‘Much of the square was empty’: Saeed Naqvi on Saddam’s statue coming down

The occupation of Iraq was undertaken with great fanfare. Vice President Dick Cheney was the spirit behind this operation, which was implemented by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The complete misreading of the public mood in Iraq, where I was present, was replicated in every detail in the Iran expedition begun on 28 February 2026. In Iraq in 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld had expected an uprising to topple the regime and embrace the Americans as liberators. What I was witness to in Baghdad was quite the opposite of what Cheney had boasted.

At the time, Yaqub (S.Y. Quraishi) had taken over as the Director General of Doordarshan; Sushma Swaraj, the information and broadcasting minister, and Quraishi both accepted my argument. This is where my friend, Rajan Abhyankar, Secretary in the MEA, came in handy and helped secure the necessary clearance. For the first time in the history of Indian journalism, Worldview India posted camera units and reporters in Baghdad, Najaf, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Amman and Lebanon. Some of these reporters happened to be in Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, witnesses to the real story, the one the world wasn’t supposed to know.

Ravi Shankar Prasad had taken over as minister when the programme was on. To Prasad goes the credit for having terminated the project when it was in full flight. He called me to his office: ‘President Bush has announced the end of major military operations; I think we can end the programme now.’ Prasad thought that the Indian contingent covering the occupation of Iraq was, in fact, supplementing the elaborate Western media propaganda to boost the occupation. The pity is that the story of the American occupation of Iraq became much more dramatic when Prasad, having no clue to the story, brought it to an end. The assumption was revealing: once Washington declared the military story over, there was apparently nothing left for Indian reporters to discover.

The standard argument against foreign coverage was that it drew low TRP ratings. Quraishi showed us the figures: Worldview India’s one-hour prime-time reporting from the Gulf had outdone even the ratings benchmark set by Kaun Banega Crorepati. The ratings argument was an alibi. At the heart of the resistance was a fear that independent Indian reporting would poke its fingers into American eyes. The establishment did not have the nerve to contradict the power running the war.

The American invasion of Iraq, which began on 20 March 2003, immediately affected all of West Asia. After the invasion, the most amusing story for journalists was Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, Saddam’s information minister and a friend of mine, standing in the public square spewing Iraqi propaganda. After American forces seized Baghdad airport, he promised a ‘non-conventional act’ against them: ‘We will do something that will be a great example for these mercenaries.’

‘Tomorrow you’ll see a unique way in which we handle the American invaders.’ In the charged atmosphere of Baghdad, he left everybody in suspense. The only narrative on what happened came to me via the reliable agency of Hardarshan Singh Mejhi.

US soldiers who had not yet found their feet in Iraq had, in the initial stages, set up one of their resting places in Baghdad Airport.

When the Americans were sleeping, the Iraqis filled the lounge ankle-deep with water. They ran a high-voltage electric current through the water. For the American retaliation, we have Mejhi’s word and CNN’s pictures. The Americans were said to have used a neutron bomb, supposedly killing people through severe dehydration while leaving buildings and furniture untouched. I remember CNN footage of an Iraqi soldier resembling a statue made from charcoal and ash.

The story was never confirmed by the Pentagon, and I have found no independent evidence that a neutron bomb was used. So, I cannot present it as established fact. But the episode belongs in this account because it conveys the information vacuum in which the war was being lived and reported: a trusted Iraqi contact supplied one fragment and CNN supplied an image; with no confirmation from the Pentagon, rumour rushed in to connect them.

In my view, Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal authors of the war, wanted the invasion to be seen as a rapid triumph. The Pentagon had embedded 300-plus journalists with American forces, creating a media spectacle on a scale no war had seen before.

On 9 April, the cameras supplied the decisive image: the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square. It could have been audaciously choreographed. They could have planned for Cheney to declare victory in a prepared statement on global television. The telecast could have been paused to insert images of an ecstatic popular upsurge pulling down the statue of Saddam at Firdos Square. Cheney’s talking head would alternate with the slow fall of the statue. But in Cheney’s wildest dreams, he could never have imagined that all the back-channel tricks that went into the manufacture of a memorable spectacle would run into serious difficulties.

With all the intelligence at its command, the US in Baghdad had completely misread the local reaction to its arrival. And for all his confidence in the media spectacle, Cheney had perhaps not bargained for a leak from a committed band of Indian journalists. Never in history had a non-Western journalist been allowed to get anywhere near what was an extremely high-stakes war effort. How could Cheney and the Pentagon have anticipated that an Indian television team, outside the system of embedded reporting, would be watching from the Palestine Hotel?

Contrary to the narrative of a popular uprising toppling the statue, the Americans had to think on their feet: they had to improvise the iconic images because the popular upsurge had simply not materialised.

A small group of Iraqis gathered around Saddam’s statue and tried unsuccessfully to bring it down. US Marines supplied a sledgehammer and a rope and eventually used an M88 armoured recovery vehicle to topple it. The spectacle was carried live and repeated incessantly.

Tight television frames made the crowd look like a popular uprising; wider views showed that much of the square was empty and that many of those present were journalists and Marines. CNN, the occupation’s premier cheerleader, to this day incorporates a video of the toppling of the statue as a lasting symbol of Americans replacing a ‘brutal’ dictatorship with democracy.

The sole superpower can arrange for a statue to be pulled down, but how does it show images of crowds celebrating Saddam Hussein’s fall? During the uprising in the Shia centres of Najaf and Karbala after Desert Storm, the retaliation by Iraqi forces was horrendous, causing streams of Shia refugees to head north towards Baghdad, many of them settling in Saddam City, a vast district northeast of the capital.

It was a slum on an immense scale, though smaller than Dharavi in Bombay.

When, contrary to US expectations, people did not come out on the streets of Baghdad, leaving the cameras blank, even as Cheney was clearing his throat in the studios for the historic victory statement, something had to be done to mobilise crowds so that the event looked like a celebration.

It was indeed a brainwave to contact Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shia cleric and politician whose father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, was murdered along with two of his sons in 1999. Muqtada al-Sadr had influence among the Shias of Saddam City. Within an hour, crowds came out singing songs, beating drums and, to cap it all, Saddam’s picture was beaten with sandals and trampled underfoot. This was real Shia anger from those who had suffered under Saddam in the south of Iraq. Sadr was rewarded for having saved the Americans from embarrassment. Saddam City was renamed Sadr City.

This was the ‘leak’ made possible by an Indian presence.

Excerpted with permission from Saeed Naqvi’s ‘The World Was Not Their Story: Odyssey of an Indian Reporter’, Speaking Tiger Books (2026).