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Wailing
Children, the Wounded, the Dead: Victims of the Day
Cluster Bombs Rained On Babylon
by
Robert Fisk
in
Baghdad
Dissident Voice
April
3, 2003
The
wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or
face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in
the flesh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something
illegal something quite outside the Geneva Conventions occurred in the
villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The
wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients
upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their
heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like
grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say and the detritus of
the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and
Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
Were
they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the
most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the
Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who,
in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high
above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in
the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off
the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Rahed
Hakem remembers that it was 10.30am on Sunday when she was sitting in her home
in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked out of
the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a
black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little
boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were
silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said. "If
it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said.
"They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our
home, unexploded."
Karima
Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them perhaps
the metal "butterfly" that contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs
and springs open to release them in showers.
Some
victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened,
decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the
Hillah hospital. The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since
Saturday night the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or
who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been
buried in their home villages and, of these, doctors say about 80 per cent
were civilians.
Soldiers
there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and
amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki
military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and
both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military
installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a
missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field as they were along the
highway north to Baghdad? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for
civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of
cluster bombs in these villages even if aimed at military targets thus
crosses the boundaries of international law.
So
it was that 27-year old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in
her back. And so five-year-old Zaman Abbais was hit in the legs and 48-year-old
Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old
soldier, said the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red
and green sometimes painted on them. ''It is like a grenade and they came into
the houses," he said. "Some stayed on the land, others
exploded."
Heartbreaking
is the only word to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old
sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet
embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn't
realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother
carefully lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture
in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to
her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she
had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters lying
in their own blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid
when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to
laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience.
The
Iraqi authorities, of course, were all too ready to allow us journalists access
to these patients. But there was no way these children and often uneducated
parents could manufacture their stories of tragedy and pain. Nor could the
Iraqis have faked the scene in Nadr village where the remains of the tiny
bomblets littered the ground beside the scorch marks. A crew from Sky
Television even managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from
Nadr with them, the wicked little metal balls that are intended to puncture the
human body still locked into their frame like cough sweets in a metal sheath,
They were of a black colour which glinted silver when held against the light.
Again,
were the aircraft that dropped these terrible weapons American or British? The
deputy administrator of the hospital and one of his doctors told a confused
tale of military action around the city in recent days, of Apache helicopters
that would disgorge special forces on the road to Karbala; one of their
operations if the hospital personnel are to be believed went spectacularly
wrong one night recently when militiamen forced them to retreat. Shortly
afterwards, the cluster bomb raids began, although the villages that were
targeted appear to have been on the other side of Hillah to the reported
abortive American attack.
One
thing was clear: there is no "front line" in the fighting around
Babylon, that US forces strike into land around the Tigris river by air and
then withdraw and Iraqi forces do much the same in the other direction. Only
the Americans and British, of course, have air superiority indeed there is no
evidence a single Iraqi aircraft has taken off since the start of the invasion
so even the US and British officers back at Qatar headquarters can hardly
claim the cluster bombs were dropped by Iraq.
The
most recent raid occurred on Tuesday when 11 civilians were killed two of
them women and three of them children in a village called Hindiyeh. A man
sent to collect the corpses reported to the hospital the only living thing he
found in the area was a hen. Iraqi bomb disposal officers were ordered into the
villages yesterday afternoon to clear the unexploded ordnance.
Needless
to say, it is not the first time cluster bombs have been used against
civilians. During Israel's 1982 siege of west Beirut, its air force dropped
cluster bomblets manufactured for the US Navy across several areas, especially
in the Fakhani and Ouzai districts, causing civilians ferocious and deep wounds
identical to those I saw in Hillah yesterday. Angry at the misuse of their
weapons, which are designed for use against exclusively military targets, the
Reagan administration withheld a shipment of fighter-bombers for Israel then
relented a few weeks later and sent the aircraft anyway.
It
is not easy to listen to Iraqi officials condemning the use of illegal weapons
when the Iraqi air force has itself dropped poison gas on the Iranian army and
on pro-Iranian Kurdish villages during the 1980-88 war against Iran. Outraged
claims from Iraqi officials at the abuse of human rights sound like a bell with
a very hollow ring. But something terrible happened around Hillah this week, something
unforgivable and something contrary to international law. One hesitates, as I
say, to talk of human rights in this land of torture but if the Americans and
British don't watch out, they are likely to find themselves condemned for what
they have always and rightly accused Iraq of: war crimes.
Robert Fisk is an award winning foreign correspondent
for The Independent (UK), where
this article first appeared. He is the author of Pity Thy Nation: The Abduction
of Lebanon (The Nation Books, 2002 edition). Posted with authors
permission.