Residents fight back in city of anarchy

TAKING the law into their own hands, Baghdad residents blockaded streets and beat up looters yesterday as disorder spread in the Iraqi capital.

The United States said the military does not intend to act as a police force.

Thousands of Iraqis including entire families plundered and burned government ministries and other symbols of Saddam Hussein's regime in a third straight day of lawlessness that began with the arrival of US troops in Baghdad.

The Ministries of Education and Industry, both in the heart of Baghdad, were looted and set on fire, sending dark smoke over the city.

The Foreign and Information Ministries and the Ba'ath Party headquarters were sacked along with the city's engineering and nursing colleges.

The Trade Ministry was also smouldering, along with one of the main markets in the city centre, and mobs looted Iraq's largest archeological museum.

In Baghdad's Karadah neighbourhood, residents fought back. They armed themselves with Kalashnivkov rifles, set up roadblocks and checked passing cars for stolen goods.

Any plunder was confiscated, and people in the cars were taken out and beaten and tossed in an alley.

The German Embassy and the French cultural centre, both in east Baghdad, were sacked by looters.

The French and German buildings were stripped of furniture, curtains, decorations, and anything else that could be carried away.

At the French cultural centre, where looters burst water pipes and flooded the ground floor, books were left floating in the reading rooms and corridors, and a photograph of Jacques Chirac, the French president, was smashed.

French reporters said the French Embassy, also on the Tigris's east bank, appeared to have been spared because it remained under the protection of French military guards. The German Embassy was unprotected.

In Saddam City, a Baghdad slum dominated by Shi'ite Muslims and named after the Sunni Muslim leader they despised, mosque minarets blared appeals to people to stop looting and destroying their city.

Some people heeded the clerics' calls and brought stolen goods to mosques for safekeeping. In some neighbourhoods, residents erected street barricades of tiles, huge rocks and sandbags to keep looters out.

British forces shot and killed five men trying to rob a bank who opened fire on them in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the scene of looting over the past week, a US military spokesman said on Friday.

"The robbers engaged the patrol," the spokesman said, adding that British forces fired back, killing five people in the incident which took place on Thursday.

With many Baghdad residents demanding US troops restore order, Brig Gen Vincent Brooks, Central Command spokesman, said the military is helping to rebuild the civil administration but expects the Iraqis themselves to assume responsibility for law and order.