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CounterPunch
April 01,
2003
Something's Gone Wrong
"I Am His
Mother"
By JO WILDING
Baghdad.
A missile hit the middle of the street outside
the Omar Al Faroukh mosque on Palestine Street at about 4:15
this afternoon, just as people were leaving after prayers. Ahmed
was walking out behind his friend Umar when he heard an explosion
and saw his friend fall. Umar is a student at Rafidain College.
He had fragments of shrapnel about 3cm long removed from his
liver and abdomen. His lower ribs are fractured and his left
hand has shrapnel wounds. His grandfather, Fuad Taher demands
that Bush and Blair be charged and brought to court.
Another missile hit, close by, three
minutes later. It wasn't clear from the friends and relatives
in the hospital whether it hit the other side of the road or
hit a building, but it was close by.
Akael Zuhair was standing in front of
his house opposite the mosque: I'm not sure of it was the first
or second missile that hurt him, but he's in a dangerous state
in hospital, with shrapnel wounds to his left shoulder, left
chest, right forearm and possibly a piece lodged in the frontal
lobe of his brain. The doctors were waiting for a skull x ray
to show whether the piercing was superficial or deep. He's 20.
He began to regain consciousness while
we were there, thrashing his limbs about while his family and
friends tried to hold him still and comfort him and his mum's
tears overflowed. "I am his mother," she whispered.
Nothing else. I held her without a word.
His dad heard the explosion in the street
and said the kids came running in to tell him Akael was hit.
"Help us," he said, "because we are attacked
in homes and streets and markets. We are not something to be
squeezed. We are thank to people in all the world, but especially
in America and England. More than a million people in England
say no to war. There is not a problem between people. There
is a problem with governments."
Firas Hamid was the last of the victims
to come out of surgery, having had two fragments removed from
his liver and one from his kidney. His right arm has a compound
fracture beneath an open wound. He's 16 and, like Umar and Ahmed,
was leaving the mosque when the explosion happened.
Again, no one could guess what the intended
target was. All of the clusters of friends and family we took
statements from said there was nothing military in the area,
nor any communications towers, which have been devastated in
recent days. The most recent was about 5pm today: the Al Baya
tower. We know there were deaths but have as yet no details.
The El Alawiya was bombed yesterday morning in the early hours
and two strikes on Tuesday and Thursday have wrecked the Al
Ma'amoun. It's not possible to make even an emergency call and
the doctors said people were coming in in private cars, delaying
medical treatment.
Less than two miles north of the mosque
and just 15 minutes earlier, Fawzia Kurbaan and her husband
Najah Mohammed were waiting for a taxi in the street near their
home when, he said, "I felt something strike my hand and
legs and I fell to the ground." He has a fractured right
arm and index finger and shrapnel in his right thigh and abdomen.
The doctor, Dr Hamid Al-Araji, said he didn't think the shrapnel
had caused any internal injury but he was keeping an eye.
They were fleeing Baghdad for a farm
in the countryside, where about 20 families were going to stay.
They'd sent their children ahead of them and were waiting for
a taxi to go and join them. They had all their possessions with
them when it happened and didn't know yet what had happened
to them " whether they'd lost everything or someone had
salvaged it for them. Fawzia showed us what little money they
had left, dyed red with Najah's blood.
The doctors in the Al Kindi were doing
a lot of tasks normally associated with nursing staff, checking
and emptying and keeping up observations, because there's a
total of 120 nurses in a hospital which, for its size, needs
about 550. I mentioned before that most of the nurses in Iraq
before the 1991 war were foreigners, who left en masse, more
or less. Khalida, the chief nurse who never sleeps, said the
international standard ratio is 4 nurses per doctor. Here it's
the other way round: there's one nurse for every four doctors.
"So," says Dr Hamid, laughing.
"I think the nurses are very lucky."
Intensive care units were also absent:
Akael, with his serious head wound, and Umar, with his mangled
liver, could both have better done with at least a blood pressure
and heart monitor but, after 12 and a half years of sanctions,
most hospitals don't have enough working units, if any at all,
many of the parts being embargoed as dual military and civilian
use.
A grain silo seems to have been the target
of the attack at 9am on Thursday, about 35kms south of Baghdad
on the main road to Wasit. Haitham Abid was driving a lorry
past when the missile landed close to the Grain Board building.
The lorry crashed and the back part caught fire. He wasn't sure
whether he jumped from the cab or was pulled clear, but his
right thigh was badly broken.
All this as well as the bombing of another
market yesterday, Al Shu'la: Dr Tariq said there were over 50
deaths and lots of injuries. Someone told me a day or two ago
that I wasn't giving the US enough credit for its efforts to
avoid civilian casualties. I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something,
but I'm not seeing the fruits of their "efforts".
How is it that, when these bombs and missiles are guided by the
finest technology human minds have developed, they can still
land on a street outside a mosque which is emptying, explode
into the bodies of elderly couples flagging down taxis and burn
lorries next to food silos.
Something's wrong. There are too many
civilian casualties, too far from military targets, for all
of these to be mistakes. Either they're hitting civilians on
purpose, to whip up fear in the hope of spurring rebellion,
or their weapons are not as precise as they say, in which case
they're not suitable for use in an urban environment. There's
no justification for using any weapons here, but if you can't
hit a military target without causing civilian casualties, you
don't have the right to attack it.
The US has apparently claimed that some
of this is done by the Iraqi military to make the US look bad.
I can't rule that out. But anything that comes from an aircraft,
at least, is unlikely to be from the Iraqis. It's doubtful a
plane would get far off the ground here without being attacked
by the US/UK aircraft. Of course, when it's all over, the US
will provide "proof" that it was the Iraqis, in the
form of testimonies by people who will say anything they are
told to save their own necks, and we will probably never know
the full truth of who did what to whom. Meanwhile, and as ever,
the people of Iraq are still dying, still the pawns in everyone
else's political games.
I'm being expelled from Iraq. It looked,
for a while, as if we were going to have to leave this morning,
but we scored another two days, till Monday, "And then
leave this hotel. Leave this country." Coming from the
Foreign Ministry, there's not really any arguing with that.
There's no shame in it either, being booted out by this government,
but it hurts, it aches. I can't say goodbye to anyone because
there are no phones and we can't go anywhere without a minder
and permission from the foreign ministry, and I'm not going
to know if they're safe and I can't hold them when they're scared
and their phones might not work for months, never mind e mail.
And it seems like, for a lot of journalists,
this isn't a story anymore. Apparently it's starting to drag.
Nothing is happening. "House destroyed by bomb" is
a story. "Second house destroyed by bomb" is still
a story. Another and another and yet another house destroyed
by a bomb is not. There was a flurry of excitement last night
when the rumour began to circulate that a hospital had been
bombed, but no " it was only another market, near a hospital.
Whole packs of them are leaving now, and that makes getting
kicked out even more rubbish (I had to search for a polite way
to put that) because there are fewer and fewer witnesses.
So unless everything changes, tomorrow
is my last day here. I realized today that it's not the buildings
that rock in the aftershock of the explosions but the whole
earth. It feels exactly the same on the ground floor as on the
fifth. The bombs have been more frequent today, and closer,
than any other day.
Still, I'm going to miss it, miss the
Iraqis: I don't think there's anyone like them, soldiers sharing
warm bread and salty cheese curds with us, standing round a
wooden sand-box which does the job as a table, pouring glasses
of sugary chai from a metal flask and every one of them giggling
like schoolgirls, guns across their shoulders, while Sabah clowns
in the face of it all, making jokes in mime about bombs falling,
hugging the pillar behind him in half-mock terror, telling us
his huge burly mate gets his hair cut by his mum, snorting with
uncontrollable laughter.
At least I should make it home in time
for my law exam on Thursday. Insha'Allah. We're waiting to hear
from the drivers who went to the Jordanian border today.
Jo Wilding can
be reached at: wildthing@burntmail.com
Yesterday's
Features
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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