|
Baghdad blasts kill 17 civilians { March 27 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/27/international/worldspecial/27BAGH.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/27/international/worldspecial/27BAGH.html
March 27, 2003
Baghdad Blasts Are Said to Kill 17 Civilians
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 26 Ñ Two large explosions that detonated simultaneously in a working-class district of Baghdad this morning, killing 17 civilians and wounding 45, set off a scramble by Iraq to blame the United States for indiscriminate bombing, and prompted a suggestion from the Pentagon that the Iraqis themselves might have been responsible.
The Iraqi officials said an American plane or missile was responsible for the blasts about five miles northwest of the center of Baghdad. American military officials said they did not know the cause, although they said they could not rule out an errant American bomb or missile, or the possibility that the explosions could have been caused by Iraqi antiaircraft fire falling back to earth, or a faulty Iraqi missile.
But at least one thing was clear: a week of war between the United States and Iraq had finally produced an incident with enough civilian victims, and of a sufficiently gruesome nature in a thickly populated district of the Iraqi capital, to create a shock wave of indignation against the "villains and criminals" in Washington that Iraq has blamed for the war.
The lurid coverage of the carnage on Iraq's evening television news placed responsibility squarely on the United States. Many news reports reaching elsewhere in the world did the same Ñ American air attacks, dedicated to toppling Saddam Hussein, had brought sudden, eviscerating death to innocent Iraqis whose only purpose, this morning, was to pursue their everyday lives as auto mechanics, plumbers, shopkeepers, fathers, mothers and children.
At the Pentagon, officials said they had not directed any bombs or missiles at the neighborhood. But if anybody doubted American culpability at the site of the bombing in a district known as Al Sha'ab, or Place of the People, there was no whisper of it amid the cries for the victims, and the chorus of indignation that Iraqi officials, waving pistols and Kalashnikov rifles, led among bystanders.
As they have in every place in Baghdad where American air attacks are said to have gone astray, in the daytime or late at night, local party bosses made a political rally of the misery, leading a rhythmic refrain of loyalty to Mr. Hussein Ñ "Our blood, our soul, we pledge to you, Saddam" Ñ along with counterpoint verses of "Down, down Bush."
The chants also included the Islamic invocations Mr. Hussein, in his two television speeches since the start of the war, has made his central theme, along with his calls for Iraqis to kill as many American soldiers as they can. "God is great!" cried the men and teenage boys who made a stage out of one of the wrecked cars, carbonized by fire, that had been parked feet away from one of the blasts. And then, continuing the opening phrases of the Muslim prayer in a cold, drizzling rain that fell through a sandstorm and turned every falling drop to spattering mud, "There is no God but God."
Asked if American bombs or missiles could have caused the explosions, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, at a Central Command briefing at the United States war headquarters in Qatar, said: "We don't know that they were ours. We can't say that we had anything to do with that." He acknowledged that "mistakes can occur," but said that it was too early to know whether an American strike had hit the wrong target. "Right now, we simply don't know," he said.
The counterpoint, General Brooks suggested, was also true Ñ that nobody could be sure that the explosions had not been set off by Iraqis assigned by Mr. Hussein to plant a bomb in a public place and blame the United States for it.
The general noted news reports that an Iraqi had been found somewhere in the war zone wearing an American uniform, and strapped with explosives in the manner of a suicide bomber. He did not say when or where this incident had occurred, and he did not offer any confirmation. Weeks before the war, American officials said they had evidence that Iraqis were being fitted with American camouflage uniforms for covert operations to kill or bring discredit to American forces.
There was not much Western reporters who were bused to the scene of the explosions could contribute, at least in terms of fixing responsibility. Notification of the incident, by officials of the Information Ministry, came two hours after it occurred at about 11:30 a.m., and by the time the reporters arrived at the site, whatever truth had been available in the immediate aftermath of the blasts had begun to fade. All the bodies were gone, even those burned to death in their cars; witnesses who remembered anything very clearly about the moment of detonation were few, and hard to find.
The facts that were beyond contest were these: two craters, one larger than the other, and neither more than a fraction as deep as the 50-foot quarries dug by the largest American bombs to have fallen here in the last week, lay to either side of a busy suburban roadway leading north out of Baghdad toward Kirkuk.
Near one crater, a row of auto workshops had been blasted to a rubble of concrete and twisted steel, of scattered tools and crumpled stacking shelves and blackened, punctured cans of oil. Cars awaiting service had been burned in the inferno, and one of the victims, so a witness said, had been a mechanic working underneath a car when his world suddenly ended. Others said that a whole family Ñ father, mother, three children Ñ had burned to death in one of the cars.
About 50 yards away on the opposite side of the road, there was a smaller crater, and a similar tangle of ruined workshops, including a modest business selling and repairing household water heaters where two men, identified by survivors as Taher, 26, and Sermat, 22, had died.
Someone, ghoulishly, had made a display item of a severed hand, placing it at the end of a steel shutter, torn from one of the workshops, that served as sort of makeshift table. Officials were on hand to point out fragments of human remains, including brain tissue, that lay in one of the workshops. In the rain and mud, television crews and photographers competed for the best angles in capturing these and other grisly totems.
There was nothing that looked remotely stage-managed about the families who survived the explosions, who joined with friends and neighbors in shuttling through bare-concrete entrances between the workshops and up stairs to the low-rent apartments above. Furniture, refrigerators, radios, beds, bookshelves, bicycles and piles of clothes were salvaged to be stacked in the mud. Much of what was saved was little more than debris, but groups of sobbing women, some with children in their arms, seemed to cling to the remainders of their existence as if to flotsam in a heaving sea.
Almost everybody in the neighborhood who spoke to reporters blamed the United States. One man said he had heard American aircraft "roaming about" before the explosions.
Anybody who has been in Baghdad during the air attacks knows that attacking aircraft can sometimes be heard, although not often, because of the height at which they fly. The roar of cruise missiles as they close in on their targets is easier to hear. But hearing anything, much less seeing it, would have been very difficult today, with almost all of Iraq smothered beneath an orange shroud of swirling sand and raging winds.
During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, errant bombs and missiles in Baghdad killed hundreds of people, including one incident at an underground bunker in the district of Amariya in which 403 people, many of them women and children, died from a direct hit by an American bunker-busting bomb.
Today, many who survived the blast seemed convinced that something similar had happened again. After 12 years of invective about the Amariya incident, memorialized now in the museum that has been made of the bunker and annual commemorations that serve as occasions for anti-American rallies, many who spoke at the scene of today's blasts did so in a common Iraqi parlance.
"We have committed no sin, we are not guilty, why are they doing this to us?" said Hisham Madloul, a 28-year-old janitor who said he was a friend of the two men who died in the water-heater workshop, and who had helped pick up his friends' bodies and carry them to the ambulances that took them away.
"We are innocent people, and we want to know: what is it that Bush wants?" he said. "If he wants Iraq to surrender its sovereignty, he will fail, because Iraq will stay Iraq. If he wants Saddam Hussein to go, he will fail in that, as well, because Saddam is an Iraqi ruler for Iraqis, and he will stay."
Normally, when reporters visit Baghdad hospitals after American attacks, the doctors turn casualty wards into forums for polemics. But today, one of the striking things was what did not happen at Al Kindi Hospital, where 5 of the dead and 12 of the injured were taken.
Dr. Sabah Hassan, director of the hospital's surgical unit, emerged from operations on some of the survivors to give details of their trauma injuries. But he refused, even when invited, to make politics of the event. Instead, he spoke in detail of the injuries he had seen, and not a word about Mr. Hussein or President Bush. "What can we do?" the 52-year-old surgeon said. "We manage our patients as best we can."
Other bits of evidence were like random pieces of a jigsaw. A Western reporter who arrived in a car with a minder after the buses carrying the main body of reporters returned to the Information Ministry said the car was stopped a half-mile from the site by a policeman who told the minder there had been an errant bombing attack, and that the issue was sensitive because a military installation was nearby. The only military compound visible to those aboard the bus was a low-walled compound about 800 yards from the blasts, guarded by a lackadaisical group of soldiers sitting at the entrance, wearing helmets and sitting on steel chairs.
The compound did not look much like the strategic targets that have been hit all across Baghdad in the airstrikes that began in the predawn hours of last Thursday. Most of these have been buildings that have been central to Mr. Hussein's power.
On Tuesday, several bombs or missiles struck the main television and radio headquarters on the west bank of the Tigris, putting the three main Iraqi channels off the air. But two of the channels, including a satellite system that broadcasts 24 hours a day outside Iraq and the main domestic channel, were back on air within hours as engineers came up with technical solutions that worked around the shattered buildings.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy
|
|
