The Guardian and Observer’s correspondent recalls his 2003 journey dodging US tanks, checkpoints and police
, dodging checkpoints and military police on a March afternoon in 2003, our first encounter was a geyser of burning oil arcing against a sky blackened by the smoke of burning wells.
A rumour spread of a mass grave that had been found by British troops, so we headed to a Sunni village in the largely Shia south, where bodies of several people were being exhumed, victims of the Saddam era. Unlike the village, Basra, which had suffered so much at the hands of Saddam, was happy at his impending fall. The lethal hostility towards the British from the myriad of Shia insurgent groups that would emerge there came later.Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesThe Americans were closing in quickly on Baghdad.
We crept in the fading evening light past tanks illuminated by nearby fires until we reached an overpass.
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