US missile attack kills 13 civilians in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
13 September 2004

"I am a journalist. I'm dying, I'm dying," screamed Mazen al-Tumeizi,
a correspondent for the Arabic television channel al-Arabiya, after shrapnel
from a rocket fired by an American helicopter slammed into his back.
Twelve others were killed and 61 wounded by rockets from two US
helicopters on Haifa Street in central Baghdad. They had fired into a crowd
milling around a burning Bradley fighting vehicle that had been hit by a
rocket or bomb hours before.
"The helicopter fired on the Bradley to destroy it after it had been
hit earlier and it was on fire," said Major Phil Smith of the 1st Cavalry
Division. "It was for the safety of the people around it."
Mr Tumeizi, a Palestinian, was the sixth Arab journalist to be killed
by American troops since Baghdad was captured last year. The videotape of
his last moments shows the Bradley blazing in the distance and a crowd of
young men celebrating its destruction, but it shows no reason why the
helicopters should open fire.
Many of those hit by the rockets in Haifa Street, in a tough
neighbourhood of tower blocks notorious as a centre of resistance to the
occupation, were on their way to work. "We are just ordinary workers. We are
just trying to live," said Haidar Yahyiah, 23, sobbing with pain from a
broken leg as he lay in bed in nearby Karkh hospital.
He and others described how they had been woken by the sound of
explosions in Haifa Street in the early dawn. They had been sleeping on the
roofs because it is too hot in the Baghdad summer to sleep inside. They saw
a vehicle on fire. But it was several hours later, at about 8am, that they
sallied out.
By then US troops had already removed four lightly wounded soldiers
from the Bradley. Young men and children had swarmed over the vehicle,
cheering triumphantly, waving black flags and setting it ablaze again. The
US military said that a Kiowa, a light reconnaissance and attack helicopter,
fired rockets at the Bradley to destroy weapons and ammunition on board. But
it is evident from the al-Arabiya video that the rockets landed among people
standing or walking far away from the Bradley.
Hamid Ali Khadum was on his way to work when he was hit. "At first I
thought I had just tripped over dead people but then I realised I was
wounded myself," he said as he lay in Karkh hospital waiting for an
operation on his heavily bandaged left leg. The rest of his body was
peppered with shrapnel. A male nurse standing nearby said: "This happens not
just in Haifa Street but in all Baghdad, and not just in Baghdad but in all
Iraq."
The slaughter in Haifa Street took place only a few hundred yards from
the heavily defended International Zone (what used to be called the Green
Zone) which houses the headquarters of the Iraqi government and its American
ally. It is a measure of the military failure of the US occupation that it
has failed to assume control of this Sunni Muslim neighbourhood in the heart
of the capital.
Early yesterday, insurgents fired more than a dozen rockets and
mortars into the International Zone. The zone contains the US embassy and
Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, which the US is about to refurbish at a
cost of $200m (£110m). US troops set up road blocks around the city, causing
enormous traffic jams, in an unavailing attempt to catch whoever was
launching the mortars.
There was scattered violence elsewhere in Baghdad, in which 12 people
died and 41 were injured. Colonel Alaa Bashir, the police chief of the
Yarmouk district in west Baghdad, was killed by a bomb while on patrol. A
suicide bomber blew himself up in a vehicle packed with explosives at the
gates to Abu Ghraib prison - he was the only one to die. A US plane attacked
a machine-gun team from the Mehdi Army in their stronghold in Sadr City in
east Baghdad.
In Ramadi, a city controlled by insurgents west of Baghdad, 10 people
were killed and 40 wounded in fighting, according to the local hospital. A
US Humvee was also set ablaze, but casualties were unknown.
South of Baghdad, three Polish soldiers were killed during an attack,
further indicating that violence has spread to all parts of Iraq, even
though up to six months ago it had been largely confined to the so-called
Sunni triangle or the Sunni Muslim provinces around Baghdad. Gunmen from
Shia areas have now joined in.
©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights reserved