WAR ON IRAK

Independent: Robert Fisk: A quiet Baghdad night of occasional air raid sirens and mysterious explosions

On the roof of the al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, you could hear the missile coming. It swooped down out of the clouds of smoke south of the Tigris, hissed past the office and disappeared over the old Ahrar bridge. "Was that what I think it was?" the anchorman asked me down the line from Doha. Ah yes, indeed. It was one of those days. A few minutes later, chatting to the al-Jazeera staff in their waterfront villa, an old colonial home with wooden bannisters and beautifully crafted blue-and-white patterned floor tiles, came the sound of supersonic jets.

We looked at each other with that special intensity that members of the most successful Arab television channel do when they smell danger. Only 18 months ago, the Americans sent a cruise missile into al-Jazeera's office in Kabul, an attack for which the United States neither apologised nor explained. But Tony Blair was attacking the station last week for showing videotape of two dead British soldiers in Basra and, only a few days ago, who should turn up at al-Jazeera's Baghdad office but Taiseer Alouni, former manager of the Kabul office who was lucky to avoid the earlier cruise attack.

Baghdad is also a city of rumours, sometimes confirmed, often tantalisingly obscure. The Iraqi army has announced the arrival of Arab volunteers "seeking heaven", who have arrived from every Middle Eastern country to fight for Iraq. I would have doubted all this had I not met on Saturday three serious young men, all wearing leather jackets and khaki trousers and black berets who informed me, seriously and with the sincerity of youth, that they intended to fight and if necessary die in Iraq. One was Palestinian, the other two Syrian, the first explaining to me that he was inspired by patriotism for the "pan-Arab cause" and by God.

Two more American aircraft have been shot down, the Iraqi army claimed. Again, scepticism is an essential response, as it is to more and more statements by the Anglo-American forces. Then there's the Baath Party official I meet as the American jets were sweeping back over Baghdad last night. "We shot down a plane over the Tigris and I saw the pilot bail out," he tells me.

He was from the Emirates, he was an Arab. When he landed, the people heard he was an Arab and started to beat him. He said he had an American female co-pilot who had also bailed out. She was captured later. True or false? Why on earth should Arabs be flying over Iraq in an American plane? Or was the pilot, if the story bears any relation to the truth, an Arab-American in the US Air Force? There are other stories of a Kuwaiti pilot also captured. Now the rumour is of up to 500 American prisoners-of-war, most of them taken into custody in the Najaf area. "They will be part of a political solution, if there is any," the Baath official says. Five hundred, I ask in disbelief? I do not accept this. But then I never believed that, 10 days after the start of this war, the Americans and British would still be fighting for Basra and Nassariyah and Kerbala and Najaf.