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'We're
Here to Fight the Regime, Not Civilians, But I Had to Save My Men'
by
Robert Fisk
in
Doura, Baghdad
April
11, 2003
Something
terrible happened on Highway 8. Some say a hundred civilians died there. Others
believe that only 40 or 50 men, women and children were cut to pieces by
American tank fire when members of the 3rd Infantry Division's Task Force 315
were ambushed by the Republican Guard.
Many
of their corpses still lie rotting in their incinerated cars, a young woman,
burnt naked, slumped face down over the rear seat on the Hillah flyover bridge
next to half of a male corpse that is hanging out of the driver's door.
Blankets cover a pile of civilian dead, including a cremated child, a few
metres away. A red car, shot in half by an American tank shell, lies on its
side with the lower half of a human leg, still in a black shoe, beside the left
front wheel.
No
one disputes that the American troops were ambushed here or that the battle
only ended late on Wednesday afternoon. On the flyover, I found a dead Iraqi
Republican Guard in uniform, his blood draining into the gutter, one foot over
the other, shot in the head. A hundred metres away lay a car with an elderly
civilian man dead under the chassis. Two fuel trucks one of them still
burning lay in a field. An incinerated passenger bus stood beside the
motorway.
Hundreds
of Iraqis stared at the corpses in horror, most of them holding handkerchiefs
to their faces and swatting the flies that moved between the living and the
dead.
Captain
Dan Hubbard, commanding the 315th's Bravo Company whose 10 tanks and four
Bradley Fighting Vehicles hold the flyover bridge, described to me how his men
came under fire "from 360 degrees" with rocket-propelled grenades and
AK-47 rifles at 7am when civilian traffic was moving along the motorway.
"We're
here to fight the Iraqi regime, not the civilians," he said. "There
were cars on the road when we were ambushed and we fired over their heads two
or three times to get them to stop. Ninety per cent of the vehicles turned away
after a warning shot." Here the captain paused for a moment. "A lot
of things go on in people's heads at such times," he said. "A lot of
people speed up ... I had to protect my men. We tried our very best to minimise
any kind of injuries and death to civilians. I have got to protect my soldiers
because we don't know if it's a car-load of explosives or RPGs [rocket-
propelled grenades]. We'll have the cars removed. The bodies will be taken care
of."
Captain
Hubbard was a thoughtful man, a 34-year-old from Tennessee who named his tank
Rhonda Denise after his wife, who is "the toughest woman I've ever
met" though what she would make of the civilian horror on Highway 8
doesn't bear thinking about.
Clearly
the Iraqi Republican Guard also have a responsibility for this carnage since
they started their ambush knowing full well that civilians would be on the
motorway.
Two
American soldiers were killed in the battle and up to 30 wounded. Six US
vehicles were destroyed, including two tanks. Many families had come to find
their dead relatives and bury them but I counted at least 16 civilian bodies
and parts of bodies still on the highway, several of them women.
And
of course, this killing field raised a now familiar question. Americans fired
tank shells at civilian motorists. Still their bodies lay beside the road
with the dead soldier and still no one had buried them. Sure, the Americans
tried not to kill civilians. But all would have been alive today had President
George Bush not ordered his army to invade their country.
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.