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CounterPunch
February
28, 2003
Future Headlines?
What
If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
By RON JACOBS
1000s Dead
in Fire Following American Attack
BAGHDAD, IRAQ,2003. A raging fire ignited by a barrage of military
pyrotechnics ripped through the city here late at night, leaving
at least 15,000 people dead and tens of thousands more injured.
The inferno in the city was the deadliest military attack in
Iraq in 12 years and one of the worst in the country's history,
with the death toll exceeding that of the January 16, 1991 beginning
of the war with the United States, which killed hundreds of citizens
and destroyed much of the City's infrastructure.
Survivors described a ghastly scene that
began when the US military launched cruise missiles minutes after
11 p.m. and a shower of fire appeared to ignite buildings in
the center of the city. The authorities said the fire spread
almost instantly to other buildings in the area as more cruise
missiles landed.
Numerous witnesses said the city center
was almost instantly engulfed in flames and citizens bolted for
doorways and smashed windows as they tried to escape coffeehouses
and bars. People raced and clambered outside with their hair
and flesh on fire.
"People were bleeding, their hair
was being burned off, their skin was just melting off, skin was
just dangling," said Muhammad Eid, a construction worker
from Basra., who was in the city for a visit with his relatives.
"You could smell flesh burning even when I the fire had
died down. Eid said he had been expecting the attack for weeks.
But he said that "no one can ever really prepares for these
things."
President Hussein said officials were
hoping to get most of the city's residents to safer areas before
more attacks took place Investigators said most of the victims
had either been burned to death or died of smoke inhalation,
though some may have been trampled in the madness and panic following
the attack. Some bodies were so charred that officials were having
trouble making identification and planned to use DNA samples
and other methods to identify them. Names of the victims were
not being released this evening because many family members had
not been notified, officials said.
It was clear that the fiery attack had
dealt a horrific blow to Iraq, a country that often sees itself
as one close-knit community. Countless Iraqi residents had some
connection to people who had been in the city. All day, as the
death toll climbed and rescuers used cranes to lift the blackened
debris and look for bodies, friends and relatives showed up at
the ravaged hulk that was Baghdads city center looking for people
they knew or thought had been there last night.
Sharif Abu, 35, a house painter who was
at a coffee house in the destroyed area on Thursday night and
was burned on his head and leg, returned to the area this afternoon
searching for a close friend, a man whose wife is nine months
pregnant, who he feared had not survived.
"I'm hoping he got out and is just
walking around somewhere," Mr. Abu said.
Sharif described his escape: "The
flames were over my head, coming through the coffee house. I
figure I had two choices: make a run for it or stay and die.
I jumped over the coffee bar and ran."
"I ran across the street and into
the lot over there. I looked back and saw people coming out.
One guy, he already looked dead. He said, `Don't touch me.' He
had no face."
Another woman showed up to look for her
brother and his wife. She said that her brother, had not been
able to leave Baghdad last night.
"This is so much pain," she
said, "more pain than I've ever known." At the hospitals,
hundreds of people had been admitted by this afternoon, the authorities
said.
A waitress at a downtown restaurant,
who preferred not to give her name, suffered burns over 30 percent
of her body, mostly on her back, which was struck by a piece
of hot shrapnel. The soles of her sneakers melted into the floor
of her workplace and she escaped after a friend picked her up
and threw her over a crowd of people and out the restaurant's
door.
Her mother visited her this afternoon
in the burn unit at Baghdad Hospital. The hospital ward, filled
with nearly 700 attack victims, was "ghastly," she
said. "You see people literally without faces." Doctors
gave some of the more critical patients a 40 percent to 50 percent
chance of survival.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera television,
an Iraqi government spokesman said that when the attack started,
he was "standing in his office like I always do."
"The next thing I heard the missiles
and felt this heat, so I turned around and I see that some of
the city is on fire."
Today, as each body was discovered, rescue
workers removed their hats, as fire department imams and chaplains
led them in prayer. "They are going through a nightmare,"
President Hussein said of the rescuers. "This is an emotionally
draining effort."
Ron Jacobs
lives in Burlington, VT. He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
Yesterday's
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