IRAQ

Independent: Robert Fisk: Flames engulf the symbols of power

Baghdad is burning. You could count 16 columns of smoke rising over the city yesterday afternoon. At the beginning, there was the Ministry of Trade. I watched the looters throw petrol through the smashed windows of the ground floor and the fire burst from them within two seconds.

Then there was a clutch of offices at the bottom of the Jumhuriyah Bridge, which emitted clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. By mid- afternoon, I was standing outside the Central Bank of Iraq as each window flamed like a candle, a mile-long curtain of ash and burning papers drifting over the Tigris.

As the pickings got smaller, the looters grew tired and – the history of Baghdad insists that anarchy takes this form – the symbols of government power were cremated. The Americans talked of a "new posture" but did nothing. They pushed armoured patrols through the east of the city, Abrams tanks and Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, but their soldiers did no more than wave at the arsonists. I found a woman weeping beside her husband in the old Arab market. "We are destroying what we now have for ourselves," she said to him. "We are destroying our own future."

After the West German and Slovak embassies and the Unicef offices, it was the turn of the French cultural centre to be looted.

I briefly mentioned the extent of the anarchy to a US Marine officer who promised to tell his colonel about it. When I saw him later, he said he'd seen the colonel – but hadn't had time to mention the looting and burning.

Just a week ago, it was the Iraqi army's oil fires that covered the city in darkness. Now it is the newly "liberated" Iraqi people who are cloaking their city in ash.