|
Baghdad market world cries { March 29 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44407-2003Mar28.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44407-2003Mar28.html
'The Whole World Cries'
Crowded Market Turns Into Scene of Carnage
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 29, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD, March 28 -- Through the dreary, dirty streets of the neighborhood, the men carried the wood coffin draped hastily in a tattered orange blanket. In a cadence of death, their sobs a refrain, they murmured, "There is no god but God."
They walked past women cloaked in black chadors huddled in wailing knots of grief, their silhouettes caught in headlights. They passed the cries of "Oh, God! Oh God!" cascading from doors along the street. They moved across a scene of death and devastation, a vegetable market packed with evening shoppers that became, in the flash of war, a cauldron of human wreckage.
And, in the coffin, they delivered 27-year-old Najah Abdel-Rida to his waiting family.
"How can they make these mistakes, with the technology they have?" said Abdel-Hadi Udai, his brother-in-law, standing amid broken glass that littered the sidewalk. "There are no military installations anywhere near here. This war defies nature."
Iraqi officials said at least 58 people were killed in the market in Shuala, a working-class Shiite Muslim neighborhood on Baghdad's northern outskirts. They blamed a U.S. strike for the carnage. Officials from the U.S. Central Command said they were investigating the report. U.S. officials suggested that a blast Wednesday that devastated another Baghdad market was caused by an errant Iraqi missile.
The capital's residents found themselves again the hapless victims of a war many are struggling to understand.
"What's our sin? What's our sin?" Ayad Abadi shouted. "The whole world cries when it sees this."
The blast struck when the market was its most crowded, teeming with shoppers on the Muslim Sabbath. Some residents insisted they heard a plane overhead, and one said he saw the orange glow of the engines. When the bomb landed, they said, they heard no explosion and saw no fire, only a shower of razor-sharp shrapnel that shattered glass and tore through flesh. A moment of silence followed, the hush of devastation. Then pandemonium ensued. Men, women and children staggered in all directions, stumbling over wreckage. Children cried for their parents. Mothers and fathers shouted the names of their children.
One resident said he saw the head of 33-year-old Hassan Jabr on the sidewalk. Another said he saw the severed legs of Sayyid Hassoun Musawi, 56, tossed on a tableau of bleeding bodies and limbs. In the aftermath, a rickety, red Volkswagen sat parked along the sidewalk, its windows shattered and its doors sprayed with shrapnel. Corrugated tin, wires and insulation hung from roofs like vines on a tree. At the entrance of a shuttered shop, a pair of worn sandals sat undisturbed before a doorway, wet with blood and water.
The crater was the size of a coffee table -- about four feet across, two feet deep -- surrounded by asphalt rubble.
"It's a market, look around you," Jabbar Darraji said, as reporters gathered at the scene, the lights of television cameras casting a glow over a market cloaked in darkness. "Shame on you for the children who died, the women, the people."
The blast came on one of the most intense days of bombing since the air assault on Baghdad began last week. Before dawn, bombing wiped out four transmission towers and exchanges, shutting off some telephone lines in the capital. At one site, concrete spilled into Saadoun Street from a crater in the side of a building. At another, the blast blew out the middle three floors of an eight-floor building, leaving a tangle of reinforced steel and concrete hanging tenuously from the sides. At one complex that houses a transmission tower, a statue of President Saddam Hussein stood with its arm outstretched, pointing toward the destruction.
After nightfall, thundering explosions struck near the Republican Presidential Palace compound and the Information Ministry.
In nine days of war, Iraqi officials have volunteered daily counts of civilian casualties from the bombing, and it is clear from their rhetoric that they hope public revulsion from the deaths will force international intervention to end the conflict.
As with other tolls reported since the war began, a precise count from today's blast was difficult to verify. Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf put the dead at 58 and said the number was expected to rise. Doctors and some witnesses at the market said they believed 50 people had died. Haqi Ismail Razouq, director of nearby Nour Hospital, where many of the wounded were taken, said at least 30 people were killed and 47 wounded, many of them children in serious condition.
At the hospital, sobbing men stood in the hallway, embracing each other. Women ran down the hallways, screaming the names of their relatives. In one bed lay Samaan Kadhim, his hands crusted with blood and a bandage covering a gaping wound on his back.
"This was a civilian area, there were no soldiers," he said softly, his face contorted in pain. "It was just a market."
With his daughter and grandson, the 52-year-old Kadhim was shopping for an antenna for his television when the blast occurred. His relatives escaped unharmed, but hours later, he said he was already haunted by the memories.
"They slaughtered us," he whispered.
In a hallway, with scenes of grief replaying through the night, Ahmed Sufian, a physician, looked out over a dilapidated hospital little equipped to treat all the wounded. Tired and overwhelmed, he discarded the detached demeanor of a doctor. He spoke of a young child, still breathing but with an open wound in his abdomen, and he became angry.
"Our floors are covered with blood, the walls are splashed with blood. We ask why, why, why? Why all this blood? I'm a doctor, but I can't understand such things," Sufian said. "They came to free us? This is freedom? We have done nothing."
In the neighborhood, the Imam Moussa Kadhim Mosque, a small building of corrugated tin roofs and concrete walls, drew mourners who gathered to wash the bodies before draping them in a white sheet and placing them in the wood coffins.
In one room, women dipped cotton in water, removing the blood from the body of a 9-year-old girl who lay lifeless on a cement slab. The shrapnel had torn holes in her back, abdomen and leg. Her eyes were still half-open, her mouth agape.
In a coffin next to her was her mother.
In the mosque's prayer room, men gazed on seven other coffins, draped in household blankets. In silence, a few stared blankly. Some sobbed into their trembling hands. Others clenched their teeth, trying to hold back tears. One mumbled over and over, "God forbid." Along the wall, women in black beat their chests and threw up their hands, begging for God's help.
Watching over the mourners was a portrait of Hussein, the prophet Muhammad's grandson whose martyrdom in the 7th century is a powerful, resonant symbol of suffering for the Shiite Muslims who live in the neighborhood of Shuala. His name was written in white in graceful Arabic calligraphy, each letter dripping with blood to represent his sacrifice.
The worshippers, their wails cascading off the walls, left little nuance in the blame they assigned for their suffering.
"America is responsible for this," said Kadhim Ali, a 50-year-old dressed in a gray cloak. "Why does it hate the Iraqi people?"
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
|
|
