March 28
BOMB BLAST IN BUSY BAGHDAD MARKET
KILLS DOZENS
(Associated Press photo shows
a child lying dead in the morgue of Al Nur hospital, following a bomb that landed in a
busy market in the Al Shula'a district of West Baghdad Friday March 28, 2003, killing
dozens, according to local hospital sources, and wounding scores).
Washington Post ~ BAGHDAD, March 28 -- ... 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 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.
...
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?"
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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL:
28 March: A shattering explosion reportedly killed at least 62 people in a market in Baghdad's poor al-Shu'la neighbourhood. A distraught mother, Sumaya' Abed, said that three of her sons had been killed by pieces of shrapnel that cut through their chests and heads. The youngest was just 11 years old. Both the US and UK governments publicly suggested that the explosion was "probably" caused by an ageing Iraqi anti-aircraft missile. However, according to the Independent newspaper, the remains of a serial number of a missile were found at the scene, identifying it as one manufactured in Texas, the USA, by Raytheon, the world's biggest producer of "smart armaments", and sold to the US Navy. The missile is believed to have been either a HARM (High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile) device, or a Paveway laser-guided bomb. Although the US authorities acknowledged that one of their jets fired at least one missile in the area that day, an official US source claimed that the shrapnel could have been planted at the scene by Iraqi officials. AI believes that in such disputed circumstances independent investigation is vital.
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BASRA: IRAQI FORCES FIRE ON FLEEING CIVILIANS: Reuters - Iraqi forces have fired on about 2,000 civilians trying to flee fighting and a humanitarian crisis in the besieged southern city of Basra, forcing some to turn back, British military officials say.
"A couple of thousand Iraqi civilians trying to get out of Basra to the north and west are being fired on by paramilitaries with both mortars and machineguns," British military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Ronnie McCourt told Reuters.
In what appeared to be a similar but separate incident on the main road south out of Basra, Iraqi forces fired mortar bombs near some 1,000 civilians waiting to cross a bridge, seriously hurting one woman, a British officer in Basra said.
Speaking at the war headquarters of the U.S.-led invasion forces in Qatar, McCourt said British forces were trying to help evacuate casualties from the incidents north and west of Basra.
Another British military spokesman said two groups of civilians had tried to flee. "The first group made it. When the second group came out, paramilitaries came out and mortared them and machine gunned them and drove them back into town," he said.
Al Lockwood, the main spokesman for British forces in Qatar, said the British Black Watch 1st Batallion tried to intervene once the paramilitaries launched their attack.
"This was witnessed by elements of the Black Watch...who placed themselves between the fleeing civilians and the paramilitaries and commenced firing," Lockwood said.
"The paramilitaries are attempting to keep people in the bounds of Basra," he said. "There is a great deal of coercion particularly among the young male population by the Baath party and these paramilitaries to make them fight for the regime."
"Once we have isolated these forces, located them, we will strike, we will take them out and return Basra to the people."
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March 28
INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS DAILY BULLETIN
GENERAL SITUATION: Many telephone landlines, including those of the ICRC
delegation, were no longer functioning following overnight attacks. This made it impossible for
many Baghdad residents to find out how their family and friends were faring after another night
of heavy bombardments. The ICRC tried to give most of its core staff a well-deserved day of rest
following eight days of intense activity. The workload was thus reduced as much as possible.
GENERAL: Yesterday the ICRC received reports from different sources of severe water shortages in several governorates (Nalnawa, Kerbela, Dia Qar, Wasit) due either to failures of the national electricity grid, a reduction in the water supply to water treatment plants, or hostilities on the ground. As a result several urban centres such as Naseriyah and possibly Najaf and Kerbela have most likely now been without drinking water for several days.
Also since yesterday telecommunications with Iraq have been disrupted, following reported attacks on communication facilities. As a result, the ICRC's delegation in Baghdad no longer has the use of normal land lines, and is now relying entirely on satellite phones. Information from our colleagues in Basra is therefore very limited in today's bulletin.
BAGHDAD (28 March 2003),
General situation: Many telephone landlines, including those of the ICRC delegation, were no longer functioning following overnight attacks. This made it impossible for many Baghdad residents to find out how their family and friends were faring after another night of heavy bombardments.
The ICRC tried to give most of its core staff a well-deserved day of rest following eight days of intense activity. The workload was thus reduced as much as possible.
Contacts with the authorities
Regular contacts continued with the Iraqi authorities on a range of subjects, including the issue of prisoners of war. As yet, no date has been fixed for ICRC visits to POWs to begin.
Medical assistance
The ICRC doctor visited the Al-Nur general hospital, which will be provided with two stretchers, two trolleys and two emergency sets.
The doctor also visited one of the 25 first-aid posts set up around the city by the Iraq Red Crescent Society. The post is staffed 24 hours a day by two Red Crescent volunteers and one medical assistant from the Ministry of Health. It provides first aid and wound dressings, and evacuates urgent cases to the nearest referral hospital using a Ministry of Health ambulance or a volunteer's private car.
BASRA
Telephone contact with the ICRC delegation in Basra was not possible.
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