Khaled Bayomi looks a bit surprised when he sees the American officer on TV regret that they don't have any resources to stop the looting in Baghdad.

"I happened to be there just as the US forces told people to start looting" he says.

Khaled Bayomi went from Malmo, Sweden, to Baghdad to be a human shield, and arrived on the day the fighting begun. About this he can tell us plenty and for a long time, but the most interesting part of his story is his witness-account about the great surge of looting now taking place.

"I had visited a few friends that live in a worn-down area just beyond the Haifa Avenue, on the west bank of the Tigris River. It was April 8 and the fighting was so heavy I couldn't make it over to the other side of the river. On the afternoon it became perfectly quiet, and four American tanks pulled up in position on the outskirts of the slum area. From these tanks we heard anxious calls in Arabic, which told the population to come closer."

"All morning anybody who'd tried to cross the streets had been fired upon. But during this strange silence people eventually became curious. After three-quarters of an hour the first Baghdad citizens dared to come forward. At that moment the US solders shot two Sudanese guards, who were posted in front of a local administrative building, on the other side of the Haifa Avenue."

"I was just 300 meters away when the guards where murdered. Then they shot the building entrance to pieces, and their Arabic translators in the tanks told people to run in and grab whatever they could inside the building. Rumors spread rapidly and the house was cleaned out. Next tanks broke down the doors to the Justice Department in the next building, and looting was carried on there too."

"I was standing in a big crowd of civilians who also saw all this. They didn't take any part in the looting, but they were too afraid to take any action against it. Many of them had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning looting spread to the Museum of Modern Art, which lies another 500 meters to the north. There was also two crowds, one looting and the other disgracefully watching it happen."

"Are you saying it was the US troops that initiated the looting?"

"Absolutely. The absence of scenes of joy meant the US forces needed images of Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated their disgust with Saddam's regime."

"But people in Baghdad tore down a big statue of Saddam?"

"They did? A US tank did that, actually, close to the hotel where all the journalists live. Until noon on the 9th of April, I didn't see a single torn picture of Saddam anywhere. If people had wanted to turn over statues they could have gone for some of the many smaller ones, without the help of an American tank. If this had been a political uproar, people would have turned over statues first and looted afterwards."

Home in Sweden Khaled Bayomi is a PhD student at Lund University , where he's been teaching for ten years and researching conflicts in the Middle East. He's very informed about the conflicts, as well as on the propaganda war.

"Isn't it good that Saddam is gone, then?"

"He isn't gone. He's dissolved his army into tiny, tiny groups. This is why there was never any big battle. Saddam dissolved Iraq as a state as far back as 1992, and has had a parallel tribal structure going, which since then has been altogether decisive for the country. When the USA begun the war, Saddam completely abandoned the state, and now depends on this tribal structure. That's why he abandoned the big cities without any battle."

"Now the USA is forced to do everything themselves, because there's no political force from within that could challenge the structure in place. The two challengers who came in from the outside were immediately lynched."

He's referring to what happened to General Nazar al-Khazraji, who came in from Denmark, and Shia-muslim leader Abdul Majid al- Khoei, who were both chopped to pieces by a raging crowd in Najaf, because they where perceived to be American puppets. According to Danish newspaper BT, al-Khazraji was picked up by the CIA in Denmark and brought to Iraq.

"Now we have an occupying power in place in Iraq, it hasn't said how long they'll stay, it hasn't brought forward any time-plan for civilian rule, and it has set no date for general elections. Big big chaos is coming."