by Robert Fisk
IT WAS AN OUTRAGE, AN OBSCENITY. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three children in their still-smouldering car. Two missiles from an American jet killed them all—twenty-one Iraqi civilians—torn to pieces on 27 March before they could be “liberated” by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself at the scene, to call this “collateral damage”? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red-and-yellow dust and rain that morning.
It was a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs. Bush and Blair still fondly hoped would rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. “Roar, flash,” he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them. I am faced by the same old question: How to record so terrible an event? Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told. For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?
Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch for customers at the Nasser restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb Street. The missile that killed them landed next to the westbound carriageway, its blast tearing away the front of the café and cutting the two men—the first forty-eight, the second only eighteen— to pieces. A fellow worker led me through the rubble. “This is all that is left of them now,” he said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with blood. At least fifteen cars burst into flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the centre of the street that had been flipped upside down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The second missile hit on the eastbound carriageway, sending shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block with the words “This is God’s possession” written in marble on the outside wall.
The building’s manager, Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway as soon as he heard the massive explosion. “I found Ta’ar in pieces over there,” he told me. His head was blown off. “That’s his hand.” A group of young men and a woman took me into the street and there, a scene from any horror film, was Ta’ar’s hand, cut off at the wrist, his four fingers and thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His colleague, Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled a few feet away, a pale red-and-grey mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked for Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.
As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities. There was the electrical shop owner killed behind his counter by the same missile that cut down Ta’ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl standing on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the truck-driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar who regularly called to see Mr. Danoon for bread and who was just leaving when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to destroy him.
In Qatar, the Anglo-American forces announced an inquiry. The Iraqi government, who are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value of such a bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially put at fourteen dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there was a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though I couldn’t find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade headquarters, but the fire brigade can hardly be described as a military target. Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions; these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.
Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned coordinates, and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud’s friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn’t want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems. And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in Baghdad. On 24 March an entire family of nine was wiped out in their home near the centre of the city. On 25 March a busload of civilian passengers was reportedly killed on a road south of Baghdad. On the 26th, Iraqis were learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered on a Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the Iraqi border.
We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of September 11th, we may say, because of the “weapons of mass destruction”—which do not exist—because of our desperate desire to “liberate” all these people. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I wrote that night, I’ll bet we are told that Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan’t mention the pilot, of course. And we didn’t. Faulty Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles—the same old excuse—had probably killed them all, the Americans said. It was not possible. The two missiles had exploded equidistant from each other on both carriageways. No guidance system could fail on two anti-aircraft missiles at exactly the same time, causing them to land so neatly on the same road.
There is no end to this. Just a day later—on 28 March—the atrocity is repeated. The evidence this time is a piece of metal only a foot high, but the numbers on it hold the clue. At least sixty-two civilians have died by the afternoon of 29 March and the coding on that hunk of metal contains the identity of the culprit. The Americans and British were doing their best to suggest—here we go again— that yet one more Iraqi anti-aircraft missile destroyed those dozens of lives, adding that they were “still investigating” the carnage. But the coding on the missile fragment is in groups of numerals and Latin letters, not in Arabic. And many of the survivors heard the plane.
In the al-Noor hospital, there were appalling scenes of pain and suffering. A two-year-old girl, Saida Jaffar, swaddled in bandages and tubes, a tube into her nose, another into her stomach. All I could see of her was her forehead, two small eyes and a chin. Beside her, blood and flies covered a heap of old bandages and swabs. Not far away, lying on a dirty bed, was three-year-old Mohamed Amaid, his face, stomach, hands and feet all tied tightly in bandages. A great black mass of congealed blood lay at the bottom of his bed.
This is a hospital without computers, with only the most primitive of X-ray machines. But the missile was guided by computers and that vital shard of fuselage was computer-coded. It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans—if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB7492. The letter “B” is scratched and could be an “H.” This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon’s “Lot” number. It reads: MFR 95214 09. The piece of metal bearing the codings was retrieved minutes after the missile exploded on the evening of the 28th, by an old man whose home is only a hundred metres away from the 2-metre crater. Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists. The missile sprayed hunks of metal through the crowds—mainly women and children—and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads. Three brothers, the eldest twenty-one and the youngest twelve, were cut down inside the living room of their brick hut on the main road opposite the market. Two doors away, two sisters were killed in an identical manner.
“We hav
e never seen anything like these wounds before,” Dr. Ahmed, an anaesthetist at the al-Noor hospital, told me later. “These people have been punctured by dozens of bits of metal.” He was right. One old man I visited in a hospital ward had twenty-four holes in the back of his legs and buttocks, some as big as pound coins. An X-ray photograph handed to me by one of his doctors clearly showed at least thirty-five slivers of metal still embedded in his body.
As with the Abu Taleb Street massacre, Shu’ale is a poor Shia Muslim neighbourhood of single-storey corrugated iron and cement food stores and two-room brick homes. Again, these are the very people whom Messrs. Bush and Blair expected to rise in insurrection against Saddam. But the anger in the slums was directed at the Americans and British, by old women and bereaved fathers and brothers who spoke without hesitation—and without the presence of the ubiquitous government “minders.” “This is a crime,” a woman muttered at me angrily. “Yes, I know they say they are targeting the military. But can you see soldiers here? Can you see missiles?”
The answer has to be in the negative. A few journalists did report seeing a Scud missile on a transporter near the Sha’ab area on Thursday and there were anti-aircraft guns around Shu’ale. I heard an American jet race over the scene of the massacre and just caught sight of a ground-to-air missile that was vainly chasing it, its contrail soaring over the slum houses in the dark blue sky. An anti-aircraft battery—manufactured around 1942—also began firing into the air a few blocks away. But even if the Iraqis do position or move their munitions close to the suburbs, does that justify the Americans firing into those packed civilian neighbourhoods, into areas that they know contain crowded main roads and markets—and during the hours of daylight? The 27 March attack on Abu Taleb Street was carried out on a main road at midday during a sandstorm—when dozens of civilians are bound to be killed, whatever the pilot thought he was aiming at.
“I had five sons and now I have only two—and how do I know that even they will survive?” a bespectacled middle-aged man asked in the bare concrete back room of his home. “One of my boys was hit in the kidneys and heart. His chest was full of shrapnel; it came right through the windows. Now all I can say is that I am sad that I am alive.” A neighbour interrupted to say that he saw the plane with his own eyes. “I saw the side of the aircraft and I noticed it changed course after it fired the missile.”
Plane-spotting has become an all-embracing part of life in Baghdad. I respond in my paper to a reader who thoughtfully asks if I can see with my own eyes the American aircraft over the city; I have to reply that in at least sixty-five raids by aircraft, I have not—despite my tiger-like eyes—actually seen one plane. I hear them, especially at night, but they are flying at supersonic speed; during the day, they are usually above the clouds of black smoke that wash over the city. I have, just once, spotted a cruise missile—the cruise or “Tomahawk” rockets fly at only around 400 mph—and I saw it passing down a boulevard towards the Tigris River. But the grey smoke that shoots out of the city like the fingers of a dead hand is unmistakeable, along with the concussion of sound. And when they can be found, the computer codings on the bomb fragments reveal their own story. As the codes on the Shu’ale missile surely must.
All morning, the Americans were at it again, blasting away at targets on the perimeter of Baghdad—where the outer defences are being dug by Iraqi troops— and in the centre of the city. An air-fired rocket exploded on the roof of the Iraqi Ministry of Information, destroying a clutch of satellite dishes. One office building from which I was watching the bombardment swayed for several seconds during a long raid. Even in the al-Noor hospital, the walls were shaking as the survivors of the market slaughter struggled for survival. Hussein Mnati is fifty-two and just stared at me—his face pitted with metal fragments—as bombs blasted the city. A twenty-year-old man was sitting up in the next bed, the blood-soaked stump of his left arm plastered over with bandages. Only twelve hours ago, he had a left arm, a left hand, fingers. Now he blankly recorded his memories. “I was in the market and I didn’t feel anything,” he told me. “The rocket came and I was to the right of it and then an ambulance took me to hospital.” Whether or not his amputation was dulled by pain-killers, he wanted to talk. When I asked him his name, he sat upright in bed and shouted at me: “My name is Saddam Hussein Jassem.”
AT THE END OF MARCH 2003, Sergeant Ali Jaffar Moussa Hamadi al-Nomani drove a car laden with explosives into a U.S. Marine checkpoint in southern Iraq and blew himself up. He was the first Iraqi combatant known to stage a suicide attack. During the uprising against British rule not one Iraqi killed himself like this to destroy his enemies. Nomani was also a Shia Muslim—a member of the sect the Americans faithfully believed to be their secret ally in their invasion of Iraq. Even the Iraqi government initially wondered how to deal with his extraordinary action, caught between its desire to dissociate itself from an event that might remind the world of Osama bin Laden, and its determination to threaten the Americans with more such attacks.
The details of the fifty-year-old sergeant’s life were few but intriguing. He was a soldier in the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War and volunteered to fight in the 1991 Gulf War, the “Mother of All Battles” according to Saddam Hussein. Then, though he was over-age for further fighting, Nomani volunteered to fight the Anglo– American invasion. And so it was, without telling his commander and in his own car, that he drove into a U.S. Marine checkpoint outside Najaf. Saddam awarded him the Military Medal (1st Class) and the “Mother of All Battles” medal. The dead man left five children, a widow and a new place in the 2,000-year history of Iraqi resistance to invasions. A U.S. spokesman said that the attack “looks and feels like terrorism,” although, since Nomani was attacking an occupation army and his target was a military one, no Arab would ever believe this.
Within hours al-Homani’s death, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Iraqi vice president, was talking like a Palestinian or Hizballah leader, emphasising the inequality of arms between the Iraqis and the Americans. “The U.S. administration is going to turn the whole world into people prepared to die for their nations,” he said. “All they can do now is turn themselves into bombs. If the B-52 bombs can now kill 500 or more in our war, then I’m sure that some operations by our freedom fighters will be able to kill 5,000.” It was clear what this meant; the Iraqi leadership was just as surprised at Nomani’s attack as were his American victims.
This made no sense to us. Iraqis were not suiciders. As the Americans might say, this did not “compute.” I wrote a half-hearted dispatch to The Independent on 30 March, trying to make sense of what had happened. Of course, I had forgotten the Iran–Iraq War—the conflict in which Nomani had participated—and the suicidal battles in which the Iraqis fought and died. Suicide bombers, I wrote:
whether they be the Shia Muslim Lebanese successfully evicting Israel’s army of occupation or the Palestinians destroying Israel’s sense of security, are the ultimate weapon of the Arabs. The U.S. first understood its power when suicide bombers struck the American embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the marine barracks in Beirut on 23 October the same year, when 241 American servicemen died. Only when Arabs bent on a far more devastating suicide mission launched their attacks on September 11th, 2001, did Washington finally realise that there was no effective defence against such tactics. In a strange way, therefore, September 11th at last finds a symbolic connection with Iraq. While the attempts to link President Saddam’s regime with Osama bin Laden turned out to be fraudulent, the anger that the U.S. has unleashed is real, and has met the weapon the Americans fear most. Most suicide bombers are younger than Nomani and unmarried. But someone must have helped him to rig the explosives in his car, must have taught him how to set off the detonator. And if this was not the Iraqis, as they claim, then was there an organisation involved of which both the Americans and the Iraqis know nothing?
There was some talk by Vice President Ramadan of “the martyr’s moment of sublimity,” an expression hitherto unheard of in the Baat
hist lexicon. General Hazim al-Rawi of the Ministry of Defence recalled that the dead man bore the same name as “the Imam Ali” and announced that the new “martyr Ali has opened the door to jihad.” He said that more than 4,000 volunteers from Arab countries were now in the country and that “martyrdom operations will continue not only by Iraqis but by thousands of Arabs who came to Baghdad.” In my report that night, I wrote that “suddenly, it seems, Islam has intruded into this very nationalistic war of liberation—for that is what it is called here—against the Americans.”
In retrospect, Nomani’s suicide was one of the most important moments in this war. It shocked the Americans—whose superficial reaction about “terrorism” hopelessly underplayed the meaning of the attack—and it surprised the Iraqis. But the language of the Baathists—the talk of “martyrdom operations” and the international Arab legion that would supposedly continue them—should have set those old cliché “alarm bells” ringing loud. Something had started outside Najaf, a precedent most serious for any invading army; in a land without any such tradition, a match had been lit.
A vicious dark storm has smashed into Baghdad, leaving my hotel room yellow with sand. The dust and muck of the city now lies like a shroud over the carpets and bed linen and tables. The cleaning staff have long ago fled. My files are covered in fine grains of sand so that the pages slither out of their boxes with the sound of a knife leaving a sheath. I work my way with dirty fingers through the section that I have marked with the word “Islam.” Mostly, the pages are about Shiite resistance. But I have some handwritten notes—never used in a report, since I did not understand their meaning—to the effect that Saddam had, in 2000, allowed the creation of “Islamic committees,” groups of Sunni Muslim religious scholars and their followers who would be permitted to discuss Islamic law and Koranic teaching provided they never mentioned politics, never combined their beliefs with the secular world of the Baath. These committees now existed in Mosul and Baquba, Fallujah and Ramadi, and in Baghdad.