7-4-2003

In Iraqi Hospitals, Child War Casualties Mount
By Samia Nakhoul , Reuters, Thursday 3 April 2003

BAGHDAD - The moaning of Aisha Ahmed, eight, fills the hospital's emergency ward.

One of hundreds of child victims in the 15-day-old U.S.-led war in Iraq, she lost one eye and her face and body are peppered with wounds from what must have been a storm of shrapnel.

"Mummy! I want my mummy. Where is my mummy?" Aisha kept muttering. Yet neither the nurse nor the neighbor trying to comfort her dared to answer.

Her four-year-old brother Mohammad died and her mother and other brother were in critical condition undergoing surgery for head and chest injuries. Her father and two sisters were all badly injured and in another hospital.

A neighbor said he saw missiles crash into Radwaniyeh, a remote area near Baghdad's airport on Wednesday morning.
To their misfortune, they live in an area that -- apart from their farm -- has a presidential palace complex and military positions. A total of 12 children and six adults were struck.

U.S. war headquarters in Qatar said that a farm at Radwaniyeh doubled as a military "command and control facility." Washington says it seeks to minimize civilian casualties in its war to oust President Saddam Hussein.

Aisha was with her cousin and neighbors playing in the garden during a lull in the fighting when a missile struck, the neighbor said.

"We heard the planes and then the big explosion. We saw these houses in flames, and ran to rescue them and get them out from under the rubble. We did not expect them to hit civilians during a lull," the neighbor said.

MANY VICTIMS CHILDREN

Aisha lay with dry blood on her clothes and her moans turned to screams when nurses tried to lift her to the operating theater for head surgery.

Doctor Ahmed Abdel Amir said children were bound to make up a large number of casualties because they are such a big proportion of Iraq's 26 million population.

Another child, Mohammad Kazem, seven, lay in the next bed with serum tubes strapped to him. He was hit by shrapnel in the stomach when a missile crashed near his home west of Baghdad.

"He is so terrified now. He trembles when he hears explosions. I keep on trying to calm him down. I keep telling him that nothing will happen to him any more.

"Whenever he hears the thud of explosions he grabs me. I stay hugging him and patting him until the bombings stop," said his mother, Madiha Mohsen Ali, 40.

"He does not sleep or eat. The only question he keeps asking is: 'mummy when will this banging stop?" she added.

Such scenes have become part of daily life in Iraq since the U.S.-led war started with a fierce air attack and a ground invasion on March 20.

Since then, U.S. planes have flown thousands of sorties, destroying Iraq's military buildings, infrastructure and ministries and sometimes civilian homes.

Most said the war, in which Iraq said 1,250 civilians were killed and 5,000 wounded, was particularly hard on children.

Mohammad al-Jammal, six, was also screaming from his wounds. He too had been standing outside his house when a missile struck, killing two people and sending shrapnel into his stomach, opening it to the intestines.

He lay with his father and mother reading Koranic prayers for him. They said he would be all right because "God is looking after him."

Mothers at the hospital compare notes on their children's traumas. Many speak of their terrified children crying relentlessly, trembling when they hear the bombings. They say their children refuse to eat or sleep.

They say their children are bewildered and depressed. There is little for them to do to get through the day and many fear the night when the bombardment normally resumes.


Iraq Shows Casualties in Hospital
By Tyler Hicks With John F. Burns, New York Times, Thursday 3 April 2003

HILLA, Iraq - The boy was bewildered, perhaps 10 or 11, separated from his parents, lying on a hospital gurney. All about was chaos, mothers weeping for their dead and wounded children, doctors and nurses shouting to be heard, coffins shouldered along the corridors to taxis that stacked two and three on their roofs at a time, serving as makeshift hearses.

It was never clear, in the confusion, if the boy was told why he had been asked to follow the nurse out of the ward, down the passageway, past the lamentations and the cursings, to the operating theater. He seemed frightened, and if he heard the question, he never gave his name, or any details of how he got his wound.

Once on the operating table, quickly anesthetized, he knew nothing. His wounded arm was unbandaged and amputated rapidly by the surgeon just below the elbow.

So it was today at the general hospital in Hilla, an hour's drive south of Baghdad, on the road to the site of the ancient town of Babylon, now a soulless re-creation of ancient glory, built as a backdrop to one of Saddam Hussein's ubiquitous palaces. Hilla itself is a nondescript place, a town between here and there, mostly a rambling huddle.

But today Hilla was a front-line city, only a few miles north of American troops advancing up the strategic highway to Baghdad - and a showcase of what Mr. Hussein's government wants the world to believe about the American way of war.

Officials marshaling the buses from the Palestine Hotel in the capital made it plain that, for them, the case was open and shut, an example of American weapons being used indiscriminately to kill civilians.

The story of the hospital, as survivors and physicians told it, was of incidents on Sunday or Monday or Tuesday - accounts were confused - in which civilians had come under attack from an American tank that fired on a bus and a car and from an American aircraft that dropped cluster bombs on an impoverished outlying district of Hilla. Dr. Saad al-Fallouji, the hospital's chief surgeon, said that on Tuesday alone, the hospital received 33 victims dead on arrival and 180 others who were wounded by American fire. "Most of them - no, all of them - were civilians," he said. "All of them were from Nadir village, women and children and men of all ages, mostly they had very serious injuries to their abdomens, to their intestines, to their chests and their heads. Many of the bodies were completely torn apart."

Western reporters asked him how he felt about the carnage. "I feel very angry about this," he replied. "Don't you feel angry too?"

Reporters had no difficulty confirming that there had been scores of casualties - the dead evident in the procession of coffins, and in the torn bodies that crowded the shelves of the large refrigerator in the hospital's front garden, the wounded filling every ward, many eager to recount how they had come under American fire. Information Ministry officials translated the accounts.

Hussein Ali Hussein, 26, a door-to-door gas salesman, lay on a bed, the stump of one leg covered in a bloody bandage, a mass of flies settling on the gauze. He said that he had been in a car that was hit by an American tank shell as he drove south toward Kifl, near Najaf.

"We believed the Americans, when they said they were not going to attack civilians," he said. "Why would the Americans do this to me?" As nurses arrived to wheel him away for surgery, he added: "But we Iraqis will never accept that this country is ruled by anybody but Iraqis, so we will fight to the last drop of our blood."

Another patient, Bassan Hoki, 38, said he was in the bus attack. Surgeons had amputated his right arm above the elbow, and seeping bandages covered deep wounds on both his legs. Mr. Hoki, with a neatly trimmed, gray-flecked beard, gesticulated with his remaining arm as he described seeing the tank from the window of the bus.

"There was no warning, they simply opened fire," he said.

He said that his mother, who was seated beside him, was killed instantly in the blast. "I looked around me, it seemed like everyone was dead," he said, "people's heads were snapped off their bodies. The bus was torn to pieces."

He said, "I have just one thing to say to George Bush. He is a criminal and a liar to talk of bringing us freedom. He attacks civilians for no reason. This is a crime, a crime, a crime."

It was difficult to mesh accounts from the hospital with the scenes where the attacks were said to have occurred. In Nadir, a sprawl of one- and two-story brick or mud homes astride the line of the American advance, reporters were shown the bus on which, doctors said, 18 people had been killed and 16 wounded by American tank fire. The bus stood in a clearing and reporters were led on a tour of sinuous alleyways to see the damage from what was described as the cluster bombing of an entire neighborhood.

From what officials at Nadir said and from what seemed probable to the eye, the attacks appeared to have been one. The bus, like the houses, appeared to have been hit not by a tank shell but by thousands of shards of shrapnel that had punctured it and shattered the windows but left the body mostly intact. Small, grayish-black pieces of unexploded ordnance, possibly a form of cluster bomb, lay scattered in profusion.

Nadir, by noon today, was deserted, save for families here and there loading up possessions into cars and glimpses of men in military uniforms, some with the red triangular shoulder flashes of the Republican Guard. Several reporters and photographers said later that they had seen a man in camouflage uniform disappearing into one of the houses, carrying a sniper rifle.

Whatever had occurred at Nadir, the incident was part of a wider pattern of increasing tension among Iraqi officials and American troops. Anxieties in the capital had risen overnight, with more intensive bombing of Mr. Hussein's palaces and other strategic targets.

All night long, and through the day, the bombs and missiles struck, booming across the city, with more shuddering of the earth and bursting fireballs of red and orange, as well as billowing clouds of smoke and dust.

From the upper rooms of the Palestine Hotel, especially those facing directly across the Tigris River, it seemed that the Pentagon, in returning to some targets, had in mind not just to destroy, not just to deny the Iraqi ruler the use of this palace or that intelligence headquarters, but to obliterate, perhaps to humiliate, by leaving nothing but smoking rubble.

The air defense headquarters on the east bank of the Tigris, close to the Palestine, were hit by at least two cruise missiles last week and were struck again on Monday night, this time by bombs dropped by aircraft low enough to hear overhead. The missile strikes appeared to have been enough to disable the headquarters, and with it much of the air defense system, since air raid sirens failed within days of the first attacks on Baghdad on March 20, and the anti-aircraft fire fell off sharply, too. But they had left the headquarters punctured, not destroyed, until bombing completed the job.

By Tuesday, all that was left was a mound of grayish-black rubble, and, perversely, a towering bronze statue of Mr. Hussein. arm raised in salute, which appeared hardly scratched.

The case for concluding that the military had had in mind the humiliation of Mr. Hussein and his sons has been made even more strongly by the repeated bombing of the Republican Palace compound, the jewel in the Iraqi ruler's crown. About an hour or two before first light today, at least five more huge blasts hit one of several large, colonnaded buildings clustered near the main palace, a neo-imperialist edifice that some Iraqis say has been one of the headquarters for Qusay, the favored younger son of Mr. Hussein.

Perhaps, these Iraqis have said, the target lies underground, in the maze of tunnels and bunkers built during the war with Iran in the 1980's.

But perhaps, here too, the objective was to obliterate. This morning an entire palace within the compound had disappeared, leaving only the building's signature feature - giant, 30-foot-high busts of Mr. Hussein clad in the headdress of the 12th-century warrior Saladin. Three of the busts stood on their pediments while a fourth, its back to the Tigris, leaned drunkenly forward.

Early today reporters on the bus to Hilla said they saw the park set aside for Baghdad's annual international trade fair with about a dozen large buildings completely flattened with smoke still rising.

Iraqi officials said later that the strike had hit a maternity clinic on the fairground, killing nine women.