Iraq

A nation cheers 'Welcome home'

As thousands wave flags, the former prisoners of war reunite with family and friends in Texas.

[AP photo] Spc. Joseph Hudson waves as Pfc. Patrick Miller holds an American flag as they arrive at Fort Bliss, Texas, on Saturday night.

Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 20, 2003

Seven soldiers captured in the war in Iraq made a triumphant return to Fort Bliss on Saturday night, and were greeted by a cheering crowd of family members and thousands of other well-wishers.

The crowd roared as the C-17 plane landed on a wind-swept runway. Two servicemen poked their heads through a hatch on top of the plane, holding an American flag and waving as the plane taxied along the tarmac.

The soldiers drove a victory lap in a pair of golf carts, waving flags to the crowd. People chanted "USA" in return while a military band played God Bless America. Spc. Joseph N. Hudson, the only soldier to address the crowd, thanked them for their support. "This is why we live in a great country," he said.

Five of the former POWs are stationed with the U.S. Army's 507th Maintenance Company. Two other Apache helicopter crewmen, who are with the First Cavalry Division, were to continue to their home base at Fort Hood.

Also Saturday:

Baghdad seemed to turn a corner toward peace and normality.

Officials announced that officers from Iraq's newly reconstituted police force arrested Saddam Hussein's former finance minister and turned him over to U.S. authorities, who hope he can lead them to the ousted dictatorship's millions in hidden wealth.

According to Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer, coalition military forces in Iraq are putting the finishing touches to a proclamation formally declaring the war over. Downer told Australian television's Seven Network that final details are still being worked out, "but it will happen in the next few days."

Some Marines who seized the eastern half of Baghdad this month are handing over control to the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division as the military's mission moves from combat to policing.

After a private reception and dinner of submarine sandwiches, cookies and pink lemonade, the 507th soldiers were to spend the night at the post to undergo evaluation by doctors from nearby William Beaumont Army Medical Center.

A nine-member team of debriefing specialists and a psychologist accompanied the seven on their trans-Atlantic flight from Germany, which was refueled in flight to avoid requiring an additional stop, U.S. Air Force officials said.

The seven who had been held captive for three weeks were rescued April 13 after Iraqi captors abandoned their posts ahead of advancing American troops.

The Fort Bliss soldiers were captured and nine comrades were killed in an attack near Nasiriyah on March 23. Another member of the 507th, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, was rescued separately in a daring commando raid April 1 and continues to recuperate in Washington, D.C.

Returning to Fort Bliss on Saturday were Spc. Edgar Hernandez, 21, Mission, Texas; Spc. Joseph Hudson, 23, Alamogordo, N.M.; Spc. Shoshana Johnson, 30, El Paso; Pfc. Patrick Miller, 23, Park City, Kan., and Sgt. James Riley, 31, Pennsauken, N.J.

Slowly across Iraq, like a swimmer testing the water before diving in, most of the main cities are returning to some level of normalcy.

In Baghdad, residents got their first post-war newspaper on Saturday, published by the Communist Party, and Marines didn't shoot when a car backfired. To the south in Basra, doctors are treating more feuding neighbors and car crash victims and fewer people wounded in the war.

The capital's more than 5-million people still have to boil their drinking water and live in darkness unless they have private generators.

Shopkeepers are slowly shoveling the debris of war and looting onto gutters.

About one in 10 shops is open, more in the heart of the city, less in some neighborhoods where swarms of looters stripped everything from supermarkets to mom-and-pop tailoring shops.

Vendors overturned another prohibition from the Hussein era and began peddling whiskey and beer on the street.

Traffic is again dense, partly because traffic lights are out and many major intersections are manned by teenage volunteers, but the jams also signal that more people are leaving their homes.

Local police in blue pants, white shirts and French-style blue Kepi hats were a greater presence on the streets Saturday than they have been, and for the first time were armed with AK-47 assault rifles.

The first newspaper published since the war ended had people eagerly reaching for copies of the six-page tabloid, Tarik al Shahab, or the People's Way, owned by Iraq's tiny orthodox Communist Party.

Iraqi television and radio are still off the air, although Baghdad residents with powerful antennas can receive Arabic-language broadcasts from neighboring Iran.

There was an influx of necessities, too. A 50-truck convoy brought the first massive shipment of donated food to the capital, including flour.

Some isolated pockets of armed resistance still remain.

U.S. troops outside Baghdad imposed a 7 p.m. curfew for the first time Saturday night, with orders to shoot anything that moves west of the Euphrates River.

Four U.S. soldiers patrolling Baghdad were wounded on Saturday when a young Iraqi girl handed them an explosive and it blew up. One soldier's leg was amputated; none suffered life-threatening injuries.

The northern city of Kirkuk, the center of one of the largest petroleum reserves in the Middle East, remained up for grabs on Saturday as coalition forces and Kurdish troops were attacked by well-armed and vengeful Hussein loyalists.

The nearby northern city of Mosul, the third-largest in Iraq, has not been fully controlled by the several hundred coalition troops deployed there. The city of nearly 2-million people is still wracked by daily arson and nightly gun battles, by vigilantism and communal violence between Kurds and Arabs.

But in the southern cities of Najaf, Karbala and Nasiriyah all reported calm.

Marines have restored most services in Nasiriyah, Central Command said Saturday. The city's four pumping and treatment stations now run off generators, and 6-million gallons of water are being distributed daily from the Ash Shatrah water plant.

The hunt continued for members of Hussein's leadership.

Former finance minister Hikmat Mizban Ibrahim Azzawi, a deputy prime minister who appears on a list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis, was the latest in a string of Hussein's aides to be captured and the first big arrest made by the country's police force, a once-corrupt organization that has been partly revived to help control looting.

The U.S. military also took into custody two people who could aid in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and terrorists. Emad Ani, one of Iraq's top chemical-weapons scientists who is believed to be the architect of the country's nerve agent program, turned himself in to U.S. forces Friday. Khala Khader Salahat, a member of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, also surrendered to U.S. troops in Baghdad on Friday.

Officials were confident that Azzawi would know where Hussein's government hid its fortune, said Marine Capt. Stewart Upton, a spokesman for the Central Command.

"As the deputy prime minister for finance and economics, he could have information on the locations of money that belongs to the Iraqi people," Upton said. "He's a deputy prime minister. That in and of itself says that he has knowledge of the inner workings and the command structure of the regime."

Some analysts believe Hussein might have stolen as much as $20-billion from Iraq and secreted it away in offshore accounts and front companies. Others, however, suggest the figure might be smaller because he spent much of his fortune building palaces and other monuments to himself.

Hikmat was No. 45 on a list of 55 former Iraqi leaders the American military said "must be pursued and brought to justice." He is the eight of diamonds in an American deck of cards that identifies especially wanted members of Hussein's regime. Police nabbed him in Baghdad on Friday, making him the fifth member on the list to surrender or be captured.

-- Information from the New York Times, Washington Post, Knight Ridder and Associated Press was used in this report.