Iraq
Human Toll - The Untold Story
By Ed Vulliamy
The Observer, UK
06 July, 2003
It was Rahad's turn to hide.
The nine-year-old girl found a good place to conceal herself from her
playmates, the game of hide and seek having lasted some two hours along
a quiet residential street in the town of Fallujah, on the banks of
the Euphrates. But while Rahad crouched behind the wall of a neighbour's
house, someone else - not playing the game - had spotted her, and her
friends; someone above. The pilot of an American A-10 'tank-buster'
aircraft, hovering in a figure of eight. He was flying an airborne weapon
equipped with some of the most advanced and accurate equipment for 'precision
target recognition' in the Pentagon's arsenal. And at 5.30pm on 29 March,
he launched his weapon at the street scene below.
The 'daisy-cutter' bounced and exploded a few feet above ground, blasting
red-hot shrapnel into the walls not of a tank but of houses. Rahad Septi
and 10 other children lost their lives; another 12 were injured. Three
adults were also killed.
Juma Septi, father to Rahad,
holds a photograph of his daughter in the palm of his hand as he recalls
the afternoon he lost his 'little flower'. A carpenter, Septi had been
a lifelong opponent of Saddam Hussein - an activist in the Islamic Accord
Party, for which he had been imprisoned, then exiled to Jordan in 1995.
Last October, Septi had returned under an armistice to start a new life
in his home town, reunited with his family. 'I don't really know what
to think now,' he says. 'We have lost Saddam Hussein, but I have lost
my daughter. They came to kill him, but killed her and the other children
instead. What am I supposed to make of that?'
Jamal Abbas joins the conversation.
'I was driving my taxi and heard the noise like thunder, when someone
told me, "Jamal, they've bombed your street!" When I got back
here, the smoke was so thick it was like night - children lying wounded
and women screaming.' Abbas learnt that his niece - 11-year-old Arij
Haki, visiting from Baghdad - had been killed immediately. 'She was
playing a guessing game with her cousins,' says the child's father Abdullah
Mohammed, 'when the top half of her head was blown off.'
'But there was no sign of
my daughter,' says Jamal Abbas, 'so I went outside to search in that
madness; it was half an hour before I found her, right there, on the
ground.' Miad Jamal Abbas, aged 11, her body bloody and ripped, was
taken to the same hospital ward as Rahad Septi. The two fathers accordingly
sat in vigil together. 'They died together, just as they had played
together, in the same room,' says Abbas. 'We were close before, now
we are bound together.'
'It's not easy now to think
about what they were like when they were alive,' says Septi, making
to retreat into the shadows of his home. 'I have to think that this
was my fate and the will of God. Otherwise, I would go mad. Rahad had
a tongue in her head, for sure. She talked too much. She was very little,
really, but understood things quickly.'
At the cemetery on the edge
of the town, where Fallujah dissipates into desert, 11 small mounds
of earth have been dug, awaiting proper headstones. The children have
been buried together rather than in family plots. Saad Ibrahim whose
father, Hussein, was killed in the corner shop he kept, has a few caustic
questions for the tank-buster's pilot: 'I want to ask him: what exactly
did you see that day that you had to kill my father and those kids?
Do you have good eyesight? Is your computer working well? If not...
well, that's your business. But there was no military activity in this
area. There was no shooting. This is not a military camp. These are
houses with children playing in the street.'
The total figure of civilian
deaths in the Iraqi conflict may never be known, but an investigation
of random incidents reveals that whatever the total, the proportion
of civilian to military deaths among Iraqis is overwhelming. A graphic
illustration of this can be found in the corner of the Abu Graib cemetery
on the edge of Baghdad. Here, during the days after the fall of Saddam's
regime, families came to disinter the grievous legacy of that tyranny,
in the form of their relatives' skeletons. But other huddles of people
came, too - to bury, not recover, their dead. Most did so in family
plots, but some were too poor to own such patches of land and instead
placed their cadavers beneath mounds of earth in a paupers' plot outside
the cemetery. The grave digger, Akef Aziz, explains that those from
the military, or Fedayeen Saddam units, were also covered with an Iraqi
flag. Out of a total of 916 graves in this plot, 17 are those of fighters.
'They were coming in at least 30 or 40 a day,' recalls Aziz. 'They were
good times for us, because we are paid by the body.'
In war, collateral damage
- as the parlance describes civilian casualties - has no human face,
nor does it have a name. But here, on the following pages, are some
of their stories. This is the bitter - but hidden - reckoning of war's
aftermath.
The southern Iraqi town of
Nasiriyah, where the American ground offensive began in earnest during
the last days of March, will before long be the best known in all Iraq.
This will not be because Nasiriyah was once the cradle of the Sumer
dynasty and thus of civilisation; not because here, 6,000 years ago,
the first syllabic alphabet was devised and first mathematical schema
developed (around the figure 60, still the modern world's measurement
of time). And not because the first legal code - including laws governing
the conduct of war - was written and enforced. Nor will this renown
be because the town of Nasiriyah is now rife with disease arising from
putrid water and stinking rubbish through which children pick, looking
for things to sell.
No, Nasiriyah's fame will
be enshrined in Hollywood lore because it was here that US special forces
rescued Jessica Lynch of the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, who
went astray and was captured by the Iraqis. And most famous of all will
be the first floor of Nasiriyah General Hospital, where Private Lynch
was being treated when snatched in what the story emblazoned across
cinema screens will narrate as a raid of daring heroism (although doctors
and ancillary staff recall the episode differently: as the Americans
blasted and kicked their way in, they were welcomed and shown to Private
Lynch's ward, with no resistance offered). Every major American television
network has since dutifully traipsed through this corridor, anxious
to relive the fantasy version of the drama.
None of them, however, bothered
to visit ward 114, a few doors down from Jessica's. In there, separated
by a curtain, lie Daham Kassim, aged 46, and his 37-year-old wife Gufran
Ibed Kassim. Daham has his arms bound, and a stump where his right leg
used to be. Gufran cannot move her arms, wounded by gunshots, and probably
never will. But the pain is not in their bodies, it is in their faces.
It is impossible to 'interview'
Kassim. He dismisses questions, driving his narrative, like a man possessed,
towards its conclusion. He speaks in English, an educated man and, until
a few months ago, director of the Southeastern electricity board. His
torment began on the evening of 24 March, when - after heavy US bombing
in his Mutanaza neighbourhood - Kassim told his family to prepare to
depart in the morning. They would leave Nasiriyah for the safety of
his parents' farm 70 miles away. 'We packed anything valuable, and the
children were allowed to take a few toys each.'
Departure was delayed by
a sandstorm, and the family - the four children in the back - set off
shortly after noon in Kassim's new car. A few minutes later they reached
the American checkpoint at the northern gate to the city. (Significantly,
the suicide bomb which killed four US soldiers at a road block and was
credited with inflaming American behaviour at check points, occurred
a full four days later on 29 March at Najaf. This was the incident described
by the Washington Post as, 'The first such attack of the war.') 'I could
see two tanks,' recalls Kassim. 'They were sand-coloured, with markings
on them. I was afraid and stopped my car 60m away. Less than a minute
passed. They did not open anything, I saw no one. It was silent.' [The
American tanks kept their hatches down. The Marines inside would have
been looking through their green-tinted rectangular window, at a civilian
car carrying a couple and four children.] 'I was frozen with fear,'
continues Kassim. 'I could see their guns moving down. Then there was
a terrible noise, and my car was buried in shooting.'
Kassim's voice begins to
crack. 'I saw my eldest daughter, Mawra, die. She was nine; I saw it
with my eyes: she took the first shot, opened her eyes, and closed them
again.' Gufran, his second daughter, was also killed immediately. 'But
my son Mohammed, he was six and in the first year of primary school,
he was still breathing. And my Zainab, she is five, was also still alive,
although she had been shot in the head.'
Two Americans approached
the car. 'They were called Chris and Joe. They took out my two dead
children, then tried to give my son oxygen, but it was no use. He died
there, at that moment. I asked for a helicopter to take us to hospital.
They refused, but Joe gave us some morphine in exchange for my gold
watch. They tied my bad leg to the other, then took us to their base.'
There, the Americans had
established a field hospital, where they bandaged up the surviving child,
father and mother. For two nights, the remains of the family slept in
a bed. It appears that the story is reaching an end. 'Wait!' insists
Kassim, his tears preparing themselves for what is to come, as if his
trials could get any worse. 'Don't ask me questions. I will tell you
what happened.'
On the third night, that
of 27 March, 'there were some Americans wounded that night, in the fighting.
Maybe they needed the beds. So they told us we had to go outside. I
heard the order - "put them out" - and they carried us like
dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days
of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard Zainab crying:
"Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold." Then she went silent.
Completely silent.'
Kassim breaks off in anguish.
His wife continues the story of the night. 'What could we do? She kept
saying she was cold. My arms were broken, I could not lift or hold her.
If they had given us even a blanket, we might have put it over her.
We had to sit there, and listen to her die.'
'We'd had trouble having
children,' Kassim re-enters the conversation. 'We'd been trying for
six years without success and given up hope. But then God blessed us,
and everything went right. Four little flowers - and now four little
flowers cut down. What for? For oil and a strategic place for America?
Do they know God, these people? Why did they put my Zainab out into
the cold? I tell you Mister, she died of cold, she died of cold.'
There is urgent business,
however. Kassim has still not concluded - indeed he is reaching his
purpose. The three Kassim children put to death at the checkpoint had
been buried at the site of their shooting, but later taken to the holy
city of Najaf for entombment, as is the mandatory custom for Shia Islam.
Zainab, however, had been interred inside the US base, 'and the question
now,' pleads Kassim, revived by the urgency of the matter, 'is that
we must get her to Najaf, where there is a space for her there with
her brother and sisters. Please, Mister, I cannot move; you must go
and ask how we can take my Zainab to Najaf.'
The US encampment and airstrip
is under speedy construction, built to last, on a site chosen alongside
the world's most ancient human creation, the Sumer ziggurat at Ur. 'There
is no one buried at this site,' assures US Marine Sergeant Jarrell,
offering nevertheless to put us through to the authority able to deal
with Kassim's request, which turns out to be the Civil Affairs department.
The voice of Civil Affairs accordingly comes down his radio: 'Tell them
this is a waste of Civil Affairs' time.' We try again the next day,
when a kindly woman, Private Hurst from the Medical Corps, is more responsive.
'Oh yes,' she says, rather
nervously, 'we have three children buried here. Yes, I think I know
who you're talking about.'
An examination of Kassim's
car shows this to have been a clinical and frontal piece of musketry.
A fusillade of heavy-calibre chain-gun tank fire attacked the vehicle,
with some rounds twisting into the metalwork, but most fired straight
through the windows at its occupants. A neighbour, Taleb Yasser, who
retrieved the car, recalls how Kassim would make his way home of an
evening, 'often bringing chocolate for his children and others playing
in the street'. He points out the bomb damage that encouraged his friend
to leave. 'We told him that it might be dangerous,' says Yasser, 'that
the tanks were sitting there, but he would have none of it, and insisted
on taking his family to safety.'
Beyond a dilapidated fairground
beyond Kassim's now empty house are further homes hit by the bombing,
including the one Kadem Hashem had lived in since returning to his native
Iraq. Hashem was a consultant in computer and communications technology,
born in Kuwait and well travelled across the Arab world. But in 1996,
he elected to join his parents and two brothers back in Nasiriyah, bringing
his wife, Salima, and six children. They lived in what Hashem remembers
as 'a nice house, with a TV, and comfortable'. He was, however, 'distrusted
by the government of Saddam for being away for so long. It seems,' he
says, 'that I was called back to accept my fate.'
That fate was a cruel one.
Hashem surveys the wreckage of his 'nice house', its walls imploded,
its roof collapsed. In the diwaniya, to which men would retire of an
evening to smoke a hooker pipe, singed cushions are still arranged on
the ground, with burned pages of a Koran scattered in the debris. Of
the 14 members of Hashem's family that shared or were visiting the house
on 23 March, only he and his youngest daughter survive.
The missile which destroyed
Hashem's family struck at 1.15 pm. 'I was outside and heard something
like the wind, a plane, and then something thrown at the house. I went
flat on the floor, and felt the heat on my body. When I looked up, the
house was falling in, on fire. My eldest daughter Bashar was buried
beneath it. My father and mother, Ali Kadem and Reni, died but I did
manage to wrap my wife in a blanket and get her to the hospital, where
she died that night.'
He finds a photograph in
the cinders. 'This was my middle daughter, Hamadi. I found her burnt
to death by that doorway, she had shrunk to about a metre tall.' And
another picture, this one from within his robe: 'This was my sister
when she was little. She died over there, by the gate. My father was
killed where you are standing now, in the diwaniya; I loved him too
much, I think. For three days afterwards, I sat by the gate of my home.
I didn't sleep or go anywhere, I didn't know who or where I was.'
It is now twilight, a purple
hue in the sky, and we decide to continue in the morning and also to
visit the one surviving daughter, Bedour.
'Bedour is 18 years old,
but doesn't look it,' we are warned in advance, as the cockerel's crow
heralds another day in Hashem's laden life. 'In fact, she does not look
like herself at all. She cannot walk or talk, or sleep. She has something
wrong in her head - she keeps talking nonsense or crying out: "Why
did you all go away and leave me?"'
What remains of a beautiful
girl called Bedour Hashem lies on a piece of floor at a relative's house,
having been discharged by the American military hospital, with no room
for her at the local one. She is shrivelled and petrified like a dead
cat. Her skin is like scorched parchment folded over her bones. Unable
to move, she appears as if in some troubled coma, but opens her eyes,
with difficulty, to issue an indecipherable cry like a wounded animal.
Hashem understands it: 'We should leave her.'
'She and I have something
in common,' he continues, outside the house, bright flowers climbing
its walls, 'which is that we have lost everyone else. Every time I look
at her, I will always think of my wife. But now I have to be a father,
mother, brother, sister and grandparent to her, all in one person, and
I don't know if I can manage that.'
Hashem has dug his own mass
grave in the holy city: 'I collected them all and put them in a single
grave at Najaf; my money was burnt, too, and I couldn't afford to bury
them separately. Now the holy men in town are at me for this, blaming
me for doing something not in accordance with the religion.'
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.