On Sunday, it will be exactly 20 years since American tanks bludgeoned their way into Baghdad and “liberated” the Iraqi capital. The previous day, Saddam Hussein had fled from his presidential palace in the Green Zone to an underground hideaway, built by his fiercely loyal Albu Nasir tribesmen, in his home city, Tikrit. This would be his refuge till December 2003, when he would be captured by American troops and hanged three years later.
As US troops spread across Baghdad, so too did the journalists. In an image broadcast across the world, a frenzied Baghdad mob, helped by a US armoured vehicle, pulled down Saddam’s bronze statue at Firdos Square. A horde of us journalists looked down on this scene from the Paradise Hotel and Sheraton Ishtar Hotel, cameras whirring.
At lunchtime on April 14, I joined the journalists’ “outdoor broadcast” (OB) line up on the roof of the Sheraton Ishtar, an important part of all tel
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