Wartime cheer

Just a little wartime cheer: Civilians flee Basra as paramilitaries brace for last stand

Civilians fleeing Iraq’s main southern city of Basra said increasingly desperate Iraqi fighters were preparing for a last stand against a swelling force of British troops and tanks being readied to fight their way in.

Many of the hundreds streaming out of the city over a bridge leading south said the Iraqi soldiers, paramilitaries and Baath party members loyal to President Saddam Hussein who have held off the coalition forces since the start of the war nearly two weeks ago were trying to stop the exodus.

“They believe that if Basra empties of civilians it will be easy for the foreign troops to take the city,” one man said, echoing the comments of many.

and:

Iraqis Welcome U.S. Marines in Shatra
Monday, March 31, 2003 11:43 a.m. ET
By Sean Maguire

SHATRA, Iraq (Reuters) – Hundreds of Iraqis shouting “Welcome to Iraq” greeted Marines who entered the town of Shatra Monday after
storming it with planes, tanks and helicopter gunships.

A foot patrol picked its way through the small southern town, 20 miles north of the city of Nassiriya, after being beckoned in by a
crowd of people.

“There’s no problem here. We are happy to see Americans,” one young man shouted.

and on our friends the peaceniks, Julie Burchill writes in The Guardian:

What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people. But even those whose anti-war protests started in good faith now know that when Saddam’s regime comes tumbling down, thousands of Iraqis will dance and sing with joy before the TV cameras, and thank our armed forces for giving them back their lives.

Links via Command Post, I think.