Iraq: the human toll (part two)
As news reporters tracked troops on the road to Baghdad, much of the
suffering and loss of ordinary Iraqi civilians was left untold. Until now.
Here, in a compelling dispatch, award-winning foreign correspondent Ed
Vulliamy goes in search of their stories
Sunday July 6, 2003
The Observer
The hospital in which Salima Hashem died, where the childless Kassim and his
wife lie, and from which Jessica Lynch was rescued, is one of two in
Nasiriyah. At the other, the General Surgical Hospital, six o'clock in the
evening in the wards on the North Wing would usually have been a quiet time,
says Dr Karim Azurgan, an orthopaedic surgeon. 'We would have finished our
rounds, with patients getting ready for their evening meal.' But on the
night of 24 March, the ward was anything but tranquil. That was the
hospital's turn to become the target of two war crimes: one by the Iraqis,
with a retort from the Americans. The wing is now a rubble of twisted metal
and masonry blown akimbo, with beds and medicine cabinets strewn around.
'They were not war patients in here, they were in hospital for normal
reasons you would come to hospital for,' says Dr Azurgan. 'But then, of
course, those who survived the bombing became war patients.'
The Americans might have seen reason for dispatching the bomb that crashed
through the ward ceiling, in breezy defiance of the Geneva Conventions. As
part of the Baa'th party's tactic to use such places as hospitals for human
shields, the governor of Nasiriyah, Adel Mehdi, and head of security Kamil
Bahtat had arrived that afternoon, brandishing satellite phones which give
out global positioning signals easily picked up by American radar. The
doctors, no fools, 'were screaming at the Ba'athists to leave,' says Dr
Azurgan. 'One of my colleagues even threatened to shoot them if they did
not.'
They remained - and survived. But, whatever the temptation to the Americans,
two red crescents, still visible, clearly marked the roof of the building,
as did a flag bearing the same symbol. In theory protected by the laws of
war, some 70 patients were wounded and four killed - before the scene of
mayhem that followed. 'As the ambulances moved in to take the injured to the
other hospital, they fired at them, too, from helicopters,' recalls Dr
Azurgan. 'They were shooting at anyone who was driving or walking on the
street.'
It is hard to cite a figure for the civilian dead in Nasiriyah - 'about 800,
maybe more', calculates the keeper of records at the main hospital, Abdel
Karim, who logged 412 war-death certificates from his own wards alone, of
which only 25 were military casualties - that is, those wearing a black or
military uniform, or else a black ribbon somewhere on civilian clothes, as
was the practice of the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitaries. The papers also show
3,013 war wounded, including Mr and Mrs Kassim, the deaths of whose children
may or may not lie elsewhere, in some American record.
Through Nasiriyah's northern gate, where the Kassim family was ambushed, the
American Marines surged north. There are rumours in Washington about a race
between the marines and the army, taking a route further west, to reach
Baghdad. If true, it was a race for high, sanguine stakes. Almost
immediately outside the gate lie the first burnt-out skeletons of cars and
civilian buses blasted off the road as they passed - or were passed - by
advancing American armour, each bus capable of holding up to 50 passengers.
The road north is lined by kilns making adobe bricks with which the small
farming hamlets are built. Despite the ravaging of this landscape,
schoolchildren walk to their studies in clean, pressed white shirts,
carrying their books. In the town of Ash-Shatra, a poor ribbon development
along the highway, they walk past a concentration of these spidery frames
that were once buses. Many were removed, stashed behind houses; some are now
being taken away by heavy vehicles. But one is still parked, awkwardly, on
the roadside.
Whether through recklessness or naivety, these buses continued running in
spite of the American advance, and this bus was the unfortunate 8pm service
at Ash-Shatra, on its way from Baghdad to Nasiriyah. In the tangerine light
of dusk, children come to play at being drivers in the incinerated hulk. The
cousin of one of these urchins, Sajed Mohammed, 13, was among those
preparing to alight when the bus made its regular stop, some 100m from a
tank blocking the road.
'The lights were on inside the bus,' remembers Sajed, 'and there was some
shouting, American shouting. There was silence for a while, then a noise
which made me think I would go deaf. The bus jumped like an animal being
killed. Next day, the Americans came and buried the bodies of all the
people, and the morning after that they came back and burned the bus.'
Rahad Klader, 30, who saw the incident from his window, recounts that after
the tank had fired and the bus exploded, the Americans came up to the
vehicle and emptied their machine-guns into whoever had survived. Ammunition
strewn around the wreck is, indeed, American - not Iraqi, which would have
given the tank some reason to suspect military activity aboard the bus.
'The Fedayeen were hiding between houses further down the road,' says
Klader, 'and there had been fighting. But they were nowhere near the bus,
and they were not on the bus. Oh yes, the lights were on all right.
Fluorescent lights, bright and blue-ish. We could see from our houses that
they were the usual people aboard when the bus stops here every evening.
The Shiites are Iraq's religious majority, persecuted during Saddam's
tyranny, and prey to one of the most brutal episodes in modern history - the
dictator's suppression of the Shiite rebellion on the slipstream of the
first gulf war. It was an uprising urged, but unaided and (in the Shia's
mind) betrayed by the US. The Shiite militias advanced to within some 50km
of Baghdad, waiting for an American intervention that never came. Saddam's
retort was a savage one.
The last time I was in Iraq, in 1991, I travelled south from Baghdad in the
wake of the Republican Guard, as it laid waste to the Shia population and
its glorious cities, its finery reduced to rubble. The journey generated a
clear notion, but no proof, of what we were travelling over - mass graves
recently excavated, bringing back to the surface thousands of slaughtered
men, women and children, their earth-stained skulls still blindfolded.
'You see, sir,' said Karim Jasim, an excavator brushing dirt off a skeleton
at the al-Musayyib mass grave near Kerbala, 'there are two Iraqs; one above
the ground, and another beneath it.'
Twelve years after these massacres, the Americans finally rolled along the
route taken by Saddam Hussein's shock troops, to liberate these cities,
their people and religion, after decades of fear and oppression. But not all
of those who waited lived to relish that liberation. And few of those who
gather around the wondrous shrine in Najaf - of gold and mosaic, in which
the first Shiite caliph, Ali Ibn Ali Talib, Mohammed's nephew, is buried -
regard the US army as one of deliverance. Indeed, the Americans are for the
most part resented, and duly absent from the city itself, confined to bases
on its outskirts. This is in some degree due to the anti-Americanism innate
to political Islam, but is also explained by the way in which Najaf -
located on the most lyrical and evocative palm-strewn banks of the
Euphrates - was 'liberated'.
There was reason for the cluster-bomb run that scorched along the main
street at the edge of the Haikarama neighbourhood in the early hours of 27
March, as residents acknowledge there was an Iraqi army radar position and
military truck hidden in scrappy woodland over the road from their houses.
But a cluster bomb explodes in all directions, not only one.
'It was about 1.30 in the morning when the bombs started falling,' recalls
Fahem Jabar al-Huwayli, sitting in what is left of his front room, the
masonry still smelling of the fire that raged through it, the walls pitted
with shrapnel. 'Most people were asleep, but stupid enough to go out and see
what was happening.'
By the time a small fleet of ambulances screeched on to the scene, says
al-Huwayli's neighbour Abdul Hussein Ubayed, 'There were wounded people all
over the street, and my son here, Ali Abdel, was injured also.' The boy,
prostrate, duly lifts his shirt to reveal a scar running from his scrotum,
across his torso to his throat.
It was after the medical teams began trying to load their vehicles with the
injured that bombers returned for a second raid. 'By then, I'd say 35 or so
people had been killed, and the military target destroyed,' says Ubayed. 'It
was during the second raid that they hit the ambulance. We saw it catch fire
and five people were killed.' What remains of the vehicle is now parked at
the local Red Crescent base - a gnarled frame of scorched metal without a
trace of paint left, lacerated by shrapnel, and harboured next to another
ambulance on which the torched medical emblem, the red crescent - a supposed
protection - is still visible.
Bombing ambulances is a war crime, but the word of residents would be
evidentially insufficient, in the unlikely event that the alleged
perpetrators of this crime in Najaf were one day called to account.
(America's war in Iraq was quickly followed by a request, granted by the
United Nations, that the US military enjoy a unique exemption from
prosecution by the new International Criminal Court.) The word of the driver
himself would, however, carry some cogency.
After the initial bombing raid, Osham Thalar Messin and his paramedic
answered an alarm call at 1.10am. They boarded ambulance number 2260 and
raced to the scene of the attack, along with two others. 'When we arrived,
wounded people were lying in the road,' recalls Messin, 'others were in the
houses. We put five people into the ambulance from the road, and went into a
house to get more. That was when the second raid came in. There were
explosions along the street, and one of the bombs went off next to my
ambulance.'
Messin's account is credible mainly for the umbrage with which he hastily
and haughtily dismisses the figure of five people supposedly killed in his
vehicle. 'It was two,' he emphasises, 'not five, but two. Whoever told you
that is overlooking the fact that I managed to rescue three of those I had
loaded, but not the other two. They'd been hit by what looked like burning
iron, or something sharp and heavy. It was a woman of about 25 and a child
of, I would say, eight, who died. I think they were both from the same
family, travelling on a minibus - no one knew who they were. They were
buried by the roadside and later claimed by their families.'
A further eight ambulances were then dispatched. 'It was a terrifying
sight,' recalls Messin. 'I've been an ambulance driver for three years and
before that I was in the army, and even I was afraid. In all, we took 65
wounded people by ambulance to the hospital. I couldn't count the dead - we
left most of them there to make space for the living in our vehicles. I'd
say about 50.'
'It's hard to judge how many were killed in Najaf,' says Dr Hussein Kaptan
at the main hospital. Our documents here alone record at least 500, with 700
or more wounded. I've got a family here which was all killed except for one
boy and his father. I have to keep the child here, apart from his wounds,
because he is suicidal.'
The 16-year-old Malik Musa was a cowherd, tending to his charge in a stretch
of rural land astride the Euphrates between Najaf and Hilla - along which
the bombers connected the two towns with an umbilical cord of death. Malik
looks rather like a dead spider, his bandaged arms warped into odd
positions. He lies on his side. 'He worked hard,' says his father Musa
Hamsa, 'and sometimes behaved badly - and if I was ever angry with him, I
certainly don't care now.' There were always two prospective versions of the
fall of Baghdad: one fearful, the other fantastical. The first accorded with
America's fear that Saddam would defend the capital and that it may be
necessary to either lay siege or take the city street by street. The second
was the vision of an entry into Baghdad met with exuberant gratitude and
crowds cheering a force of liberation. In the event, America's passage into
Baghdad was a cannonade that resulted in probably the heaviest bloodletting
of the war: the so-called 'Thunder Run'.
The Thunder Run, as it was branded by some American media, consisted of two
armoured punches into the capital, on 5 and 7 April, respectively. They
departed from the southeastern checkpoint to the city and forked - one wing
heading for the airport, the other towards Saddam's palace. They were,
essentially, demonstrations of force rather than attempts to take the city,
and a finger stuck up against what was being said on Iraqi television by
'Comical Ali' - Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf - that US
forces were nowhere near Baghdad.
'It was very confusing,' recalls Ali Mahadi, a welder. 'I was having
breakfast in the front of my house, and when I heard the first shooting I
presumed it was the Iraqis, because we'd been told there were no Americans
near Baghdad.
I went upstairs to see what was happening, and saw the first armoured car
coming over the bridge there. Bilal Abdul Muhed was driving his taxi, and
another man. They got out, put their hands up, and were shot to pieces. A
lot of people rushed out to try and help Bilal - fools, they were killed,
too, by the shooting, right and left, as the Americans came through.' Bits
of Bilal's car are still strewn along the roadside, but he was merely one of
the first among hundreds to die that day.
Sahad Majul Majit had set up his cigarette stall at the Khadessia junction
at 6 o'clock on the morning of 5 April, as he had done for 16 years. 'They
came from nowhere,' he says, 'suddenly, at about 7 o'clock, shooting
everywhere. I didn't think the Americans were in Baghdad after what I had
heard on television - and there were some Fedayeen between the houses. But I
didn't expect the Americans to come into Baghdad like that, and when I saw
what was happening, I grabbed some of my cigarettes and ran into that
supermarket over there.
'They were firing at anything that moved for three days. I myself helped get
30 bodies into the supermarket - what a smell they made. Across from Majul's
now re-opened stall are two bus shelters, on either side of the road, now
riddled with heavy-calibre fire. Majul saw what happened: 'There was a
military car, and the soldiers ran into that far shelter. The Americans shot
that one up. But then a bus came down the road, and the people ran off it to
hide in the other bus shelter - and they fired at that one, too. I could
hear people screaming as they died, even with the noise of the guns.'
Majul is glad to be back in business, but says, 'It's hard to know what to
think. First of all we had Saddam, now we've got Saddam without a face. And
by the way, could you write that I don't smoke? If I did, I wouldn't have
any cigarettes to sell.'
Arabia Jamal and his son Jamal Rabir began to worry about Arabia's brother,
sister-in-law and three children when the car journey to their house that
should have taken 15 minutes stretched to a two-hour wait, in the tumult
outside their electrical shop. It was young Jamal, aged 20 and a
biotechnology student, who began the search. It lasted a week, during which,
along with the Imam of his mosque, Jamal became immersed in the recovery and
burial of 'more people than I can remember, maybe 30, maybe 50'. All week we
buried them, some by the roadside, some we took to the hospital and helped
to bury them there.
I didn't sleep for three nights, and had the stink of burned flesh on my
clothes. I did it for three reasons: because I was looking for my cousins
and their parents, because it is our religion that the dead must be buried
by an Imam and because I studied anatomy, so I am not squeamish. Finally,'
rasps Jamal, 'I found my uncle and aunt and cousins. And not from their
faces, they were so burnt. My aunt had a ring - her father had worked in
Russia, and it had Russian writing on it.'
The hospital to which Jamal took some of those he did not bury by the road
was the Yarmouk infirmary. There, on the wall in reception, are lists of the
dead and missing that provide the basis for at least some anecdotal
calculation. There are 37 sheets listing the dead between the period 5 and 8
April - each bearing a minimum 20 names, a total of at least 740. Those
still missing from the same period are listed on 48 sheets, with an average
of 25 names apiece - some 1,200. The hospital director, Hamed Farij, has
been restored to authority by the Americans - like most of his peers -
despite having held the office under Saddam Hussein, as part of an
infamously corrupt health system. He has signed the disclaimer handed out by
the Americans denouncing his former party and now praises the American entry
into Baghdad as being 'very beautiful', adding that most of the names on
this list are those of the Fedayeen or Iraqi soldiers.
But Dr Nama Hasan Mohammed overhears this conversation and, the director
departed, tells a different story. 'Mr Hamed Farij was a Ba'athist and left
before the war, he has only just returned. I was here day and night all the
time. I can tell you that we passed anyone in uniform or with a black ribbon
to the al-Rashid Military Hospital. These dead are all civilians, although
there are some soldiers among the missing posted. Those are the ones whose
names we know. How many are there without names? We don't know.' Dr Hasan
takes us out through the hospital grounds, to show us the fresh earth where
many of the dead - unclaimed - remain buried in eight pits. There are
roughly 25 to each pit. 'Many are children. One was a baby, shot at the bus
stop. He was eight weeks old.'
America and Britain have proclaimed their war in Iraq over and won, but
wars, unlike football matches, do not end when the whistle blows. Iraq
remains a land without peace; a war of attrition continues between the
occupier and a fragmented resistance. And each night, when the sun sinks
into Baghdad's skyline, the burning and shooting begins again - be it among
the populace or between that populace and the Americans. The chatter of guns
and arcs of tracer fire pierce the eventide; billowing smoke rises into the
dusk. The city may live under the martial order of military occupation, but
it is also afflicted by a lawlessness which that very order has unleashed.
And it is not only in fighting that civilians die. The anarchic absence of
peace, that the Iraqi war has wrought, also kills.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,992577,00.html
--
"After we shoot something with DU, we're not supposed to go around it, due
to the fact that it could cause cancer," says a sergeant in Baghdad from New
York, assigned to a Bradley, who asked not to be further identified.
"We don't know the effects of what it could do," says the sergeant. "If one
of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside, or an ammo truck, we wouldn't
go near it, even if it had important documents inside. We play it safe."
Six American vehicles struck with DU "friendly fire" in 1991 were deemed to
be too contaminated to take home, and were buried in Saudi Arabia. Of 16
more brought back to a purpose-built facility in South Carolina, six had to
be buried in a low-level radioactive waste dump.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0515/p01s02-woiq.html
--
According to Myers, U.S. warplanes dropped 1,500 cluster bombs in Iraq, 26
of them within 1,500 feet of civilian neighborhoods. Britain's Ministry of
Defense said the British army fired by artillery or rocket launchers more
than 2,000 cluster munitions and dropped 66 cluster bombs around Basra.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0515-02.htm
--
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 16, 1953
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