told in The Independent - whose father's telephone number is printed below her picture. "Blond hair, brown eyes, wearing a black skirt," it says.

The occupation powers, the so-called "Provisional Coalition Authority", love statistics when they are useful. They can tell you the number of newly re-opened schools, newly appointed doctors and the previous day's oil production in seconds. The daily slaughter of Iraq's innocents, needless to say, is not among their figures. So here are a few statistics. On Wednesday of last week, the Baghdad city morgue received 19 corpses, of which 11 were victims of gunfire. The next day, the morticians received 11 dead, of whom five had been killed by bullets. In May, approximately 300 murder victims were brought to the morgue, in June around 500, in July 600, last month about 700. In all of July of last year - under Saddam's regime - Dr Abdullah Razak, the deputy head of the morgue, says that only 21 gunshot victims were brought in.

Of course, it's possible to put a gloss on all this. Saddam ruled through terror. If there was security in Baghdad under his regime, there was mass murder in Kurdistan and in the Shia south of Iraq. Tens of thousands have been found in the mass graves of Iraq, men - and women - who had no death certificates, no funerals, no justice. At the Abu Ghraib prison, the head doctor, Hussain Majid - who has been reappointed by the prison's new American guards - told me that when "security prisoners" were hanged at night, he was ordered not to issue death certificates.

It might be argued that under the previous regime, the government committed the crimes. Now, the people commit them. How can the Americans be held to account for honour killings? But they are accountable, for it is the duty of the occupying power to protect the people under their control. The mandate of the CPA requires it to care for the people of Iraq. And they don't care.

None of the above statistics take into account the hundreds of shooting incidents in which the victims are wounded rather than killed. In the Kindi hospital, for example, I come across a man whose father was caretaker of a factory. "Looters came and he opened fire on them and then the Americans came and shot my father because he was holding his gun," he said. "He's had two operations, and he'll live. But no one came to see us. No one came to say sorry. Nobody cared."

One of the most recent corpses to arrive is that of Saad Mohamed Sultan. He was an official interpreter for the occupying powers and was, incredibly, shot dead by an American soldier on a convoy as he travelled with an Italian diplomat to Mosul. After shooting him, the Americans drove calmly on. They didn't bother to stop to find out who they'd killed. Saad was 35. He had a wife and two children.

In the yard of the City Morgue, a group of very angry young men have gathered. They are Shia and, I suspect, members of the Badr Brigade. They are waiting for the coffin of Taleb Homtoush who was killed by three bullets fired into his head as he stood at the door of his Baghdad home on Wednesday. Taleb had lost his legs in the Iran-Iraq war. Two of his brothers were killed in the same conflict. Another cousin who will not give his name, a tall man, is spitting in anger as he speaks.

"You must know something," he shouts at me. "We are a Muslim country and the Americans want to create divisions among us, between Sunni and Shia. But no civil war will occur here in Iraq. These people are dying because the Americans let this happen. You know that the Americans made many promises before they came here. They promised freedom and security and democracy. We were dreaming of these promises. Now we are just dreaming of blowing ourselves up among the Americans."

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Americans draw a veil of secrecy as casualties grow: No comment from the authorities while more and more US servicemen and their families are demanding answers from George Bush, by Robert Fisk in Baghdad, September 20, 2003

A culture of secrecy has descended upon the occupation authorities in Iraq. They will give no tally of the Iraqi civilian lives lost each day. They will not comment on the killing by an American soldier of one of their own Iraqi interpreters yesterday - he was shot dead in front of the Italian diplomat who was the official adviser to the new Iraqi Ministry of Culture - and they cannot explain how General Sultan Hashim Ahmed, the former Iraqi minister of defence and a potential war criminal, should now be described by one of the most senior US officers in Iraq as "a man of honour and integrity".

On Thursday, in an ambush outside Khaldiya, 100 miles west of Baghdad, a minimum of three US soldiers were reported dead and three wounded - local Iraqis claimed eight dead. Yet within hours, the occupation authorities were saying that exactly the same number were killed and wounded in an ambush on Americans in Tikrit. This incident was partly captured on videofilm. Only two soldiers were wounded in the earlier attack, they said.

And for the second day running yesterday, the mobile telephone system operated by MCI for the occupation forces collapsed, in effect isolating the "Coalition Provisional Authority" from its ministries and from US forces. An increasing number of journalists in Baghdad now suspect that the US proconsul Paul Bremer and his hundreds of assistants ensconced in the heavily guarded former presidential palace, have lost touch with reality. Although an inquiry was promised into the shooting of the Iraqi interpreter, details of the incident suggest that US troops now have carte blanche to open fire at Iraqi civilian cars on the mere suspicion that their occupants may be hostile.

Pietro Cordone, the Italian diplomat, was travelling to Mosul with his wife, Mirella, when their car approached an American convoy. According to Mr Cordone, a soldier manning a machine gun in the rear vehicle of the convoy appeared to signal to Mr Cordone's driver that he should not attempt to overtake. The driver did not do so but the soldier then fired a single shot at the car, which hit the interpreter who was in the front passenger seat.

The incident was only reported because Mr Cordone happened to be in the car. Every day, Iraqi civilians are wounded or shot dead by US troops. Just five days ago, a woman and her child were killed in Baghdad after US forces opened fire at a wedding party that was shooting into the air. A 14-year-old boy was reported killed in a similar incident two days ago. Then on Thursday, several Iraqi civilians were wounded by US troops after the Khaldiya ambush.

During an arms raid around Saddam's home town, guerrillas attacked not only the American raiders but two of their bases along the Tigris river. It was, an American spokesman said, a "co-ordinated" attack on soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division. Up to 40 men of "military age" were then arrested.

In what must be one of the more extraordinary episodes of the day, General Sultan Ahmed handed himself over to Major General David Petraeus - in charge of the north of Iraq - after the American commander had sent him a letter describing him as "a man of honour and integrity". In return for his surrender - or so says the Kurdish intermediary who arranged his handover - the Americans had promised to remove his name from the list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis.

I last saw the portly General Ahmed in April, brandishing a gold-painted Kalashnikov in the Ministry of Information and vowing eternal war against the American invaders. It was General Ahmed who persuaded Norman Schwarzkopf to allow the defeated Iraqi forces to use military helicopters on "official business" after the 1991 US-Iraqi ceasefire agreed at Safwan. These helicopters were then used in the brutal repression of the Shia Muslim and Kurdish rebellions against Saddam. Afterwards, there was much talk of indicting General Ahmed as a war criminal, but General Petraeus seems to have thrown that idea into the wastebin. In his quite extraordinary letter to General Ahmed the US officer says that "although we find ourselves on different sides of this war, we do share common traits. As military men, we follow the orders of our superiors. We may not necessarily agree with the politics and bureaucracy, but we understand unity of command and supporting our leaders [sic] in a common and just cause." Thus far have the Americans now gone in appeasing the men who may have influence over the Iraqi guerrillas now killing US soldiers.

What is presumably supposed to be seen as a gesture of compromise is much more likely to be understood as a sign of military weakness - which it clearly is. Historians will also have to ruminate upon the implications of the meaning of "supporting our leaders in a common and just cause". Are Saddam and Mr Bush supposed to be these "leaders"?

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Another day, another death-trap for the US: Eight American troops killed as Bush admits no link between Iraq and 11 September attacks, by Robert Fisk in Khaldiya, September 19. 2003

The American Humvee had burnt out, the US troop transporter had been smashed by rockets and an Iraqi lorry - riddled by American bullets in the aftermath of the attack - still lay smouldering on the central reservation.

"I saw the Americans flying through the air, blasted upwards," an Iraqi mechanic with an oil lamp in his garage said - not, I thought, without some satisfaction. "The wounded Americans were on the road, shouting and screaming."

The US authorities in Iraq - who only report their own deaths, never those of Iraqis - acknowledged three US soldiers dead. There may be up to eight dead, not counting the wounded. Several Iraqis described seeing arms and legs and pieces of uniform scattered across the highway.

It may well turn out to be the most costly ambush the Americans have suffered since they occupied Iraq - and this on the very day that George Bush admitted for the first time that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the 11 September assault on the United States. And as American Abrams tanks thrashed down the darkened highway outside Khaldiya last night - the soft-skinned Humvee jeeps were no longer to be seen in the town - the full implications of the ambush became clear.

There were three separate ambushes in Khaldiya and the guerrillas showed a new sophistication. Even as I left the scene of the killings after dark, US army flares were dripping over the semi-desert plain 100 miles west of Baghdad while red tracer fire raced along the horizon behind the palm trees. It might have been a scene from a Vietnam movie, even an archive newsreel clip; for this is now tough, lethal guerrilla country for the Americans, a death-trap for them almost every day.

As usual, the American military spokesmen had "no information" on this extraordinary ambush. But Iraqis at the scene gave a chilling account of the attack. A bomb - apparently buried beneath the central reservation of the four-lane highway - exploded beside an American truck carrying at least 10 US soldiers and, almost immediately, a rocket-propelled grenade hit a Humvee carrying three soldiers behind the lorry.

"The Americans opened fire at all the Iraqis they could see - at all of us," Yahyia, an Iraqi truck driver, said. "They don't care about the Iraqis." The bullet holes show that the US troops fired at least 22 rounds into the Iraqi lorry that was following their vehicles when their world exploded around them.

The mud hut homes of the dirt-poor Iraqi families who live on the 30-foot embankment of earth and sand above the road were laced with American rifle fire. The guerrillas - interestingly, the locals called them mujahedin, "holy warriors" - then fired rocket-propelled grenades at the undamaged vehicles of the American convoy as they tried to escape. A quarter of a mile down the road - again from a ridge of sand and earth - more grenades were launched at the Americans.

Again, according to the Sunni Muslim Iraqis of this traditionally Saddamite town, the Americans fired back, this time shooting into a crowd of bystanders who had left their homes at the sound of the shooting. Several, including the driver of the truck that was hit by the Americans after the initial bombing, were wounded and taken to hospital for treatment in the nearest city to the west, Ramadi.

"They opened fire randomly at us, very heavy fire," Adel, the mechanic with the oil lamp, said. "They don't care about us. They don't care about the Iraqi people, and we will have to suffer this again. But I tell you that they will suffer for what they did to us today. They will pay the price in blood."

Jamel, a shopkeeper who saw the battle, insisted - and in Iraq, it is what people believe that governs emotion, not necessarily reality - that 60 Americans were killed or wounded in a mortar attack on the former Iraqi (and former RAF) air base at Habbaniyeh last week. Untrue, of course. But as we spoke, mortar fire crashed down on Habbaniyeh, its detonation lighting up the darkness as explosions vibrated through the ground beneath our feet. This was guerrilla warfare on a co-ordinated scale, planned and practised long in advance. To set up even yesterday's ambush required considerable planning, a team of perhaps 20 men and the ability to choose the best terrain for an ambush.

That is exactly what the Iraqis did. The embankment above the road gave the gunmen cover and a half-mile wide view of the US convoy. They must have known the Americans would have opened fire at anything that moved in the aftermath - indeed, the guerrillas probably hoped they would - and angry crowds in the town of Khaldiya were claiming last night that 20 Iraqi civilians had been wounded.

Six days ago, American soldiers killed eight US-trained Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian hospital guard 14 miles away in Fallujah, claiming at first that they had "no information" on the shootings, and then apologising - but without providing the slightest explanation for the killings. Several Iraqis in Khaldiya suggested that yesterday's ambush may have been a revenge attack for the slaughter of the policemen.

True or false, that is what the guerrillas may well claim. Do they, many Iraqis wonder, follow the political trials of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair? Was the devastating attack timed to coincide with Mr Bush's increasing embarrassment over the false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction? Unlikely. But yesterday when the former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix condemned the "culture of spin, the culture of hyping" - in reference to the Anglo-American exaggeration of Saddam Hussein's threat to the world - some of his words may have found their mark in Iraq. "In the Middle Ages," Mr Blix said, "when people were convinced there were witches, they certainly found them."

Now Mr Bush is convinced he is fighting a vast international "terrorist" network and that its agents are closing in for a final battle in Iraq. And the Iraqi mujahedin are ready to turn the American President's fantasies into reality.

I couldn't help noticing the graffiti on a wall in Fallujah. It was written in Arabic, in a careful, precise hand, by someone who had taken his time to produce a real threat.

"He who gives the slightest help to the Americans," the graffiti read, "is a traitor and a collaborator."

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Saddam's vilest prison has been swept clean, but questions remain, by Robert Fisk, September 17, 2003

We could see them beyond the dirt lot, standing in the heat beside their sand-brown tents, the razor wire wrapped in sheaths around their compound.

No pictures of the prisoners, we were told. Do not enter the compound. Do not go inside the wire. Of the up to 800 Iraqis held here, only a handful are "security detainees" - the rest are "criminal detainees" - but until now almost all of them have lived out here in the heat and dust and muck. Which is why the Americans were so pleased to see us at Saddam's vile old prison yesterday: things are getting better.

So first, the good news. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, commander of the US 800th Military Police Brigade, has cleaned up the burnt and looted jail cells for hundreds of prisoners. A new medical section with stocks of medicines, X-ray machines and even a defibrillator has been installed. There is even a kindly Iraqi doctor called Hussain Majid who praises the new Ministry of Health and the occupation authorities for sending him, and paying for, "all the medicines we need". In the newly painted cells there are blankets and toothpaste, toothbrush, soap and shampoo for every man, neatly placed for them - and for us, I suspect - on their prison blankets. Even the jail canteen has been re-floored with new tiles.

Crisis-tourism is a pastime in New Iraq but yesterday's little trip around Abu Ghraib was, well, a little odd. General Karpinski is a tough lady - she was an intelligence officer in 7th Special Forces at Fort Bragg and served as a "targeting officer" in Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait - but she had a little difficulty at first in recalling that there was a riot at the jail in May in which US troops used "lethal force" when protesting prisoners threw stones and tent-legs at American military policemen. The troops killed a teenage inmate.

But she was remarkably frank on other events: such as the fact that the Americans in Abu Ghraib are attacked four out of every seven nights with mortar shells, small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. That's 16 times a month. And that's a lot of attacks.

Most of the "security detainees" - the 800th MP Brigade's publicity says they have the responsibility of "caring" for prisoners rather than guarding them - are across at Baghdad airport where, General Karpinski says, there are men who "may be part of a resistance force". Note the word "resistance", rather than terrorist. Then when I asked if there were any Western prisoners being held, she said that she thought there were "six claiming to be American and two claiming to be from the UK". Which is the first time anyone has revealed that interesting little statistic.

Then came the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison, Dr Majid. When I asked him what his job was when Saddam used the place as a torture and execution centre, he replied that he was, um, the head doctor of Abu Ghraib prison. Indeed, half his staff were running the medical centre at Abu Ghraib under the Saddam regime. "No, I didn't ever attend the executions," he said. "I couldn't stand that. I sent my junior doctors to do the death certificates." Except at night, of course, when the security services brought in political prisoners for hanging. Then Dr Majid would receive an instruction saying "no death certificates". The politicals were hanged at night. During the day, the doctor said, it was the "killers" who were hanged. Killers? Killers? What did his use of that word imply?

The new Iraqi prison guards at Abu Ghraib have been trained in human rights - including two, it turned out, who had been police officers under the Saddam regime. No wonder General Karpinski said the Americans hadn't chosen the doctors - that had been the work of the new Ministry of Health. There were US intelligence officers in Abu Ghraib but no, the military police were not present during interrogations. Yes, General Karpinski had visited Guantanamo Bay for "a few days" but had not brought any lessons learnt there to Baghdad. There had only been one suicide attempt - in a Baghdad prison - when an inmate tried to slash his wrists.

Of course, there was a statutory visit to Abu Ghraib's old death chamber, the double hanging room in which poor Farzad Bazoft of The Observer and thousands of Iraqis were put to death. General Karpinski gave the lever a tug and the great iron trapdoors clanged open, their echo vibrating through the walls.

Dr Majid said he had never heard them before, that he was never even a member of the Baath party. So let this be written in history: the chief medical officer at Saddam's nastiest prison - who is now the chief medical officer at America's cleanest Iraqi prison - was never a member of the Baath party and never saw an execution.

Of course, there are things that only those with a heart of stone cannot be moved by, the last words written and carved on the walls of the filthy death row cells, just a few yards from the gallows. "Ahmed Qambal, 8/9/2000", "Ahmed Aziz from Al-Najaf governorate, with Jabah, 2/9/01", "Abbad Abu Mohamed." Sometimes they had added verses from the Koran. "Death is better than shame." "Death is life for a believer and a high honour." What courage it must have taken to write such words, their very last on Earth.

But there was something just a little too neat about all this. Against Saddam's cruelty, any institution looks squeaky clean. Yet there's a lot about Abu Ghraib that doesn't look as clean as the new kitchens.

There is still no clear judicial process for the supposed killers, thieves and looters behind the razor wire. The military admits that the transcription of Arabic names - with all the Ellis Island mistakes that can lead to - meant that families often could not find their loved ones.

There was no mention, until we brought it up, of the mortar attack that killed six of the prisoners in their tents last month. The Americans had sent psychologists to talk to the prisoners afterwards and found that the inmates believed - surprise, surprise - that the Americans were using them as human shields.

And you can just imagine what those same prisoners feel in their tents on four out of every seven nights when the mortar shells explode again around the old jail. Which is one reason, of course, General Karpinski wants to get her prisoners into their spanking new cells.

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Powell's Baghdad briefing ignores high price of failure, by Robert Fisk in Baghdad, September 15, 2003

We had to walk through a quarter of a mile of barbed wire to reach Colin Powell, the American Secretary of State, last night. We had to pass through four checkpoints, including three body searches. Apache helicopters circled the conference centre and Bradley fighting vehicles sat in the darkness outside.

But inside was air conditioning, brightness, optimism and Secretary Powell. He had just had a "very exciting meeting" with the new "Governing Council". He was "deeply impressed" by what he saw in Baghdad - "people hard at work rebuilding a nation, rebuilding a society". So forget the $87bn (£55bn) President George Bush needs to run Iraq for the next year, forget the dead Americans and the far greater number of dead Iraqis who pay the price each day for the folly of this occupation. Forget the American soldier killed near Fallujah yesterday when a bomb blew up beneath his Humvee, wounding seven of his colleagues. He didn't rate a mention from ex-General Powell. It was the Coalition of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Sure, there was the briefest of mentions of the latest catastrophe - the killing of nine Iraqi policemen by US forces outside Fallujah - and of the compensation that might be paid to their families. It was, as America's proconsul, Paul Bremer, put it mildly "a very regrettable incident" which "is still under investigation by our military". Tell that to the people of Fallujah who want revenge.

And so we got the same old story. There would be a "free, democratic Iraq that will be a friend and partner of the United States ... and a responsible player on the world stage". It will be "some time" before a new Iraqi government can take over, Mr Powell told us - so much for the message from the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, to Mr Powell in Geneva - and there was still "instability" in the country. He could say that again.

"But in many parts of the country, things are quite secure and stable." Unfortunately for Mr Powell, however, the Americans happen to be running the unstable bit; and even the Secretary of State was forced to admit - though no one has actually produced any proof of this - that "we have acknowledged that some terrorists have started to come into the country".

Mr Bremer, who is regarded as an "anti-terrorist" expert back in Washington, kept to the local scene, enjoying the precision of his economic statistics.

On Saturday, he announced that Iraq had produced 1,624,000 barrels of oil, 95 per cent of the revenue of which goes to the Iraqi Development Fund and 5 per cent for the 1991 Kuwaiti reparations. No mention, of course, of the amount Iraq is supposed to pay for its own invasion. Mr Powell talked about the $20bn Mr Bush plans to spend on Iraq. The far more frightful figure of $87bn that the US taxpayer is supposed to doll out for this occupation didn't rate a mention.

It was, in fact, the same story the Americans have stuck to since they arrived in Baghdad. Or more or less the same story. There would have to be a constitution. It would have to be ratified. There would have to be free elections. There would be a "leadership dedicated to democratic principles". Mr Powell - who never ventured outside the barbed wire and checkpoints yesterday - had apparently noticed "a vibrancy [in Iraq] that I attribute to the understanding of freedom ... through this land". America had "liberated" Iraq, he said several times. The word "occupation" didn't cross his lips.

He wanted good news, not the stories that were "more visual [sic] and more negative in nature". He wanted "a little more time, attention and energy" directed at "the more positive stories". And so say all of us. Which is presumably why the occupation authorities no longer even distribute their overnight security warnings to humanitarian organisations in Baghdad. If they did, the reports would show that US forces are now being attacked up to 50 times every night, that missiles are being fired at US planes almost every day, that neither Baghdad nor Basra airports are safe enough to open.

There wasn't even a word about Mr Powell's disastrous meeting in Geneva, which has left the Americans - for now - with no hope of seeing foreign armies riding to their rescue in Iraq. There was just lots of good news, along with one memorable soundbite, which all occupying powers announce. "We don't want to stay here a day longer," Mr Powell said. "We are hanging on because it's necessary to stay with the task. We came as liberators ... we've liberated a number of countries and we don't own a square foot of one of them except where we bury our dead."

These days the dead go back to the US and while Mr Powell was in Baghdad, the comrades of the soldier blown up in Fallujah yesterday were preparing his last journey home.

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A hail of bullets, a trail of dead, and a mystery the US is in no hurry to resolve, by Robert Fisk in Fallujah, September 13, 2003

A human brain lay beside the highway. It was scattered in the sand, blasted from its owner's head when the Americans ambushed their own Iraqi policemen.

A few inches away were a policeman's teeth, broken but clean dentures, the teeth of a young man. "I don't know if they are the teeth of my brother - I don't even know if my brother is alive or dead," Ahmed Mohamed shouted at me. "The Americans took the dead and the wounded away - they won't tell us anything."

Ahmed Mohamed was telling the truth. He is also, I should add, an Iraqi policeman working for the Americans.

United States forces in Iraq officially stated - incredibly - that they had "no information" about the killing of the 10 cops and the wounding of five others early yesterday morning. Unfortunately, the Americans are not telling the truth.

Soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division fired thousands of bullets in the ambush, hundreds of them smashing into the wall of a building in the neighbouring Jordanian Hospital compound, setting several rooms on fire.

And if they really need "information", they have only to look at the 40mm grenade cartridges scattered in the sand near the brains and teeth.

On each is printed the coding "AMM LOT MA-92A170-024". This is a US code for grenades belt-fired from an American M-19 gun.

And out in Fallujah, where infuriated Iraqi civilians roamed the streets after morning prayers looking for US patrols to stone, it wasn't difficult to put the story together. The local American-trained and American-paid police chief, Qahtan Adnan Hamad - who confirmed that 10 died - described how, not long after midnight, gunmen in a BMW car had opened fire on the mayor's office in Fallujah.

Two squads of the American-trained and American-paid police force - from the local Fallujah constabulary established by US forces last month and the newly constituted Iraqi national police - set off in pursuit.

Since the Americans will not reveal the truth, let Ahmed Mohamed, whose 28-year-old brother, Walid, was one of the policemen who gave chase, tell his story.

"We have been told that the BMW opened fire on the mayor's office at 12.30am. The police chased them in two vehicles, a Nissan pick-up and a Honda car and they set off down the old Kandar road towards Baghdad.

"But the Americans were there in the darkness, outside the Jordanian Hospital, to ambush cars on the road. They let the BMW through, then fired at the police cars."

One of the policemen who was wounded in the second vehicle said the Americans suddenly appeared on the darkened road.

"When they shouted at us, we stopped immediately," he said. "We tried to tell them we were police. They just kept on shooting."

The latter is true. I found thousands of brass cartridge cases at the scene, piles of them like autumn leaves glimmering in the sun, along with the dark-green grenade cartridges. There were several hundred unfired bullets but - far more disturbing - was the evidence on the walls of a building at the Jordanian Hospital. At least 150 rounds had hit the breeze-block wall and two rooms had burnt out, the flames blackening the outside of the building.

Therein lies another mystery that the Americans were in no hurry to resolve. Several Iraqis said a Jordanian doctor in the hospital had been killed and five nurses wounded. Yet when I approached the hospital gate, I was confronted by three armed men who said they were Jordanian. To enter hospitals here now, you must obtain permission from the occupation authorities in Baghdad - which is rarely, if ever, forthcoming.

No one wants journalists prowling round dismal mortuaries in "liberated" Iraq. Who knows what they might find?

"The doctors have gone to prayer so you cannot come in," an unsmiling Jordanian gunman at the gate told me.

On the roof of the shattered hospital building, two armed and helmeted guards watched us. They looked to me very like Jordanian troops. And their hospital is opposite a US 3rd Infantry Division base. Are the Jordanians here for the Americans? Or are the Americans guarding the Jordanian Hospital? When I asked if the bodies of the dead policemen were here, the armed man at the gate shrugged his shoulders.

So what happened? Did the Americans shoot down their Iraqi policemen under the mistaken impression that they were "terrorists" - Saddamite or al-Qa'ida, depending on their faith in President George Bush - and then, once their bullets had smashed into the hospital, come under attack from the Jordanian guards on the roof?

In any other land, the Americans would surely have acknowledged some of the truth.

But all they would speak of yesterday were their own casualties. Two US soldiers were killed and seven wounded in a raid in the neighbouring town of Ramadi when the occupants of a house fired back at them.

It gave the impression, of course, that American lives were infinitely more valuable than Iraqi lives.

And had the brains and teeth beside the road outside Fallujah been American brains and teeth, of course, they would have been removed. There were other things beside the highway yesterday.

A torn, blood-stained fragment of an American-supplied Iraqi policeman's shirt, a primitive tourniquet and medical gauze and lots and lots of dried, blackened blood. The 3rd Infantry Division are tired, so the story goes here. They invaded Iraq in March and haven't been home since. Their morale is low. Or so they say in Fallujah and Baghdad.

But already the cancer of rumour is beginning to turn this massacre into something far more dangerous.

Here are the words of Ahmed, whose brother Sabah was a policeman caught in the ambush and taken away by the Americans - alive or dead, he doesn't know - and who turned up to examine the blood and cartridge cases yesterday. "The Americans were forced to leave Fallujah after much fighting following their killing of 16 demonstrators in April. They were forced to hire a Fallujah police force. But they wanted to return to Fallujah so they arranged the ambush. The BMW 'gunmen' were Americans who were supposed to show there was no security in Fallujah - so the Americans could return. Our police kept crying out: 'We are the police - we are the police'. And the Americans went on shooting."

In vain did I try to explain that the last thing Americans wanted to do was return to the Sunni Muslim Saddamite town of Fallujah. Already they have paid "blood money" to the families of local, innocent Iraqis shot down at their checkpoints.

They will have to do the same to the tribal leader whose two sons they also killed at another checkpoint near Fallujah on Thursday night.

But why did the Americans kill so many of their own Iraqi policemen? Had they not heard the radio appeals of the dying men? Why - and here the story of the Jordanian Hospital guards and the policemen's relatives were the same - did the Americans go on shooting for an hour and a half? And why did the Americans say that they had "no information" about the slaughter 18 hours after they had gunned down 10 of the very men that President Bush needs most if he wishes to extricate his army from the Iraqi death trap?

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Folly taken to a scale we haven't seen since WWII, by Robert Fisk, September 11, 2003

When the attacks were launched against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon two years ago today, who had ever heard of Fallujah or Hillah? When the Lebanese hijacker flew his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would ever have believed that President George Bush would be announcing a "new front line in the war on terror" as his troops embarked on a hopeless campaign against the guerrillas of Iraq?

Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to arms against "terrorism" in "Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza"? Gaza? What do the miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania?

Nothing, of course. Neither does Iraq have anything to do with 11 September. Nor were there any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any al-Qa'ida links with Iraq, any 45-minute timeline for the deployment of chemical weapons nor was there any "liberation".

No, the attacks on 11 September have nothing to do with Iraq. Neither did 11 September change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a "world order" dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

The Iraqi "regime change", as we now know, was planned as part of a Perle-Wolfowitz campaign document to the would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. It beggars belief that Tony Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising that it was no more nor less than a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists.

But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan - its American-paid warlords raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in their burqas, its opium production now back as the world's number one export market, and its people being killed at up to a hundred a week (five American troops were shot dead two weekends ago) is a "success", something which Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld still boast about. Iraq - a midden of guerrilla hatred and popular resentment - is also a "success". Yes, Bush wants $87bn to keep Iraq running, he wants to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a "talking shop" last year, he wants scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to share the burdens of occupation - though not, of course, the decision-making, which must remain Washington's exclusive imperial preserve.

What's more, the world is supposed to accept the insane notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the planet's last colonial war, although all mention of the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza have been erased from the Middle East narrative in the American press - is part of the "war on terror", the cosmic clash of religious will that President Bush invented after 11 September. Could Israel's interests be better served by so infantile a gesture from Bush?

The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers and the grotesque implantation of Jews and Jews only in the colonies has now been set into this colossal struggle of "good" against "evil", in which even Ariel Sharon - named as "personally" responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel's own commission of inquiry - is "a man of peace", according to Mr Bush.

And new precedents are set without discussion. Washington kills the leadership of its enemies with impunity: it tries to kill Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and does kill Uday and Qusay Hussein and boasts of its prowess in "liquidating" the al-Qa'ida leadership from rocket-firing "drones". It tries to kill Saddam in Baghdad and slaughters 16 civilians and admits that the operation was "not risk-free". In Afghanistan, three men have now been murdered in the US interrogation centre at Bagram. We still don't know what really goes on in Guantanamo.

What do these precedents mean? I have a dark suspicion. From now on, our leaders, our politicians, our statesmen will be fair game too. If we go for the jugular, why shouldn't they? The killing of the UN's Sergio Vieira de Mello, was not, I think, a chance murder. Hamas's most recent statements - and since they've been added to the Bush circus of evil, we should take them seriously - are now, more than ever, personally threatening Mr Sharon. Why should we expect any other leader to be safe? If Yasser Arafat is driven into exile yet again, will there be any restraints left?

Of course, America's enemies were a grisly bunch. Saddam soiled his country with the mass graves of the innocents, Mullah Omar allowed his misogynist legions to terrify an entire society in Afghanistan. But in their absence, we have created banditry, rape, kidnapping, guerrilla war and anarchy. And all in the name of the dead of 11 September. The future of the Middle East - which is what 11 September was partly about, though we are not allowed to say so - has never looked bleaker or more bloody. The United States and Britain are trapped in a war of their own making, responsible for their own appalling predicament but responsible, too, for the lives of thousands of innocent human beings - cut to pieces by American bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq, shot down in the streets of Iraq by trigger-happy GIs.

As for "terror", our enemies are closing in on our armies in Iraq and our supposed allies in Baghdad and Afghanistan - even in Pakistan. We have done all this in the name of the dead of 11 September. Not since the Second World War have we seen folly on this scale. And it has scarcely begun.

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Unless the White House abandons its fantasies, civil war will consume the Iraqi nation, by Robert Fisk, August 30, 2003

In Iraq, they go for the jugular: two weeks ago, the UN's top man, yesterday one of the most influential Shia Muslim clerics. As they used to say in the Lebanese war, if enough people want you dead, you'll die.

So who wanted Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim dead? Or, more to the point, who would not care if he died? Well, yes, there's the famous "Saddam remnants" which the al-Hakim family are already blaming for the Najaf massacre. He was tortured by Saddam's men and, after al-Hakim had gone into his Iranian exile, Saddam executed one of his relatives each year in a vain attempt to get him to come back. Then there's the Kuwaitis or the Saudis who certainly don't want his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to achieve any kind of "Islamic revolution" north of their border.

There are neo-conservatives aplenty in the United States who would never have trusted al-Hakim, despite his connections to the Iraqi Interim Council that the Americans run in Baghdad. Then there's the Shias.

Only a couple of months ago, I remember listening to al-Hakim preaching at Friday prayers, demanding an end to the Anglo-American occupation but speaking of peace and demanding even that women should join the new Iraqi army. "Don't think we all support this man," a worshipper said to me.

Al-Hakim also had a bad reputation for shopping his erstwhile Iraqi colleagues to Iranian intelligence.

Then there's Muqtada Sadr, the young - and much less learned - cleric whose martyred father has given him a cloak of heroism among younger Shias and who has long condemned "collaboration" with the American occupiers of Iraq; less well-known is his own organisation's quiet collaboration with Saddam's regime before the Anglo-American invasion.

Deeper than this singular dispute run the angry rivers of theological debate in the seminaries of Najaf, which never accepted the idea of velayat faqi - theological rule - espoused by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Al-Hakim had called Khomeini, and his successor Ayatollah Khamanei, the "living Imam". Al-Hakim also compared himself to the martyred imams Ali and Hussein, whose family had also been killed during the first years of Muslim history. This was a trite, even faintly sacrilegious way of garnering support.

The people of Najaf, for the most part, don't believe in "living Imams" of this kind. But in the end, the bloodbath at Najaf - and the murder of Mohamed al-Hakim - will be seen for what it is: yet further proof that the Americans cannot, or will not, control Iraq. General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, said only 24 hours earlier that he needed no more troops. Clearly, he does if he wishes to stop the appalling violence. For what is happening, in the Sunni heartland around Baghdad and now in the burgeoning Shia nation to the south, is not just the back-draft of an invasion or even a growing guerrilla war against occupation. It is the start of a civil war in Iraq that will consume the entire nation if its new rulers do not abandon their neo-conservative fantasies and implore the world to share the future of the country with them.

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