The Human Toll
ZnetJuly 7, 2003
It was Rahad's turn to hide. The nine-year-old girl found a good place to conceal herself from her playmates, the game of hide and seek having lasted some two hours along a quiet residential street in the town of Fallujah, on the banks of the Euphrates. But while Rahad crouched behind the wall of a neighbour's house, someone else - not playing the game - had spotted her, and her friends; someone above. The pilot of an American A-10 'tank-buster' aircraft, hovering in a figure of eight. He was flying an airborne weapon equipped with some of the most advanced and accurate equipment for 'precision target recognition' in the Pentagon's arsenal. And at 5.30pm on 29 March, he launched his weapon at the street scene below.
The 'daisy-cutter' bounced and exploded a few feet above ground, blasting red-hot shrapnel into the walls not of a tank but of houses. Rahad Septi and 10 other children lost their lives; another 12 were injured. Three adults were also killed.
Juma Septi, father to Rahad, holds a photograph of his daughter in the palm of his hand as he recalls the afternoon he lost his 'little flower'. A carpenter, Septi had been a lifelong opponent of Saddam Hussein - an activist in the Islamic Accord Party, for which he had been imprisoned, then exiled to Jordan in 1995. Last October, Septi had returned under an armistice to start a new life in his home town, reunited with his family. 'I don't really know what to think now,' he says. 'We have lost Saddam Hussein, but I have lost my daughter. They came to kill him, but killed her and the other children instead. What am I supposed to make of that?'
Jamal Abbas joins the conversation. 'I was driving my taxi and heard the noise like thunder, when someone told me, "Jamal, they've bombed your street!" When I got back here, the smoke was so thick it was like night - children lying wounded and women screaming.' Abbas learnt that his niece - 11-year-old Arij Haki, visiting from Baghdad - had been killed immediately. 'She was playing a guessing game with her cousins,' says the child's father Abdullah Mohammed, 'when the top half of her head was blown off.'
'But there was no sign of my daughter,' says Jamal Abbas, 'so I went outside to search in that madness; it was half an hour before I found her, right there, on the ground.' Miad Jamal Abbas, aged 11, her body bloody and ripped, was taken to the same hospital ward as Rahad Septi. The two fathers accordingly sat in vigil together. 'They died together, just as they had played together, in the same room,' says Abbas. 'We were close before, now we are bound together.'
'It's not easy now to think about what they were like when they were alive,' says Septi, making to retreat into the shadows of his home. 'I have to think that this was my fate and the will of God. Otherwise, I would go mad. Rahad had a tongue in her head, for sure. She talked too much. She was very little, really, but understood things quickly.'
At the cemetery on the edge of the town, where Fallujah dissipates into desert, 11 small mounds of earth have been dug, awaiting proper headstones. The children have been buried together rather than in family plots. Saad Ibrahim whose father, Hussein, was killed in the corner shop he kept, has a few caustic questions for the tank-buster's pilot: 'I want to ask him: what exactly did you see that day that you had to kill my father and those kids? Do you have good eyesight? Is your computer working well? If not... well, that's your business. But there was no military activity in this area. There was no shooting. This is not a military camp. These are houses with children playing in the street.'
The total figure of civilian deaths in the Iraqi conflict may never be known, but an investigation of random incidents reveals that whatever the total, the proportion of civilian to military deaths among Iraqis is overwhelming. A graphic illustration of this can be found in the corner of the Abu Graib cemetery on the edge of Baghdad. Here, during the days after the fall of Saddam's regime, families came to disinter the grievous legacy of that tyranny, in the form of their relatives' skeletons. But other huddles of people came, too - to bury, not recover, their dead. Most did so in family plots, but some were too poor to own such patches of land and instead placed their cadavers beneath mounds of earth in a paupers' plot outside the cemetery. The grave digger, Akef Aziz, explains that those from the military, or Fedayeen Saddam units, were also covered with an Iraqi flag. Out of a total of 916 graves in this plot, 17 are those of fighters. 'They were coming in at least 30 or 40 a day,' recalls Aziz. 'They were good times for us, because we are paid by the body.'
In war, collateral damage - as the parlance describes civilian casualties - has no human face, nor does it have a name. But here, on the following pages, are some of their stories. This is the bitter - but hidden - reckoning of war's aftermath.
The southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, where the American ground offensive began in earnest during the last days of March, will before long be the best known in all Iraq. This will not be because Nasiriyah was once the cradle of the Sumer dynasty and thus of civilisation; not because here, 6,000 years ago, the first syllabic alphabet was devised and first mathematical schema developed (around the figure 60, still the modern world's measurement of time). And not because the first legal code - including laws governing the conduct of war - was written and enforced. Nor will this renown be because the town of Nasiriyah is now rife with disease arising from putrid water and stinking rubbish through which children pick, looking for things to sell.
No, Nasiriyah's fame will be enshrined in Hollywood lore because it was here that US special forces rescued Jessica Lynch of the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, who went astray and was captured by the Iraqis. And most famous of all will be the first floor of Nasiriyah General Hospital, where Private Lynch was being treated when snatched in what the story emblazoned across cinema screens will narrate as a raid of daring heroism (although doctors and ancillary staff recall the episode differently: as the Americans blasted and kicked their way in, they were welcomed and shown to Private Lynch's ward, with no resistance offered). Every major American television network has since dutifully traipsed through this corridor, anxious to relive the fantasy version of the drama.
None of them, however, bothered to visit ward 114, a few doors down from Jessica's. In there, separated by a curtain, lie Daham Kassim, aged 46, and his 37-year-old wife Gufran Ibed Kassim. Daham has his arms bound, and a stump where his right leg used to be. Gufran cannot move her arms, wounded by gunshots, and probably never will. But the pain is not in their bodies, it is in their faces.
It is impossible to 'interview' Kassim. He dismisses questions, driving his narrative, like a man possessed, towards its conclusion. He speaks in English, an educated man and, until a few months ago, director of the Southeastern electricity board. His torment began on the evening of 24 March, when - after heavy US bombing in his Mutanaza neighbourhood - Kassim told his family to prepare to depart in the morning. They would leave Nasiriyah for the safety of his parents' farm 70 miles away. 'We packed anything valuable, and the children were allowed to take a few toys each.'
Departure was delayed by a sandstorm, and the family - the four children in the back - set off shortly after noon in Kassim's new car. A few minutes later they reached the American checkpoint at the northern gate to the city. (Significantly, the suicide bomb which killed four US soldiers at a road block and was credited with inflaming American behaviour at check points, occurred a full four days later on 29 March at Najaf. This was the incident described by the Washington Post as, 'The first such attack of the war.') 'I could see two tanks,' recalls Kassim. 'They were sand-coloured, with markings on them. I was afraid and stopped my car 60m away. Less than a minute passed. They did not open anything, I saw no one. It was silent.' [The American tanks kept their hatches down. The Marines inside would have been looking through their green-tinted rectangular window, at a civilian car carrying a couple and four children.] 'I was frozen with fear,' continues Kassim. 'I could see their guns moving down. Then there was a terrible noise, and my car was buried in shooting.'
Kassim's voice begins to crack. 'I saw my eldest daughter, Mawra, die. She was nine; I saw it with my eyes: she took the first shot, opened her eyes, and closed them again.' Gufran, his second daughter, was also killed immediately. 'But my son Mohammed, he was six and in the first year of primary school, he was still breathing. And my Zainab, she is five, was also still alive, although she had been shot in the head.'
Two Americans approached the car. 'They were called Chris and Joe. They took out my two dead children, then tried to give my son oxygen, but it was no use. He died there, at that moment. I asked for a helicopter to take us to hospital. They refused, but Joe gave us some morphine in exchange for my gold watch. They tied my bad leg to the other, then took us to their base.'
There, the Americans had established a field hospital, where they bandaged up the surviving child, father and mother. For two nights, the remains of the family slept in a bed. It appears that the story is reaching an end. 'Wait!' insists Kassim, his tears preparing themselves for what is to come, as if his trials could get any worse. 'Don't ask me questions. I will tell you what happened.'
On the third night, that of 27 March, 'there were some Americans wounded that night, in the fighting. Maybe they needed the beds. So they told us we had to go outside. I heard the order - "put them out" - and they carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard Zainab crying: "Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold." Then she went silent. Completely silent.'
Kassim breaks off in anguish. His wife continues the story of the night. 'What could we do? She kept saying she was cold. My arms were broken, I could not lift or hold her. If they had given us even a blanket, we might have put it over her. We had to sit there, and listen to her die.'
'We'd had trouble having children,' Kassim re-enters the conversation. 'We'd been trying for six years without success and given up hope. But then God blessed us, and everything went right. Four little flowers - and now four little flowers cut down. What for? For oil and a strategic place for America? Do they know God, these people? Why did they put my Zainab out into the cold? I tell you Mister, she died of cold, she died of cold.'
There is urgent business, however. Kassim has still not concluded - indeed he is reaching his purpose. The three Kassim children put to death at the checkpoint had been buried at the site of their shooting, but later taken to the holy city of Najaf for entombment, as is the mandatory custom for Shia Islam. Zainab, however, had been interred inside the US base, 'and the question now,' pleads Kassim, revived by the urgency of the matter, 'is that we must get her to Najaf, where there is a space for her there with her brother and sisters. Please, Mister, I cannot move; you must go and ask how we can take my Zainab to Najaf.'
The US encampment and airstrip is under speedy construction, built to last, on a site chosen alongside the world's most ancient human creation, the Sumer ziggurat at Ur. 'There is no one buried at this site,' assures US Marine Sergeant Jarrell, offering nevertheless to put us through to the authority able to deal with Kassim's request, which turns out to be the Civil Affairs department. The voice of Civil Affairs accordingly comes down his radio: 'Tell them this is a waste of Civil Affairs' time.' We try again the next day, when a kindly woman, Private Hurst from the Medical Corps, is more responsive.
'Oh yes,' she says, rather nervously, 'we have three children buried here. Yes, I think I know who you're talking about.'
An examination of Kassim's car shows this to have been a clinical and frontal piece of musketry. A fusillade of heavy-calibre chain-gun tank fire attacked the vehicle, with some rounds twisting into the metalwork, but most fired straight through the windows at its occupants. A neighbour, Taleb Yasser, who retrieved the car, recalls how Kassim would make his way home of an evening, 'often bringing chocolate for his children and others playing in the street'. He points out the bomb damage that encouraged his friend to leave. 'We told him that it might be dangerous,' says Yasser, 'that the tanks were sitting there, but he would have none of it, and insisted on taking his family to safety.'
Beyond a dilapidated fairground beyond Kassim's now empty house are further homes hit by the bombing, including the one Kadem Hashem had lived in since returning to his native Iraq. Hashem was a consultant in computer and communications technology, born in Kuwait and well travelled across the Arab world. But in 1996, he elected to join his parents and two brothers back in Nasiriyah, bringing his wife, Salima, and six children. They lived in what Hashem remembers as 'a nice house, with a TV, and comfortable'. He was, however, 'distrusted by the government of Saddam for being away for so long. It seems,' he says, 'that I was called back to accept my fate.'
That fate was a cruel one. Hashem surveys the wreckage of his 'nice house', its walls imploded, its roof collapsed. In the diwaniya, to which men would retire of an evening to smoke a hooker pipe, singed cushions are still arranged on the ground, with burned pages of a Koran scattered in the debris. Of the 14 members of Hashem's family that shared or were visiting the house on 23 March, only he and his youngest daughter survive.
The missile which destroyed Hashem's family struck at 1.15 pm. 'I was outside and heard something like the wind, a plane, and then something thrown at the house. I went flat on the floor, and felt the heat on my body. When I looked up, the house was falling in, on fire. My eldest daughter Bashar was buried beneath it. My father and mother, Ali Kadem and Reni, died but I did manage to wrap my wife in a blanket and get her to the hospital, where she died that night.'
He finds a photograph in the cinders. 'This was my middle daughter, Hamadi. I found her burnt to death by that doorway, she had shrunk to about a metre tall.' And another picture, this one from within his robe: 'This was my sister when she was little. She died over there, by the gate. My father was killed where you are standing now, in the diwaniya; I loved him too much, I think. For three days afterwards, I sat by the gate of my home. I didn't sleep or go anywhere, I didn't know who or where I was.'
It is now twilight, a purple hue in the sky, and we decide to continue in the morning and also to visit the one surviving daughter, Bedour.
'Bedour is 18 years old, but doesn't look it,' we are warned in advance, as the cockerel's crow heralds another day in Hashem's laden life. 'In fact, she does not look like herself at all. She cannot walk or talk, or sleep. She has something wrong in her head - she keeps talking nonsense or crying out: "Why did you all go away and leave me?"'
What remains of a beautiful girl called Bedour Hashem lies on a piece of floor at a relative's house, having been discharged by the American military hospital, with no room for her at the local one. She is shrivelled and petrified like a dead cat. Her skin is like scorched parchment folded over her bones. Unable to move, she appears as if in some troubled coma, but opens her eyes, with difficulty, to issue an indecipherable cry like a wounded animal. Hashem understands it: 'We should leave her.'
'She and I have something in common,' he continues, outside the house, bright flowers climbing its walls, 'which is that we have lost everyone else. Every time I look at her, I will always think of my wife. But now I have to be a father, mother, brother, sister and grandparent to her, all in one person, and I don't know if I can manage that.'
Hashem has dug his own mass grave in the holy city: 'I collected them all and put them in a single grave at Najaf; my money was burnt, too, and I couldn't afford to bury them separately. Now the holy men in town are at me for this, blaming me for doing something not in accordance with the religion.'
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
Iraq: the human toll (part two)
As news reporters tracked troops on the road to Baghdad, much of the suffering and loss of ordinary Iraqi civilians was left untold. Until now. Here, in a compelling dispatch, award-winning foreign correspondent Ed Vulliamy goes in search of their stories
Ed Vulliamy Sunday July 6, 2003 The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,992577,00.html
The hospital in which Salima Hashem died, where the childless Kassim and his wife lie, and from which Jessica Lynch was rescued, is one of two in Nasiriyah. At the other, the General Surgical Hospital, six o'clock in the evening in the wards on the North Wing would usually have been a quiet time, says Dr Karim Azurgan, an orthopaedic surgeon. 'We would have finished our rounds, with patients getting ready for their evening meal.' But on the night of 24 March, the ward was anything but tranquil. That was the hospital's turn to become the target of two war crimes: one by the Iraqis, with a retort from the Americans. The wing is now a rubble of twisted metal and masonry blown akimbo, with beds and medicine cabinets strewn around.
'They were not war patients in here, they were in hospital for normal reasons you would come to hospital for,' says Dr Azurgan. 'But then, of course, those who survived the bombing became war patients.'
The Americans might have seen reason for dispatching the bomb that crashed through the ward ceiling, in breezy defiance of the Geneva Conventions. As part of the Baa'th party's tactic to use such places as hospitals for human shields, the governor of Nasiriyah, Adel Mehdi, and head of security Kamil Bahtat had arrived that afternoon, brandishing satellite phones which give out global positioning signals easily picked up by American radar. The doctors, no fools, 'were screaming at the Ba'athists to leave,' says Dr Azurgan. 'One of my colleagues even threatened to shoot them if they did not.'
They remained - and survived. But, whatever the temptation to the Americans, two red crescents, still visible, clearly marked the roof of the building, as did a flag bearing the same symbol. In theory protected by the laws of war, some 70 patients were wounded and four killed - before the scene of mayhem that followed. 'As the ambulances moved in to take the injured to the other hospital, they fired at them, too, from helicopters,' recalls Dr Azurgan. 'They were shooting at anyone who was driving or walking on the street.'
It is hard to cite a figure for the civilian dead in Nasiriyah - 'about 800, maybe more', calculates the keeper of records at the main hospital, Abdel Karim, who logged 412 war-death certificates from his own wards alone, of which only 25 were military casualties - that is, those wearing a black or military uniform, or else a black ribbon somewhere on civilian clothes, as was the practice of the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitaries. The papers also show 3,013 war wounded, including Mr and Mrs Kassim, the deaths of whose children may or may not lie elsewhere, in some American record.
Through Nasiriyah's northern gate, where the Kassim family was ambushed, the American Marines surged north. There are rumours in Washington about a race between the marines and the army, taking a route further west, to reach Baghdad. If true, it was a race for high, sanguine stakes. Almost immediately outside the gate lie the first burnt-out skeletons of cars and civilian buses blasted off the road as they passed - or were passed - by advancing American armour, each bus capable of holding up to 50 passengers.
The road north is lined by kilns making adobe bricks with which the small farming hamlets are built. Despite the ravaging of this landscape, schoolchildren walk to their studies in clean, pressed white shirts, carrying their books. In the town of Ash-Shatra, a poor ribbon development along the highway, they walk past a concentration of these spidery frames that were once buses. Many were removed, stashed behind houses; some are now being taken away by heavy vehicles. But one is still parked, awkwardly, on the roadside.
Whether through recklessness or naivety, these buses continued running in spite of the American advance, and this bus was the unfortunate 8pm service at Ash-Shatra, on its way from Baghdad to Nasiriyah. In the tangerine light of dusk, children come to play at being drivers in the incinerated hulk. The cousin of one of these urchins, Sajed Mohammed, 13, was among those preparing to alight when the bus made its regular stop, some 100m from a tank blocking the road.
'The lights were on inside the bus,' remembers Sajed, 'and there was some shouting, American shouting. There was silence for a while, then a noise which made me think I would go deaf. The bus jumped like an animal being killed. Next day, the Americans came and buried the bodies of all the people, and the morning after that they came back and burned the bus.'
Rahad Klader, 30, who saw the incident from his window, recounts that after the tank had fired and the bus exploded, the Americans came up to the vehicle and emptied their machine-guns into whoever had survived. Ammunition strewn around the wreck is, indeed, American - not Iraqi, which would have given the tank some reason to suspect military activity aboard the bus.
'The Fedayeen were hiding between houses further down the road,' says Klader, 'and there had been fighting. But they were nowhere near the bus, and they were not on the bus. Oh yes, the lights were on all right. Fluorescent lights, bright and blue-ish. We could see from our houses that they were the usual people aboard when the bus stops here every evening.
The Shiites are Iraq's religious majority, persecuted during Saddam's tyranny, and prey to one of the most brutal episodes in modern history - the dictator's suppression of the Shiite rebellion on the slipstream of the first gulf war. It was an uprising urged, but unaided and (in the Shia's mind) betrayed by the US. The Shiite militias advanced to within some 50km of Baghdad, waiting for an American intervention that never came. Saddam's retort was a savage one.
The last time I was in Iraq, in 1991, I travelled south from Baghdad in the wake of the Republican Guard, as it laid waste to the Shia population and its glorious cities, its finery reduced to rubble. The journey generated a clear notion, but no proof, of what we were travelling over - mass graves recently excavated, bringing back to the surface thousands of slaughtered men, women and children, their earth-stained skulls still blindfolded.
'You see, sir,' said Karim Jasim, an excavator brushing dirt off a skeleton at the al-Musayyib mass grave near Kerbala, 'there are two Iraqs; one above the ground, and another beneath it.'
Twelve years after these massacres, the Americans finally rolled along the route taken by Saddam Hussein's shock troops, to liberate these cities, their people and religion, after decades of fear and oppression. But not all of those who waited lived to relish that liberation. And few of those who gather around the wondrous shrine in Najaf - of gold and mosaic, in which the first Shiite caliph, Ali Ibn Ali Talib, Mohammed's nephew, is buried - regard the US army as one of deliverance. Indeed, the Americans are for the most part resented, and duly absent from the city itself, confined to bases on its outskirts. This is in some degree due to the anti-Americanism innate to political Islam, but is also explained by the way in which Najaf - located on the most lyrical and evocative palm-strewn banks of the Euphrates - was 'liberated'.
There was reason for the cluster-bomb run that scorched along the main street at the edge of the Haikarama neighbourhood in the early hours of 27 March, as residents acknowledge there was an Iraqi army radar position and military truck hidden in scrappy woodland over the road from their houses. But a cluster bomb explodes in all directions, not only one.
'It was about 1.30 in the morning when the bombs started falling,' recalls Fahem Jabar al-Huwayli, sitting in what is left of his front room, the masonry still smelling of the fire that raged through it, the walls pitted with shrapnel. 'Most people were asleep, but stupid enough to go out and see what was happening.'
By the time a small fleet of ambulances screeched on to the scene, says al-Huwayli's neighbour Abdul Hussein Ubayed, 'There were wounded people all over the street, and my son here, Ali Abdel, was injured also.' The boy, prostrate, duly lifts his shirt to reveal a scar running from his scrotum, across his torso to his throat.
It was after the medical teams began trying to load their vehicles with the injured that bombers returned for a second raid. 'By then, I'd say 35 or so people had been killed, and the military target destroyed,' says Ubayed. 'It was during the second raid that they hit the ambulance. We saw it catch fire and five people were killed.' What remains of the vehicle is now parked at the local Red Crescent base - a gnarled frame of scorched metal without a trace of paint left, lacerated by shrapnel, and harboured next to another ambulance on which the torched medical emblem, the red crescent - a supposed protection - is still visible.
Bombing ambulances is a war crime, but the word of residents would be evidentially insufficient, in the unlikely event that the alleged perpetrators of this crime in Najaf were one day called to account. (America's war in Iraq was quickly followed by a request, granted by the United Nations, that the US military enjoy a unique exemption from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court.) The word of the driver himself would, however, carry some cogency.
After the initial bombing raid, Osham Thalar Messin and his paramedic answered an alarm call at 1.10am. They boarded ambulance number 2260 and raced to the scene of the attack, along with two others. 'When we arrived, wounded people were lying in the road,' recalls Messin, 'others were in the houses. We put five people into the ambulance from the road, and went into a house to get more. That was when the second raid came in. There were explosions along the street, and one of the bombs went off next to my ambulance.'
Messin's account is credible mainly for the umbrage with which he hastily and haughtily dismisses the figure of five people supposedly killed in his vehicle. 'It was two,' he emphasises, 'not five, but two. Whoever told you that is overlooking the fact that I managed to rescue three of those I had loaded, but not the other two. They'd been hit by what looked like burning iron, or something sharp and heavy. It was a woman of about 25 and a child of, I would say, eight, who died. I think they were both from the same family, travelling on a minibus - no one knew who they were. They were buried by the roadside and later claimed by their families.'
A further eight ambulances were then dispatched. 'It was a terrifying sight,' recalls Messin. 'I've been an ambulance driver for three years and before that I was in the army, and even I was afraid. In all, we took 65 wounded people by ambulance to the hospital. I couldn't count the dead - we left most of them there to make space for the living in our vehicles. I'd say about 50.'
'It's hard to judge how many were killed in Najaf,' says Dr Hussein Kaptan at the main hospital. Our documents here alone record at least 500, with 700 or more wounded. I've got a family here which was all killed except for one boy and his father. I have to keep the child here, apart from his wounds, because he is suicidal.'
The 16-year-old Malik Musa was a cowherd, tending to his charge in a stretch of rural land astride the Euphrates between Najaf and Hilla - along which the bombers connected the two towns with an umbilical cord of death. Malik looks rather like a dead spider, his bandaged arms warped into odd positions. He lies on his side. 'He worked hard,' says his father Musa Hamsa, 'and sometimes behaved badly - and if I was ever angry with him, I certainly don't care now.' There were always two prospective versions of the fall of Baghdad: one fearful, the other fantastical. The first accorded with America's fear that Saddam would defend the capital and that it may be necessary to either lay siege or take the city street by street. The second was the vision of an entry into Baghdad met with exuberant gratitude and crowds cheering a force of liberation. In the event, America's passage into Baghdad was a cannonade that resulted in probably the heaviest bloodletting of the war: the so-called 'Thunder Run'.
The Thunder Run, as it was branded by some American media, consisted of two armoured punches into the capital, on 5 and 7 April, respectively. They departed from the southeastern checkpoint to the city and forked - one wing heading for the airport, the other towards Saddam's palace. They were, essentially, demonstrations of force rather than attempts to take the city, and a finger stuck up against what was being said on Iraqi television by 'Comical Ali' - Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf - that US forces were nowhere near Baghdad.
'It was very confusing,' recalls Ali Mahadi, a welder. 'I was having breakfast in the front of my house, and when I heard the first shooting I presumed it was the Iraqis, because we'd been told there were no Americans near Baghdad.
I went upstairs to see what was happening, and saw the first armoured car coming over the bridge there. Bilal Abdul Muhed was driving his taxi, and another man. They got out, put their hands up, and were shot to pieces. A lot of people rushed out to try and help Bilal - fools, they were killed, too, by the shooting, right and left, as the Americans came through.' Bits of Bilal's car are still strewn along the roadside, but he was merely one of the first among hundreds to die that day.
Sahad Majul Majit had set up his cigarette stall at the Khadessia junction at 6 o'clock on the morning of 5 April, as he had done for 16 years. 'They came from nowhere,' he says, 'suddenly, at about 7 o'clock, shooting everywhere. I didn't think the Americans were in Baghdad after what I had heard on television - and there were some Fedayeen between the houses. But I didn't expect the Americans to come into Baghdad like that, and when I saw what was happening, I grabbed some of my cigarettes and ran into that supermarket over there.
'They were firing at anything that moved for three days. I myself helped get 30 bodies into the supermarket - what a smell they made. Across from Majul's now re-opened stall are two bus shelters, on either side of the road, now riddled with heavy-calibre fire. Majul saw what happened: 'There was a military car, and the soldiers ran into that far shelter. The Americans shot that one up. But then a bus came down the road, and the people ran off it to hide in the other bus shelter - and they fired at that one, too. I could hear people screaming as they died, even with the noise of the guns.'
Majul is glad to be back in business, but says, 'It's hard to know what to think. First of all we had Saddam, now we've got Saddam without a face. And by the way, could you write that I don't smoke? If I did, I wouldn't have any cigarettes to sell.'
Arabia Jamal and his son Jamal Rabir began to worry about Arabia's brother, sister-in-law and three children when the car journey to their house that should have taken 15 minutes stretched to a two-hour wait, in the tumult outside their electrical shop. It was young Jamal, aged 20 and a biotechnology student, who began the search. It lasted a week, during which, along with the Imam of his mosque, Jamal became immersed in the recovery and burial of 'more people than I can remember, maybe 30, maybe 50'. All week we buried them, some by the roadside, some we took to the hospital and helped to bury them there.
I didn't sleep for three nights, and had the stink of burned flesh on my clothes. I did it for three reasons: because I was looking for my cousins and their parents, because it is our religion that the dead must be buried by an Imam and because I studied anatomy, so I am not squeamish. Finally,' rasps Jamal, 'I found my uncle and aunt and cousins. And not from their faces, they were so burnt. My aunt had a ring - her father had worked in Russia, and it had Russian writing on it.'
The hospital to which Jamal took some of those he did not bury by the road was the Yarmouk infirmary. There, on the wall in reception, are lists of the dead and missing that provide the basis for at least some anecdotal calculation. There are 37 sheets listing the dead between the period 5 and 8 April - each bearing a minimum 20 names, a total of at least 740. Those still missing from the same period are listed on 48 sheets, with an average of 25 names apiece - some 1,200. The hospital director, Hamed Farij, has been restored to authority by the Americans - like most of his peers - despite having held the office under Saddam Hussein, as part of an infamously corrupt health system. He has signed the disclaimer handed out by the Americans denouncing his former party and now praises the American entry into Baghdad as being 'very beautiful', adding that most of the names on this list are those of the Fedayeen or Iraqi soldiers.
But Dr Nama Hasan Mohammed overhears this conversation and, the director departed, tells a different story. 'Mr Hamed Farij was a Ba'athist and left before the war, he has only just returned. I was here day and night all the time. I can tell you that we passed anyone in uniform or with a black ribbon to the al-Rashid Military Hospital. These dead are all civilians, although there are some soldiers among the missing posted. Those are the ones whose names we know. How many are there without names? We don't know.' Dr Hasan takes us out through the hospital grounds, to show us the fresh earth where many of the dead - unclaimed - remain buried in eight pits. There are roughly 25 to each pit. 'Many are children. One was a baby, shot at the bus stop. He was eight weeks old.'
America and Britain have proclaimed their war in Iraq over and won, but wars, unlike football matches, do not end when the whistle blows. Iraq remains a land without peace; a war of attrition continues between the occupier and a fragmented resistance. And each night, when the sun sinks into Baghdad's skyline, the burning and shooting begins again - be it among the populace or between that populace and the Americans. The chatter of guns and arcs of tracer fire pierce the eventide; billowing smoke rises into the dusk. The city may live under the martial order of military occupation, but it is also afflicted by a lawlessness which that very order has unleashed. And it is not only in fighting that civilians die. The anarchic absence of peace, that the Iraqi war has wrought, also kills.
