Of all the reportage I've read based in Iraq, the daily reports by the Mirror's Anton Antonowicz has been the best so far.
SAND BEFORE THE STORM
Mar 26 2003By Anton Antonowicz
IT IS mid-afternoon and I can barely see more than 300 yards from my ninth-floor balcony window. The desert wind from the south has been blowing since the middle of the night. It brings a sandstorm and the noise of the guns closer.
A strange blood-orange glow hangs across the city. From the American and British point of view, this is the wrong kind of weather.
The Iraqis have torched oil dumps to obscure and confuse the enemy attacks upon the capital, but nature, so much more powerful, is doing a far, far better job.
"In March we expect all kinds of weather - one day storms, one day rain, one day bright blue skies," my Baghdad friend tells me. "But this sandstorm is something that comes along once in a generation.