- It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on
the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains
inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and
her three small children in their still-smouldering car.
-
- Two missiles from an American jet killed them all - by
my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could
be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask
myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with
pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the
dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow
dust and rain yesterday morning.
-
- It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims,
the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise
up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops,
overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard
the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen,
could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then
closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.
-
- How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a
medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected
to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each
day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see
should not be told.
-
- For another question occurred to me as I walked through
this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad,
what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians
are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are
no reporters to be witness to their suffering?
-
- Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch for
customers at the Nasser restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb Street.
The missile that killed them landed next to the westbound carriageway,
its blast tearing away the front of the café and cutting the two
men - the first 48, the second only 18 - to pieces. A fellow worker led
me through the rubble. "This is all that is left of them now,"
he said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with blood.
-
- At least 15 cars burst into flames, burning many of their
occupants to death. Several men tore desperately at the doors of another
flame-shrouded car in the centre of the street that had been flipped upside
down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman
and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The
second missile hit neatly on the eastbound carriageway, sending shards
of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block with
the words, "This is God's possession" written in marble on the
outside wall.
-
- The building's manager, Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway
as soon as he heard the massive explosion. "I found Ta'ar in pieces
over there," he told me. His head was blown off. "That's his
hand." A group of young men and a woman took me into the street and
there, a scene from any horror film, was Ta'ar's hand, cut off at the wrist,
his four fingers and thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His young
colleague, Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled a few feet
away, a pale red and grey mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked for
Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.
-
- As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities.
There was the electrical shop-owner killed behind his counter by the same
missile that cut down Ta'ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl
standing on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the
truck driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar
who regularly called to see Mr Danoon for bread and who was just leaving
when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to destroy him.
-
- In Qatar, the Anglo-American forces - let's forget this
nonsense about "coalition" - announced an inquiry. The Iraqi
government, who are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value
of such a bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially
put at 14 dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there was
a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though I couldn't
find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade headquarters, but the
fire brigade can hardly be described as a military target.
-
- Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour
earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when
two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out
of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions;
these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.
-
- Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent yesterday
could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned co-ordinates,
and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when
one of Malek Hammoud's friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely
kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn't want to learn about
the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems.
-
- And why should he? For this is happening almost every
day in Baghdad. Three days ago, an entire family of nine was wiped out
in their home near the centre of the city. A busload of civilian passengers
were reportedly killed on a road south of Baghdad two days ago. Only yesterday
were Iraqis learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered
on a Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the Iraqi
border at the weekend.
-
- The truth is that nowhere is safe in Baghdad, and as
the Americans and British close their siege in the next few days or hours,
that simple message will become ever more real and ever more bloody.
-
- We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining
why these people should die. They died because of 11 September, we may
say, because of President Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction",
because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to "liberate"
them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I'll bet we
are told President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We
shan't mention the pilot, of course.
-
- http://www.independent.co.uk/
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