- Day 20 of America's war for the "liberation"
of Iraq was another day of fire, pain and death. It started with an attack
by two A-10 jets that danced in the air like acrobats, tipping on one wing,
sliding down the sky to turn on another, and spraying burning phosphorus
to mislead heat-seeking missiles before turning their cannons on a government
ministry and plastering it with depleted uranium shells. The day ended
in blood-streaked hospital corridors and with three foreign correspondents
dead and five wounded.
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- The A-10s passed my bedroom window, so close I could
see the cockpit Perspex, with their trail of stars dripping from their
wingtips, a magical, dangerous performance fit for any air show, however
infernal its intent. But when they turned their DU shells - intended for
use against heavy armour - against the already wrecked Iraqi Ministry for
Planning, the effect was awesome. The A-10's cannon-fire sounds like heavy
wooden furniture being moved in an empty room, a kind of final groan, before
the rounds hit their target.
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- When they did, the red-painted ministry - a gaunt and
sinister building beside the Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris that I have
always suspected to be an intelligence headquarters - lit up with a thousand
red and orange pin-points of light.
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- From the building came a great and dense cloud of white
smoke, much of which must have contained the aerosol DU spray that so many
doctors and military veterans fear causes cancers.
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- At about this time I noticed the tanks on the Jumhuriya
Bridge. Two low-slung M1A1 Abrams, one in the centre of the bridge, the
other parking itself over the first stanchion. Just another little probing
raid, the Americans announced, but it looked much more than that.
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- I reached the eastern end of the Jumhuriya Bridge - a
wide and deserted four-lane highway that soared out across the river, obscuring
the American tanks on the other side - an hour and a half later. It looked
grimly like that scene in A Bridge Too Far, Richard Attenborough's epic
on the Arnhem disaster, in which a British officer walks slowly up the
great span with an umbrella in his hand to see if he can detect the Germans
on the other side. But I knew the Americans were on the other side of this
bridge and drove past it at great speed.
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- Which provided a remarkable revelation. While American
fighter-bombers criss-crossed the sky, while the ground shook to the sound
of exploding ordnance, while the American tanks now stood above the Tigris,
vast areas of Baghdad - astonishing when you consider the American claim
to be "in the heart" of the city - remain under Saddam Hussein's
control. I drove all the way to Mansur, where relatives of the 11 Iraqi
civilians killed in Monday's massacre of civilians - the Americans used
four
- 2,000lb bombs to dismember the mainly Christian families
in the vain hope of killing President Saddam
- - still waited to retrieve the last of their dead.
-
- On my way back past the Ahrar Bridge, I found a crowd
of spectators standing on the parapet, watching the American tanks with
a mixture of amusement and fear. Did they not know what was happening in
their city, or - an idea that has possessed me in recent days - are the
poor of Baghdad kept in such ignorance of events that they simply do not
realise that the Americans are about to occupy their city? Could it be
that the cigarette sellers and the bakery queues and the bus drivers just
don't know what lies down on the banks of the Tigris?
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- As I arrived back at the Palestine Hotel, I saw the smoke
of the shell that the Americans had just fired into the Reuters office.
It was to take two lives, in addition to the reporter from the Arab al-Jazeera
satellite channel killed a few hours earlier by an American air attack
on his office. Despite two separate assurances from the American government
that al-Jazeera's base of operations would not be targeted, it was destroyed.
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- Just an hour later, one of the tanks on the Jumhuriya
Bridge fired a shell into the wreckage. Eighteen civilians - 15 of them
women - were reported to be still hiding in the basement last night with
no immediate hope of rescue.
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- The International Red Cross had tried to arrange a convoy
out of Baghdad; inexplicably, it was reported that the Americans had refused
it passage from the city.
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- At one point, Red Cross workers hoped to take a severely
wounded Spanish television reporter with them - his leg had been amputated
after the tank shell exploded below his office in the hotel - but he died
during the afternoon. The American infantry divisional commander issued
a statement that suggested the Reuters cameramen were sniping at the US
tank, a remark so extraordinary - and so untrue - that it brought worldwide
protests from journalists.
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- I don't know what it is about the street dogs of Baghdad,
but they always know when the bombers are returning. Is there some change
in air pressure, some high technological decibel that we humans can't hear?
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- The dogs always get it right. Every time they start baying,
you know that the bombers are coming back. And they yelped and barked as
night fell last night. And within 15 minutes, even we humans could hear
the rumble of explosions from southern Baghdad.
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- http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395416
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