- The six cars that are bumper-to-bumper against the kerb
in Al Sha'ab are carbonised - charred metal now devoid of all colour and
fabric. The power of the blasts flipped another - all that is left of its
tyres are the wire coils that ran through the rubber.
-
- Yes, we're in a war zone. But Al Sha'ab is a civilian
quarter, a maze of hard-working, hole-in-the-wall mechanics and electricians.
And the attacking United States-led force promised to spare civilians.
-
- The Pentagon says that it did not target the marketplace
and it has left open the possibility that the two bombs that fell here
on Wednesday morning could have been American or Iraqi.
-
- But there is no way around the grotesque in this story.
-
- There is no nice way to write about how 28-year-old Hisam
Madloon, a guard, finds the severed head of his boss, Sermat the electrician,
on the footpath. Or of how one of his workmates thinks that a gnawed hand,
severed at the wrist, might belong to Tahir, an expert on hot-water systems.
-
- How can anyone tell whose are the brains found lying
just near the door to one of the workshops? Or be able to recognise the
remains of the mechanic who was working under one of the cars when it became
a fireball?
-
- How will the news be broken to relatives that two American
bombs meant for Saddam Hussein have obliterated a family of five because
fate had them driving through this part of town at 11.30am on Wednesday?
-
- This is a bad week in Baghdad. The talk outside may be
that this war is beginning to go badly for the Americans. But here, minds
focus on the reality that the most powerful military force ever assembled
is massing at the city gates, so fear and tension run high.
-
- People are edgy and even the weather is appropriately
apocalyptic. The whole country is in the grip of the turab, which translates
as "the desert moving".
-
- It is a violent sandstorm - wild winds whip up sheets
of abrasive dust and sand that are streaked with thick black smoke from
the trenches of flaming oil intended to confuse the US bombers.
-
- At 2pm the daylight is a deep, burnished orange, eerie
and luminescent. And because of the tonnes of dust in the air, the rain
falling on the scene of this disaster is actually mud.
-
- But people like Sermat and Tahir keep going to work at
the Al Sha'ab commercial district on the road north from Baghdad to Kirkuk,
a poor area of grubby ground-floor shops and tatty first-storey apartments.
-
- Madloon was asleep, but 55-year-old Salah Yousif, who
runs a kebab house and carries a walking stick, was walking up the street.
He says: "I heard the planes overhead and then, two bombs. Four seconds
apart."
-
- In the city I hear the two short booms. By the time I
get to Al Sha'ab, the last of the dead and injured have been taken away.
Blood runs in the muddied street and the facade is ripped from many of
the shops - chunks of concrete dangling from reinforcing steel that refuses
to snap.
-
- The road is wide, but buildings and cars on both sides
are charred black and there are two shallow craters on and next to the
roadway. A dozen charred cars lie amid the rubble.
-
- Most of the up to 15 people who died were in cars in
the traffic; many of the 45 hurt were pedestrians or local workers and
residents.
-
- Neighbours are dropping burnt bedding from an upstairs
apartment where the front wall is on the verge of caving in. The fridge
door has been blown off and a white teddy bear lies singed and abandoned
under a buckled ceiling fan.
-
- The local response to this horror show is ritualistic
and surprisingly passive. There is a crowd, mostly male - teenagers and
young adults who could be expected to be combustible in the face of such
an errant onslaught. Some of them, brandishing Kalashnikovs and pistols,
are dancing on the burnt-out cars, chanting slogans in praise of Saddam.
-
- But there is no hostility when a busload of Western reporters,
many from coalition countries, arrives on the scene. "Welcome, welcome,"
I'm told by Yousif the witness.
-
- He says: "The Americans always claim they are defending
us, but they do the opposite. That is why Saddam is on the right side,
fighting this evil. He gives us strength and we give him strength."
-
- Madloon the guard, whose thongs are embossed with the
word "free", says that the pregnant woman who lived in this apartment
is dead. And he says that the pavement was littered with body parts.
-
- "They said they would attack the army, but this
is a civilian area," he said. "Why do they do it? Do they know
that Iraqis don't change, that we are Iraqis and that we will not change
for America?"
-
- The law of averages in war says the US was always going
to give the Iraqis this propaganda gift.
-
- Such has been their impatience that journalists have
come away from some of their civilian damage bus tours around Baghdad with
more questions than answers.
-
- Most of the patients in the hospital they took us to
after the first night of bombing in Baghdad seemed to have been injured
by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire and the orphanage they took us to yesterday
- before the errant Al Sha'ab bombing - didn't quite add up.
-
- The Iraq Family Village is home to more than 500 orphans
of all ages who were taken by bus to relatives as war approached. But the
complex is a huge sprawling place, with several walled and wired compounds
and one building that stood apart because of what looked like inordinately
large air-conditioning units on the roof.
-
- Five days ago the orphanage laundry was bombed.
-
- But the Al Sha'ab bombing is the sort of mistake that
will play on the minds of Iraqis who might be on the verge of breaking
with Saddam. They expect brutality from him - if they step out of line.
But they were minding their own business yesterday when they got it from
the US.
-
- At the Al Kinndy hospital Dr Sabah Hassan, director of
the general surgery unit, is utterly professional. There were neither politics
nor sloganeering as he outlined the response to the emergency.
-
- One of his younger colleagues, 42-year-old Dr Abdul Razak,
is among the Iraqis who might be expected to be receptive to the Bush democracy
doctrine - educated, aspiring and capable of free thought.
-
- But he is living proof of the risks for the US.
-
- After dealing with the hospital's share of the Al Sha'ab
deaths and injuries, he says: "I have changed my mind about the US
because of what they have done. Now I would like to kill an American soldier."
-
- Major-General Stanley McChrystal, vice-director of operations
for the Joint Staff, told a Pentagon briefing: "Coalition forces did
not target a marketplace nor were any bombs or missiles dropped or fired"
in that district.
-
- "We don't know for a fact whether it was US or Iraqi.
We'll continue to look and see if we missed anything. Another possibility
is that Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery or an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile
falling back to earth was responsible."
-
- But US Central Command confirmed that the US was working
the Baghdad area about 11am, seeking out nine Iraqi surface-to-surface
missile launch sites, most of which were within 100 metres of civilian
homes.
-
- A spokesman insisted, however, that none of Wednesday
morning's targets was in the vicinity of Al Sha'ab.
-
- http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/27/1048653806729.html<
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