The Great War for Civilisation (158 page)

As he did so, Najla Abujahjah, a young Reuters camerawoman, was on an equally dangerous mission, driving through the foothills east of Mansouri in an attempt to film the Israeli air attacks for the British news agency. Unwilling to leave the battlezone, Abujahjah—a resourceful and brave woman who would never forget the terrible event she was shortly to witness—headed west to a road near Mansouri where she caught sight of two more Apaches that appeared to be watching something, “almost stationary in the sky but moving a few metres backwards and then a few metres forwards.”

Abbas Jiha was now back in the centre of Mansouri, enveloped in a scene of mass panic. “Many people had already fled their homes but a few were left, including my own family, and the shells were falling all over the place. A jet came and dropped a bomb on the edge of the village. So I said the people could get into the ambulance and I'd take them to safety. I got Mona and our children.” Abbas Jiha said that just as he put nine-year-old Zeinab, five-year-old Hanin and two-month-old Mariam, along with their brother Mehdi, into the back of the ambulance, he saw two helicopters. “They were low and the pilots seemed to be watching us,” he told me.

Fadila al-Oglah bought two bags of bread from Abbas but was herself now fearful of the planes. “Although the Israelis said we would not be attacked if we fled our houses, the Apaches were strafing the roads with bullets, and shells were bursting around our homes,” she was to tell me later. “My brothers had left in a pick-up and other people had escaped in farm tractors. My parents told me: ‘Leave and follow your brothers.' I went down to the village to look for another pick-up but then I saw Abbas Jiha driving the village ambulance with his wife and family inside. I asked if he would take me and he said: ‘No problem.'”

By the time Abbas Jiha left Mansouri, he had thirteen terrified passengers crammed into the vehicle. There was his wife, Mona, and their four children, Fadila and her aunt Nowkal, Mohamed Hisham, a window repairman, and five members of the al-Khaled family—twenty-two-year-old Nadia, who was Nowkal's daughter, and her four nieces, Sahar, aged three, Aida, seven, Huda, eleven, and thirteen-year-old Manar. Abbas and Mohamed Hisham, the only male adults, sat in the front of the ambulance along with six-year-old Mehdi; the rest sat pressed together in the back. “Can you imagine what it was like with fourteen people in the vehicle?” Fadila asked me when I interviewed her later. Abbas Jiha remembers that part of the village was now on fire, the smoke curling over the fields. “We left in a convoy of tractors and cars and headed for Amriyeh where there was a UN post with Fijian soldiers on the main coast road to Tyre. The shells were falling all round us in the fields.”

Najla Abujahjah was herself now standing in front of the Fijian position—UN Checkpoint 123—taking still pictures of refugee traffic on the road, her friend holding her video-camera. “There were two helicopters in the sky, watching the checkpoint,” she told me. “I was worried about those helicopters, about what they were doing there. I saw an ambulance coming down the road and thought it must have wounded on board but then I saw it was full of women and children. There was another car moving in the opposite direction and the ambulance driver was waving with his hand, telling it to turn back.” The videotape record of those moments shows the ambulance passing the unmanned UN checkpoint—the Fijian soldiers were not on the road, but in their protective bunkers—and Abbas Jiha's hand appears at the window of his vehicle, urging the other car to stop.

It was then that Abbas Jiha heard the women in the back of his ambulance shouting at him. “One of them was crying out to me: ‘The helicopter is coming close to us—it's chasing us.' I looked out of the window and I could see the Apache getting closer. I told them all: ‘Don't be afraid—just say
Allahu akbar
, God is Great, and the name of the Imam Ali.' I had told them not to be afraid but I was very frightened.”

Najla Abujahjah saw the same helicopter. “It was getting lower and nearer, and I've learnt that this means the pilot is going to fire. I felt he was going to fire a missile but I didn't imagine the target would be so close to me. I heard a sound like ‘puff-puff,' a very small sound. And I saw a missile flying from the Apache with a trail of smoke behind it.” In fact, the Israeli helicopter pilot fired two missiles; one was later discovered unexploded beside a neighbouring mosque, its steel cylinder, fins and nameplate still intact. Najla Abujahjah's videotape recorded what happened to the other rocket. Milliseconds after the ambulance cleared UN Checkpoint 123, the missile exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it 20 metres through the air into the living room of a house.

All Fadila al-Oglah could remember was “a great heat in my face, like a blazing fire. Somehow I was outside the ambulance and I found a big barrel of water and started to wash my face from the heat. It was all I could think of, despite the screaming and smoke, this terrible heat. It was as if someone was holding a flame in front of my eyes.”

Abbas Jiha was to recall how he hurled himself from the door of the ambulance just before it crashed into the house. “I was terrified. I couldn't believe it. It was the end of my world. I knew what must have happened to my family.” Najla Abujahjah, trembling with fear, was now videotaping the terrible aftermath of the Israeli missile attack. Her tape shows Abbas Jiha, wounded in the head and foot, standing in the road beside one of his dead daughters, weeping and shrieking “God is Great” up into the sky, towards the helicopter. “I raised my fists to the pilot and cried out: ‘My God, my God, my family has gone.'”

Abbas found his son Mehdi alive. Then he saw two-month-old Mariam lying 3 metres from the ambulance. “All her body had holes through it. Her head was full of metal.” Najla saw women and children “coming out of the back of the ambulance, cowering and screaming and hiding. One man threw himself into the orchard then came out holding two children by the arms. One was a little girl who was wounded and barefoot but she was still trying to put her scarf back on. I saw a girl lying on the road with blood coming out of the top of her head. The driver was crying out: ‘My children have died, God have mercy on us.' I saw another girl— she was Manar—and she had blood all over her, and she kept saying: ‘My sister's head has exploded.' ”

Still fearful that the helicopter would fire again—the pilot had clearly seen that his target was an ambulance—Najla Abujahjah ran towards the house to find a scene which she has said will torment her for the rest of her life. “I couldn't get the doors open because the vehicle was wedged in the room. But there were three children inside who were clearly in the last seconds of their life. It was as if they were entombed. One of them—she was Hanin—collapsed on the broken window frame, her blood running in streams down the outside of the vehicle. In her last seconds she tried to look at me but she couldn't because dust covered her face. Another little girl was sitting in the lap of a dead woman, wailing and crying ‘Aunty, Aunty.' There was a third girl who had her face covered in blood; she was sitting up, turning her head from side to side. Another had a terrible wound to her head and neck and she collapsed.” As the children died one by one in front of her, Najla Abujahjah heard a strange scraping sound. “The missile had set off the windscreen wipers and they were going back and forth against the broken glass, making this terrible noise. It will haunt me for the rest of my days.”

Abbas Jiha, overwhelmed with grief, was tearing at the ambulance with his bare hands, along with UN Fijian troops from the checkpoint. “I could see Hanin's back—she was cut through with holes like a mosquito net,” he recalled. “Then I found my wife Mona. She was so terribly wounded, I couldn't recognise her face. I had lost her and three of my children.” Mona Jiha, nine-year-old Zeinab, fiveyear-old Hanin and the two-month-old baby, Mariam, were all dead. So was sixty-year-old Nawkal and her eleven-year-old niece Huda. The Israeli helicopter remained in the sky over UN Checkpoint 123 for another five minutes. Then it flew away.

Within hours, the Israelis admitted they had targeted the ambulance but made two claims: that the vehicle was owned by a Hizballah member—which was untrue—and that it was destroyed because it had been carrying a Hizballah guerrilla—likewise untrue. “If other individuals in the vehicle were hit during the attack,” an Israeli spokesman said, “they had been used by the Hizballah as a cover for Hizballah activities.” There were no apologies. Yet international law demands the safeguarding of civilian lives even in the presence of “individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians,” and the claim that the vehicle had been targeted because it was believed to be owned by the Hizballah was in some ways even more outrageous. How, the survivors asked themselves, could it be justifiable for the Israelis to slaughter the occupants of an ambulance just because they didn't like the suspected owner of the vehicle? And what kind of missile, they also asked, could home in on an ambulance, blasting it 20 metres through the air? If the Apache helicopter was American—as it most certainly was—who made the rocket that killed Nowkal, Mona and the four children, Zeinab, Hanin, Mariam and Huda?

For days after the killing, the smashed ambulance lay in the wreckage of the house into which it had been blasted on 13 April. I passed it myself each day as I drove the frightening coast road south of Tyre, two Apache helicopters watching my movements as they did all vehicles on the highway. Within a week, the bloodbath at Qana, in which 109 Lebanese civilian refugees were massacred by Israeli artillery, had eclipsed this particular horror, eventually bringing “Operation Grapes of Wrath” to an ignominious end—and failing to win Shimon Peres's election. But there were many other incidents during the Israeli bombardment which bore a remarkable similarity to the ambulance attack. Close to the Jiyeh power station, south of Beirut, for example, another Israeli helicopter pilot had fired a missile at a car, killing a young woman who had just bought a sandwich from a local café. In West Beirut on 16 April, a missile decapitated a two-year-old girl. Two days later, yet another helicopter-fired missile was targeted at a block of apartments at Nabatieh, killing a family of nine, including a two-day-old baby.

What were these terrible weapons that were now being used so promiscuously in Lebanon? Who sold them to the Israelis? And—if it was an American company which had manufactured the missile—what conditions were attached to its sale? In the village of Mansouri, Abbas Jiha spent months ruminating upon this same question. “How would the people who made this missile feel if their children were killed as mine were?” he asked me. “These things are meant to be used against armies, not civilians.” Fadila al-Oglah was more resigned. “The Americans will keep giving these weapons to the Israelis whatever we say,” she remarked to me one day in the same draughty two-room house she had fled a year before. “They don't care about us. We will continue to suffer.” Which was perfectly true.

Shortly after the bombardment ended, however, UN ordnance officers searching through the wreckage of the ambulance found an intriguing clue to the missile's identity. Among fragments of shrapnel and twisted steel, a young UN liaison officer—Captain Mikael Lindval of the Swedish army—discovered a hunk of metal bearing most of a coded nameplate. It had come to rest a few inches from the bloodstained window frame where Hanin had died, and contained the logo “AGM 114C” and a manufacturer's number, “04939.” There was also an intriguing single letter, “M.” Lindval knew AGM stood for “Air-to-Ground Missile,” and the 114C coding identified the 1.6-metre projectile as a Hellfire anti-armour missile, jointly manufactured by Rockwell International and Martin Marietta. Rockwell—now taken over by Boeing—had its missile headquarters, according to
Jane's Defence
Weekly
, at Satellite Boulevard, Duluth, in Georgia, about thirty minutes' drive from Atlanta. Martin Marietta, now part of Lockheed, was making missles in Orlando, Florida. Those who made the missile that killed four Lebanese children and two women now had an address.

I even found the manufacturer's advertisement for the Hellfire. “All for One and One for All,” it said in the publicity literature. Could ever Alexandre Dumas' reputation have been so traduced? What did the rallying cry of the Three Musketeers have to do with this weapon? But there was a far more important question. Now that I had identified them, how would the missile manufacturers respond to the bloodbath inside the Mansouri ambulance?

Lindval duly handed over to me the fragment containing the codes. They were scratched and in some cases illegible, but they included a National Stock Number in a 42-34 digit sequence, “141001-1920293.” The second section of the sequence—“01”—would prove to be of vital importance. The missile's Lot No. was “MG188J315534.” Then the Fijians found the second, unexploded Hellfire missile almost totally buried beside the mosque. On the undamaged fuselage, the codings were complete and it was thus possible to reconstruct some of the missing figures on the projectile which had exploded inside the ambulance.
¹⁷¹

Somehow, I had to get the coded missile part to America, to present it to the makers. The first question was how to get this piece of shrapnel—the vital and only proof that the ambulance had been hit by a Hellfire—from Lebanon to the United States. There were no direct flights. It was not difficult to get it aboard an international flight from Lebanon to France. Sympathetic officials at Beirut airport and in the airline brought the missile part on board my Air France flight to Paris. But explaining to American security men that I wanted to carry it all the way to Washington was going to end in journalistic disaster. I consulted the Paris station manager of another European airline. “Don't think about hand-carrying it, Bob,” he told me, fondling the jagged metal fragment containing the Hellfire codes. “They'll pick up explosive traces on your hands, let alone the stuff you'd be carrying in your bag.” I could see what he meant. And I could imagine the headline: “British reporter found with missile part on flight to Washington . . .” I could even guess the reporter's by-line beneath the headline.