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When
Precision Bombing Isn’t
Iraqi
Civilians Learn the Lesson of Afghanistan
by
Marc W. Herold
Dissident Voice
March
31, 2003
Freudian
slip? A marine of the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit replaces the Iraqi flag at
the entrance to Iraq's port of Umm Qasr on March 21, 2003, with the flag of the
occupiers and the flag of the U.S. Marine Corps. The flag was later taken down
as it was deemed a politically incorrect gesture.
By
now, those who wish to see may find all the signs of a repeat carnage - bombed
buses, pulverized homes, an incinerated central market, flattened civilian
structures [the tourist center on the Tigris and the large museum in Tikrit (1)], bombed neighborhoods, a bombed abandoned customs house,
a girls' school leveled in Basra [see photo below], scores of wounded civilians
in hospitals, etc... (2) The Pentagon, DoD, defense
'intellectuals', retired generals, and mainstream corporate press sign
collective hosannas to 'precision' bombing which ring ever so hollow. Those who
dared to look found the same for the U.S. attack upon Afghanistan [or the deadly
night-time assault upon Panama in December 1989 which killed over 3,000
innocent civilians]. After a week of U.S.- U.K. attacks, Iraq's health minister
reported on March 27th that 350 Iraqi civilians had died and 3,600 had been
injured and the Pentagon reported that 600 Tomahawk cruise missiles, more than
4,300 "precision-guided" bombs had been dropped in the first 6 days
of the war. (3)
U.S.
'precision' projectiles have fallen in neighboring Turkey and Iran. (4) An early report mentioned U.S. missiles hitting
structures in Iran's city of Abadan and injuring two. (5)
On March 24th, another U.S. 'guided' missile hit the Iranian town of
Qasr-e-Shirin. (6) Other 'guided' weapons have downed
'Allied' aircraft, killed 'friendly' troops, etc.. At least one
state-of-the-art Apache attack helicopter was hit by rifle fire and lay forlorn
in a field near Karbala, an expensive monument to technological U.S. prowess
laid to waste by simple Iraqi farmers. Apache down.
Hamza
Hendawi reported on the first night of U.S. strikes upon Baghdad when scores of
Raytheon cruise missiles and 2,000 lb. JDAM bombs delivered by F-117 stealth
warplanes rained down upon Baghdad after 9 P.M. [incidentally, exactly the same
time Afghanistan was hit on the night of October 7, 2001]. Iraqi radio said
Saddam's family home was targeted along with homes of his three daughters.
Hendawi continues:
"After the first round of attacks,
nine people were in serious but stable conditions with shrapnel injuries at
Al-Yarmouk Hospital, Dr. Jamal Abed Hassan said. They included six members of
one family that was having breakfast when their town 20 miles west of Baghdad
was hit, he said...Al-Kindi Hospital in the working class Al-Nahda district
treated five people for wounds, including Iraqi TV journalist Anmar Waheed and
his sister, who were hurt as they tried to reach a shelter, according to Dr.
Osama Saleh al-Dilimi...Information Minister Said al-Sahhaf said
"coalition" forces hit a customs compound and an Iraqi TV facility in
western Iraq...he said two civilian locations were struck south of
Baghdad." (7)
The
International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed on March 20th that 15
civilians had been injured and one killed in the first attack upon Baghdad. (8) The killed civilian was near the Rutba crossing on the
Jordanian border, whereas other casualties occurred in a building used by Iraqi
state TV in the Al-Anbar province, 150 kilometers west of Baghdad. (9)
Hear
the words of a Belgian doctor in Baghdad's Al-Yarmouk hospital:
Rossel Salam, a 10 year-old girl . Hurt
on Friday, March 21st, in the west end of Baghdad. At about 9 P.M. she was in
her garden. There was a blast and metal splinters were flying about . Her
wrist, forearm, hand and breast were hit. She has multiple fractures. A tube
has been put in her thorax, her lung was hit and blood has entered her chest
cavity. She is visible in great pain. When we want to take pictures she is very
brave. Her dad cautiously removes the blanket to show us her wounds. She is
moaning with pain and stretches out her hand, fingers opened. Her dad stoops
forward, takes her hand and softly talks to her. I ask her 'how are you
feeling?'. 'I am alright', she says but you can see that she is not alright.
She is ten and already proud. Her father, 44 with two children, adds: 'we are
strong, they cannot bully us and we are going to win'. His morale is clearly
not broken, despite his daughter's serious injuries. It may even motivate him
more not to have his country squandered. The Iraqis are proud people with a
long history. At school they are taught a lot about the past, they are
conscious of their value.
Sahad Asan, 10. Hurt yesterday at about 9
pm while at home. Twelve people were hit at the same time in that neighborhood.
Injuries on both legs and in his belly. He has a drain in his belly. He is
visibly in great pain. Weah, his 25-year-old cousin is angry with us: 'why are
you here? don't you see it is terrible enough as it is?' Doctor Faysal rebukes
him, we don't understand him, but we get the gist of his words. Faysal explains
that the man takes us for journalists and does not understand why we are here.
On March 26th, U.S.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher intoned once again [after
apologizing for killing five Syrian civilians],
"American forces will continue to attempt to protect civilian
lives to the greatest extent possible." (10)
Robert
Fisk wrote about "bubbles of fire" tearing into the night sky of
Baghdad, dark red at the base, golden at the top. (11) He
mentioned the first civilian killed in Baghdad: a taxi driver blown to pieces
in the first American raid on Baghdad. A couple of days later, Fisk provided
details of the human face of the U.S. air war upon Iraq,
"[F]ive-year-old
Doha Suheil...looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a
deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her
body. The cruise missiles that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh
suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs, they were bound up with
gauze and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in
her left leg...[Doha] was the first of 101 patients brought to the
Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital after the American blitz on the city began
Friday night. Seven other members of her family were wounded in the same cruise
missile bombardment...[or] take 50-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with
tattoos on her arms and legs but who now lies on her hospital bed with massive
purple bruises on her shoulders they are now twice their original size who was
on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missile struck
Baghdad. "I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big
explosion and I fell down and found blood everywhere," she told me.
"It was on my arms, my legs, my chest."...Her five-year-old daughter
Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the
taxi first and was almost at her aunt's front door when the explosion cut her
down. Her feet are still bleeding although the blood has clotted around her
toes and is staunched by the bandages on her ankles and lower legs. Two little
boys are in the next room. Sade Selim is 11; his brother Omar is 14. Both have
shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest." (12)
Top:
a home bombed in Kabul, and Bottom: a young Afghan boy injured in the village
of Agam
The
same scenes are repeated across Iraq after U.S. bombs and missiles rain down. Echoes
of Afghanistan. Even the photos look familiar (see above). General Franks,
Secretary Rumsfeld, Vernon Loeb and Tom Ricks [of the Washington Post] (13), etc. recycle the old tired texts used in the winter of
2001/2. As in the Afghan battle of Shah-i-Kot where a French pilot of a Mirage
2000 fighter plane refused to drop bombs upon a U.S.-chosen target, so in Iraq
the pilot of a F/A-18 Super Hornet refuses to do the same, feeling Iraqi
civilians would've been killed. (14) The U.S. military
and media strive, again, to present a vision of combat as bloodless and
antiseptic, though with considerably less success this round as compared to the
Afghan case. (15) For its part, Al-Jazeera broadcasts
chilling photos of dismembered Iraqis, destroyed buildings, and captured U.S.
troops. It is joined now by other Gulf state TV stations who now dominate the
production of images, as the Iraq regime sent the propagandists of CNN off packing
on Friday, March 21st.
The
effects of U.S. 'precision bombing' in Baghdad were captured by Carolyn Cole,
whose pictures were featured in the Los Angeles Times [March 24, 2003]. She
shows the Radiha Khatoum neighborhood where crushed buildings buried a woman
and Iraqi rescue workers furiously labored to recover the body. She shows
Shahid Halid, 9, resting in a hospital, unaware that her mother was killed in
that U.S. "precision" strike.
At
7:30 PM on Saturday, U.S. bombs rained down on the Qadissiya neighborhood of
old central Baghdad. Shafa Hussein returned from taking her sick son to a
Baghdad hospital and found her home in ruins. Five other homes were demolished
and 10 others damaged. The residents said the target must have been President
Hussein's Salam palace, located about 3 kilometers away. (16)
Mr.
Rumsfeld, on the other hand, endlessly asserts on the surgical nature of the
U.S. strikes upon 'military targets':
"The images on television tend to leave
the impression that we're bombing Baghdad. The coalition forces are not bombing
Baghdad." (17)
On
Saturday, Al-Jazeera's team in the city of Basra sent out graphic pictures of
dead and wounded civilians. These images were all but ignored in the West,
which was fixated upon the couple of pictures of American prisoners of war.
On
Sunday, a U.S. 'precision' air-to-surface missile struck a passenger bus on the
Iraqi side of the Syrian border, as it carried Syrian civilians fleeing the
war. (18) Five people were killed and 10 wounded. A
wounded worker, Marwan al-Shayesh, told Syrian TV that the missile struck when
the bus had stopped near a bridge for a short rest and the passengers were climbing
out.
A
father carrying his daughter felled by U.S. bombs in Basra
The
destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure - though not yet on the scale of
1991 - is proceeding and promises to accelerate as the battle of Baghdad unfolds.
We all saw the dramatic photos of Baghdad burning, the walls of fire and
mushroom orange clouds, during the first nights of U.S. missile and bomb
attacks. Unlike in Afghanistan, the more developed Iraqi state had built
sprawling administrative structures in areas removed from residential
neighborhoods. Hence, the early U.S. bombing of the west bank of the Tigris
River in Baghdad spared most civilians. But, the infrastructural damage has
been nonetheless significant : bridges hit in western Iraq, a direct hit on the
museum in Tikrit [yes!], a couple of direct hits on Friday night upon the
Kharrada tourist complex on the banks of the Tigris.
Two
members of Iraq Peace Team left Baghdad for Jordan on March 23rd and wrote
about their journey,
"The trip from Baghdad was lonely
and creepy. We saw burning oil pits, bombed and burned out cars of the side of
the road, a couple of downed bridges, a destroyed roadside tea stand [the place
we always stop on the trip to Baghdad from Amman], a destroyed ambulance
abandoned down the embankment, a few routes hastily blocked with piles of rock,
etc."
The
BBC reporter and resident of Baghdad, Subhy Haddad, visited civilians injured
in the U.S. raids, at the Al-Nouman hospital in northern Baghdad. (19) The hospital surgeon said 29 people had been injured in
a missile or bomb attack on northern Baghdad at noon with 5 dying on the way to
the hospital. Haddad interviewed some of the injured able to speak,
"One of them, a 12-year-old girl, Shad
Khalil, said that all the six members of her family were seriously injured when
the missiles fell on the area she lives in. Among the injured was a 40-year-old
woman called Thana Wahid Jassim who works as an engineer in a local private
company. She said a missile had fallen on her house. All the members of her
family, including her husband, were seriously injured, she told us. Her husband
was undergoing surgery. She said the blast was so strong that the ceiling fell
on their heads. We asked some of the injured whether there were any military
targets in the area. They all said the only famous building in the area was the
Royal Cemetery, where the old kings of Iraq are buried. It is a residential
area - I know it very well."
Dr.
April Hurley of Iraq Peace Team presents further details of the wounded of
Baghdad in her article "Outrage in Baghdad." (20)
Also
on the 25th, James Meek of The Guardian reported from the heavily fought-over
town of Nassiriya. He spoke with the surgical assistant at the city's Saddam
hospital, who told him that on Sunday, U.S. bombs fell on Nassiriya's civilian
areas, killing 10. (21) An unconfirmed report mentioned
British troops shooting at civilians in the town of Safwan on the 25th, a town
hard hit - as many as a dozen people were killed - in the early days of the war
as U.S. and U.K. forces headed north. (22)
Reporting
from Baghdad, the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid described what happened to
the Khalil family on Tuesday, as they sat down at noon, to east boiled eggs,
tomatoes and bread. (23) As the two children told
stories, a whisper sound was heard. In seconds, the house was shattered by an
American 'precision' cruise missile. Um Aqeel, the mother of five children, and
her daughter-in-law, Sahar, were killed. Two sons and a daughter were wounded.
Some time later at the hospital, the head of 14-year old Ali, another son of
the Khalil family, was wrapped in a bandage. His sister, Shahid, 9, lay
motionless. Her fingernails were painted in sparkles and ringed by dried blood.
U.S.
Army Brigadier General Vincent Brooks (24) at Camp As
Sayliyah, Qatar, media center of U.S. Central Command soothes,
"We
do everything physically and scientifically possible to be precise in our
targeting." (25)
While
independent reporters are present in the larger cities, what happens in the Iraqi
countryside goes largely unspoken. A few rare, courageous people have ventured
out there and written about their experiences. One such is Jo Wilding, a human
rights observer of the group, Iraq Peace Watch, sends out occasional reports.
In the entry for March 26th, Wilding describes U.S. attacks carried out on
March 22, 23, 25 and 26th:
*
March 22nd in the farming community of Al Doraa. At 4 P.M. U.S. Apache
helicopters attacked. Atta Jassim died when a US 'guided' missile hit his
house. Moen, his 8-yr-old son received multiple bowel and intestinal injuries
from shrapnel. His 6-yr.-old brother Ali and mother Hana were also injured.
*
March 25th in Al Mahmoodia, South Baghdad. Saad Shalash Aday is another farmer.
He had a fractured leg and multiple shrapnel wounds including a ruptured
spleen, perforated caecum, colon and small bowel, abdominal and leg wounds. Two
of his brothers, Mohammed and Mobden, were also injured and ten year old twin
boys Ahmed and Daha Assan were killed in the same house when a bomb exploded
two or three meters from the building. The doctor, Dr Ahmed Abdullah, said two
other men were killed in the same attack around 6 P.M. yesterday (Tuesday):
Kherifa Mohammed Jebur, a 35 year old farmer and another man whose name nobody
present knew. Eight houses and four cars were destroyed and cows, sheep and
dogs were killed. The eyewitnesses described two bombs, each causing an
explosion in the air, and cylindrical containers - cluster bombs, some of which
exploded on the ground. Others did not explode. The two explosions were about
300 meters apart, with a few minutes between them. From first hearing the plane
overhead until the second explosion, they estimated, took about 10 minutes.
"Is this democracy?" the men demanded to know, gathered by Saad's
bed. "Is this what America is bringing to Iraq?"
*
March 26th . At 9 this morning a group of caravans was hit with cluster bombs,
according to the doctors. A tiny boy lay in terrible pain in the hospital, a
tube draining blood from his chest, which was pierced by shrapnel. They said he
was eight, but he looked maybe five. The doctors were testing for abdominal
damage as well. I'm not sure whether he knew yet, or could understand, that his
mother was killed instantly and his five sisters and two brothers were not yet
found. His father had gone to bring blood for him and his uncle, Dia, was with
him. Rusol Ammar, a skinny ten year old girl with startling eyes, flinched
occasionally when breathing hurt her - she had multiple injuries from glass and
shrapnel, as well as a fractured hand. Dr. Ahmed explained that, at the
velocity caused by an explosion, even a grain of sand could cause injury to a
child Rusol's size. They weren't yet sure what was in her chest. Her dad said
something hit their street and exploded. They were in their house and tried to
close the door against the fireball but the windows blew in and the glass and
shrapnel flew everywhere. His other children were unhurt. Rusol smiled the most
gorgeous smile when we told her how brave she is, and that it will give courage
to children everywhere when we tell them how brave she is.
*
March 23rd in Babylon. Today I met Essa Jassim Najim, a 28 year old first-year
engineering student from a farming family near Babylon. He couldn't speak
because of shrapnel wounds to his head and neck but his father explained that
three days ago they were attacked by two groups of Apache helicopters. The
first group attempted to land and the farmers resisted them with guns, aided by
the Civil Defence Force. The second group of helicopters attacked the house,
destroying it with a missile.
At
11:30 AM on March 26th, two U.S. cruise missiles slammed into the central
marketplace crowded with shoppers and motorists, consisting of 30 shops and
residences in the populated neighborhood of Al-Shaab in northern Baghdad,
killing 15-27 innocent civilians, breaking water mains flooding streets,
downing street lights. Hamza Hendawi reported,
"Two cruise missiles have struck a
residential area in Baghdad, killing at least 15 people, Iraqi defence
officials said. The attack occurred in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of
Al-Shaab, which contains dozens of shops and homes. The Arabic satellite
television channel Al-Jazeera showed several charred cars and at least one
bloodied body being carried away. Hundreds of people stood in front of what
appeared to be a bombed-out building, some holding their fists in the air and
shouting, "There is no God but God!" Associated Press Television News
video showed a large crater in the middle of the street, a smoldering building,
a child with a head bandage, and bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting in the back
of a pickup truck." (26)
Robert
Fisk visited the Abu Taleb Street in this dirt-poor mostly Shia muslim
neighborhood - a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments
and cheap cafes. (27) He wrote,
"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 small children in the still-smouldering car...the final
death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these
awful things each day...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 cafe and cutting the two men - the first 48, the
second only 18 - 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."
The
Al-Shaab neighborhood in northern Baghdad showing destroyed homes and vehicles,
hit by U.S. 'precision bombing' [AP and Reuters photos]. More pictures of the
carnage at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/photo_gallery/2888307.stm
The
initial U.S. response was that it 'knows nothing' of the Baghdad market bombing
and that its invasion of Iraq is on schedule. (28)
Also
on the 26th, a U.S. bomb and missile attack on Iraqi TV probably represented an
attempt at censorship and may have breached the Geneva Conventions - note that
a similar US assault took place on the Taliban's radio and TV stations in early
October 2001. (29) The prestigious International
Federation of Journalists notes that international law forbids attacks upon TV
and radio stations unless they are used for military purposes.
Reuters
reported on a bus filled with 20 men which was fired upon in "a storm of
bullets" by advancing US troops. (30) Twenty corpses
littered the ground in the village of Qal'at Sukkar. Marines searching the
blood-stained luggage could produce only two small handguns!
But,
Mr. Rumsfeld reassures the American public,
"The images on television tend to
leave the impression that we're bombing Baghdad. The coalition forces are not
bombing Baghdad."
On
Day 7 of the U.S. assault upon Iraq, U.S. forces killed upwards of 40 Iraqi
civilians. Al Jazeera's team in the city of Mosul reported that seven houses
were destroyed and bombs had killed or wounded more than 50 civilians. (31) Footage from the area depicted destroyed houses and
trucks filled with bags leaving the scene. (32) In the southern
city of Al-Zubayr, two Reuters journalists cited residents saying as many as 15
had been killed by US-UK firing. Om Talai, 40, her youngest child at her feet,
lamented,
"We live in fear at night....already
two of our houses have been destroyed. Why must they fire on our houses and
kill civilians?" (33)
The
heavy bombardment of Baghdad continued - walls of fire and clouds of smoke
billowing from stricken buildings. The Information Ministry was targeted,
witnesses said. (34) They also noted that a housing
complex for employees of a weapons-producing facility about 12 miles south of
Baghdad was hit and that an unknown number of people were killed and wounded.
The al-Ulwiyya telecommunications center on a main avenue in the central
Saadoun neighborhood was destroyed. (35) Iraqi officials
said the Thursday attacks on Baghdad had killed seven and wounded 92 civilians.
Rescuers Search for Bodies in Al-Mansour
Residences
To
all this, another eight dead and 33 injured should be added when two more US
"precision" bombs slammed into the Al-Mansour residential district in
central Baghdad. Witnesses said one resident was thrown by the explosion as he
completed his noon prayers. (36) Amy Goodman spoke with
an Iraqi engineer on the 27th who provided details of life under US bombs in
Baghdad. (37) A few hours after the attack upon the
Al-Mansour neighborhood which killed at least 8, another US 'precision' bomb
struck the Shula residential area of northwestern Baghdad, killing 52-58 more
innocent Iraqis and wounding many more. (38)
As
Jo Wilding wrote on March 28th, "home isn't safe, the farms are not safe,
the market isn't safe. Nowhere is safe." (39)
An
Indonesian Woman
Doha
Sheil of Baghdad tried vainly to move the left side of her body. And the
bearded militiaman in al-Shaab:
"Knelt in the rain and used his gun
to shift the earth of the bomb crater. "There is a hand still here in the
ground," said Wasim al-Shinmari. "I can't touch it. I'm sorry, but I
just can't touch it." He exposed what looked like a pale lump of human
flesh against the dirt, and then dissolved in sobs. "The bodies went to
hospital, but the hand is here," he said. Around him a small circle of men
shouted: haram, haram - abomination. But it was unclear whether they meant the
unburied human remains, or the audacity of America's bloody attack on an
otherwise unremarkable suburb of Baghdad." (40)
Haram!
Marc Herold is
a professor in the Departments of Economics and Women's Studies at the
Whittemore School of Business & Economics, University of New Hampshire.
Email: mwherold@cisunix.unh.edu. This article first appeared at Cursor.org,
posted with author’s permission.
FOOTNOTES
1. Annick
Benoist [in Paris], "Iraq's
Heritage in Jeopardy," Middle East Online [March 27, 2003] with a
photo of the US bomb impact upon the Tikrit museum
2. Data on
the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed in the U.S-U.K. military campaign, may be
found at the website of the Iraq Body Count team, www.iraqbodycount.net
3. "Guerra matou
350 civis iraquianos e feriu 4,000, diz ministro," Folha de Sao Paulo
OnLine [March 27, 2003 at 06:16]; also Jacques Charmelot, "Iraq:
More Than 350 Killed in First Week of War," Middle East Online [March
27, 2003]
4. Illene
R. Prusher, "Errant US Missile Raises Ire of Turkish Villagers,"
Christian Science Monitor [March 25, 2003]
5.
Mohammad Amini and Dan De Luce, "Basra Hit By Bombardment," The
Guardian [March 21, 2003] and "Iranian Oil Ministry Building Near Iraq Hit
by Missile," AP World at Yahoo!News [March 21, 2003]
6.
"Third Stray Coalition Missile Lands in Iran," The News [March 27,
2003]
7. Hamza
Hendawi, "Baghdad Pounded by Bombs for Second Night," Associated
Press [March 20, 2003 at 3:19 PM EST]
8.
"15 Civilians Injured in First Attack: Red Cross," ABC.net.au [March
21, 2003]
9. Samia
Nakhoul [in Baghdad], "Civilians Hit, Says Baghdad," The Age [March
21, 2003]
10. "US
'Regrets Deaths' in Bus Blast," Herald Sun [March 26, 2003]
11. Robert
Fisk [in Baghdad], "Bubbles
of Fire Tore into the Sky Above Baghdad," The Independent [March 21, 2003]
12. Robert
Fisk [in Baghdad], "This
is the Reality of War. We Bomb. They Suffer," The Independent [March
23, 2003]
13.
Writing about the "new American way of war" in The Washington Post,
Thomas E. Ricks recently pointed out that the past decade has seen a dramatic
increase in the military's ability to hit long-range targets with
"unprecedented precision... relying as never before on gigabytes of
targeting information gathered on the ground, in the air, and from space."
14. "Targeting
Civilians Creates a Rift in Anglo-American Troops," The Balochistan
Post [March 26, 2003]
15.
Patrick J. Sloyan, "War Without Death: The Pentagon Promotes a Vision of
Combat as Bloodless and Antiseptic," San Francisco Chronicle [November 17,
2002]
16. Hassan
Hafidh [in Baghdad], "Air Raids Wreck Civilian Homes in Baghdad,"
Reuters [March 23, 2003 at 06:32 AM ET]
17. Linda
Diebel, "'Real-Time'
TV Coverage a Real Headache for Bush," Toronto Star [March 24, 2003]
18. "Syria
Claims U.S. Missile Strike Deaths," Associated Press [March 24, 2003]
19. Subhy
Haddad, "Eyewitness:
Visiting Baghdad's Wounded," BBC News [March 25, 2003 at 10:59 GMT]
20. at http://electroniciraq.net/news/394.shtml
dated March 24, 2 004. Photos from Baghdad's emergency rooms may be found at http://electronicIraq.net/news/394.shtml
21. Paul
Reynolds, "Basra:
Why They Are Not Cheering," BBC News [March 25, 2003 at 13:53 GMT]
22.
Geoffrey York, "Few in Safwan Want to Forgive, Forget," The Globe and
Mail [March 26, 2003]
23.
Anthony Shahid in Baghdad, "Missile Strike Shatters a House, and a
Family," Washington Post [March 25, 2003]
24. for
background on Brooks, see http://www.suntimes.com/output/iraq/cst-nws-brooks27.html
25.
"U.S. Confirms Firing Missiles Into Iraqi Neighborhood. Iraq Says 14
People Were Killed," NBC6.net [March 26, 2003 at 2:51 EST]
26. Hamaz
Hendawi, "US Missiles Hit Civilians: Report," Associated Press [March
26, 2003] and Suzanne Goldenberg, "Wayward
Bombs Bring Marketplace Carnage," The Guardian [March 27, 2003]
27. Robert
Fisk, "It
Was an Outrage, an Obscenity," The Independent [March 27, 2003]
28.
"US 'Knows Nothing' of Baghdad Market Strike," ABC News Online
Australia [March 27, 2003 at 4:09 AM AEDT]
29.
"Group: Iraq TV Raid May Break Geneva Convention," Reuters [March 26,
2003 at 06:49 AM ET]
30. Sean
Maguire, "U.S. Advance Leaves Bus Full of Corpses," Reuters [March
27, 2003 at 14:55 GMT]
31.
Estimated as follows : 15 in Al-Zubayr, 7 in Baghdad, and assuming a 2:1 ratio
of injured to killed, ~17 in Mosul.
32. "'Civilians
Killed' in Mosul Raid," Herald Sun [March 28, 2003]
33.
Michael Georgy and Rosalind Russell [in Al-Zubayr], "Iraqi
Militia Pin Down U.S-Led Forces in South," Reuters/Yahoo!News [March
27, 2003 at 1:49 PM ET]
34. "Baghdad Under Air
Attack Again," Ananova [March 27, 2003 at 21:24] with photo of Baghdad
in flames
35. "Baghdad
Pounded in New Air Strikes," Middle East Online [March 28, 2003 at
09:41], with photo of Baghdad in smoke
36.
"Coalition Raid on Baghdad Kills Eight Iraqis," Middle East Online
[March 28, 2003 at 13:17], At http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/iraq/?id=4917
37. At http://www.jihadunspun.net/intheatre_external.php?article=49508&list=/home.php
38. "'Many Dead' in
Baghdad Blast," BBC News [March 28, 2003 at 22:22 GMT], and Suzanne
Goldenberg, "52
Die in Baghdad Market Blast," The Guardian [March 29, 2003]
39. Jo
Wilding, "Iraq
Diary: Nowhere is Safe," The Guardian [March 28, 2003]
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