The Great War for Civilisation (196 page)

True, there are signs of the Americans and British striking at the Iraqi military. Two gun pits have been turned to ashes by direct air strikes, and a military barracks—empty like all the large installations that were likely to be on the Anglo-American target list—has been pulverised by missiles. A clutch of telephone exchanges in the towns around Hilla have been destroyed; along with the bombing of six communications centres in Baghdad, the country's phone system appears to have been shut down.

On a rail track further south, a train carrying military transport has been bombed from the air, the detonations blasting two entire armoured vehicles off their flat-bed trucks and hurling them in bits down an embankment. But other APCs, including an old American M-113 vehicle—presumably a captured relic from the Iranian army—remained intact. If that was the extent of the Americans' success south of Baghdad, there are literally hundreds of military vehicles untouched for 150 kilometres south of the capital, carefully camouflaged to avoid air attack. Like the Serb army in Kosovo, the Iraqis have proved masters of concealment. An innocent wheat field fringed by tall palm trees turned out, on closer scrutiny, to be traversed with bunkers and hidden anti-aircraft guns. Vehicles were hidden under motorway bridges—which the Americans and British very definitely do not wish to destroy because they want to use them if they succeed in occupying Iraq—and fuel trucks dug in behind deep earth revetments. At a major traffic intersection, an anti-aircraft gun was mounted on a flat-bed truck and manned by two soldiers scanning the pale blue early summer skies.

As well they might. Contrails hung across the skies between Baghdad, Kerbala and Hilla. Above the centre of Hilla, home to the ancient Sumerian Babylon, a distant American AWACS plane could be seen circling high in the heavens, a tiny white dot indicating the giant scanner above the aircraft, its path followed by the eyes of scores of militiamen and soldiers. Driving the long highway south by bus, I could see troops pointing skywards. If hanging concentrates a man's mind wonderfully, fear of an air strike has almost the same effect. An Iraqi journalist beside me insisted that an American or British aircraft whose course we had been fearfully tracking from our vehicle was turning back towards the south, ignoring traffic on the main road. A few minutes later, it reappeared in front of us, flying in the opposite direction.

Driving the highway south, a lot of illusions are blown from the mind. There are markets in the small towns en route to Babylon, stalls with heaps of oranges and apples and vegetables. The roads are crowded with buses, trucks and private cars—far outnumbering the military traffic, the truckloads of troops and, just occasionally, the sleek outline of a missile transporter with canvas covers wrapped tightly over the truck it is hauling. In the town of Iskandariyah, cafés and restaurants were open, shops were selling take-away
kofta
meat balls and potatoes and the tall new television aerials that Iraqis now need to watch their state television channel, whose own transmitters have been so constantly attacked by American and British aircraft. This was not a population on the edge of starvation; nor indeed did it appear to be a frightened people. If the Americans were about to launch an assault through this farmland of canals and massive forests of palm trees and wheat fields, it looked at first glance like a country at peace.

But the large factories and government institutions seemed deserted, many of the industrial workers and employees standing outside the main gates. Only 30 kilometres south of Baghdad, there came the thump of bombs and our bus shook with the impact of anti-aircraft rounds. A series of artillery pieces to our right were firing at an elevation over our heads, the gun muzzles blossoming gold, the shells exploding above the canopy of grey smoke from Baghdad's oil fires which now spread 80 kilometres south of the city.

The images sometimes stretched the limits of comprehension. Children jumping over a farm wall beside a concealed military radio shack; herds of big-humped camels moving like biblical animals past a Soviet-made T-82 battle tank hidden under palm branches; fields of yellow flowers beside fuel bowsers and soldiers standing amid brick kilns; an incoming American missile explosion that scarcely prompts the farmers to turn their heads. On one pile of rubble north of Hilla someone had fixed the red, white and black flag of Iraq, just as the Palestinians tie their banners to the wreckage of their buildings after Israeli attacks.

Was there a lesson in all this? I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway—you can feel the temperature rise as you drive south—with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations. The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black kuffiah scarves round their heads, whom I saw 150 kilometres south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a “degraded” army on the verge of surrender.

All this, I wrote that night, may be an illusion. The combat troops I saw may have no heart for battle. The tanks may be abandoned when the Americans come down the highway towards Baghdad. The fuel bowsers may be towed back to the capital and the slit trenches deserted. Saddam may flee Baghdad when the first American and British shells come hissing into the suburbs and the statues of the Great Leader that stand outside so many villages along the highway may be ritually sundered. This would prove to be very much the case. But it didn't feel that way in early April. It looked like an Iraqi army and a Baath party militia that were prepared to fight for their leadership, just as they had at Um Qasr and in Basra and Nasiriyah and Suq al-Shuyukh. Or was it something else they might be fighting for? An Iraq, however dictatorial in its leadership, that simply rejected the idea of foreign conquerors? Or Iraqis who cared more about Iraq than Saddam and who identified the Americans as their enemies without obeying Saddam's orders?

THE WOUNDS ARE VICIOUS AND DEEP, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hilla teaching hospital some 50 kilometres south of Baghdad are proof that something illegal—something quite outside the Geneva Conventions—occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon. The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the ten patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell “like grapes” from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say—and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.

Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare on 29, 30 and 31 March? The sixty-one dead who have passed through the Hilla hospital cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets that explode in the air, or swoop through windows and doorways to burst indoors, or skip off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.

Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10:30 that Sunday morning, when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard “the voice of explosions” and looked out of the door to see “the sky raining fire.” She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of “little boxes” that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like “small grapefruit,” he said. “If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately. They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded.”

Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them—perhaps the metal “butterfly” which contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and which springs open to release them in showers above the ground. Some died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel-house mortuary at the back of the Hilla hospital. The teaching college had received more than 200 wounded since the night of Saturday, 29 March—the sixty-one dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages—and of these doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians.

Soldiers there certainly were, at least forty if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile-launcher was positioned in a nearby field—as they were along the highway north to Baghdad yesterday? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages—even if aimed at military targets—thus transgresses international law.

So it was that twenty-seven-year-old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And so Zaman Abbais, five years old, was hit in the legs and forty-eight-year-old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a thirty-two-year-old soldier, said that the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them. “It is like a grenade and they came into the houses,” he said. “Some stayed on the land, others exploded.”

Heartbreaking is the only word to describe ten-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself, and wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn't realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the younger girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters in a pool of blood near the door. The girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience.

The Iraqi authorities, of course, were all too ready to allow us journalists access to these patients. But there was no way these children and their often uneducated parents could manufacture these stories of tragedy and pain. Nor could the Iraqis have faked the scene in Nadr village where the remains of the tiny bomblets littered the ground beside the scorch marks of the explosions, as well as the shreds of the tiny parachutes upon which the bomb clusters float to the ground once their containers have broken open. A crew from Sky Television even managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from Nadr with them, the wicked metal balls that are intended to puncture the human body still locked into their frame like cough sweets in a metal sheath. They were of a black colour which glinted silver when held against the light.

The deputy administrator of the Hilla hospital and one of his doctors told a confused tale of military action around the city in recent days, of Apache helicopters that would disgorge Special Forces troops on the road to Kerbala. One of their operations—if the hospital personnel are to be believed—went spectacularly wrong one night when militiamen forced them to retreat. Shortly afterwards, the cluster-bomb raids began—artillery rather than aircraft might have been used to deliver the bomblets—although the villages that were targeted appear to have been on the other side of Hilla to the abortive American attack. The most recent raid occurred on Tuesday, when eleven civilians were killed—two women and three children among them—in a village called Hindiyeh. A man sent to collect the corpses reported to the hospital that the only living thing he found in the area of the bodies was a hen. Not till four days later were Iraqi bomb disposal officers ordered into the villages to clear the unexploded ordnance.

Needless to say, it was not the first time that cluster bombs had been used against civilians. During Israel's 1982 siege of West Beirut, its air force dropped cluster bomblets manufactured for the U.S. Navy across several areas of the city, especially in the Fakhani and Ouzai districts, causing civilians ferocious and deep wounds identical to those I saw in Hilla. Vexed at the misuse of their weapons, which are designed for use against exclusively military targets, the Reagan administration withheld a shipment of fighter-bombers for Israel—then relented a few weeks later and sent the aircraft anyway. Nor is it easy to listen to Iraqi officials condemning the use of illegal weapons by the USAF and RAF when the Iraqi air force itself dropped poison gas on the Iranian army and on pro-Iranian Kurdish villages during the 1980–88 war against Iran. Outraged claims from Iraqi officials at the abuse of human rights by American and British invaders sound like a bell with a very hollow ring. But something grievous happened around Hilla at the end of March, something unforgivable, and contrary to international law.

CONCEIT RULED BAGHDAD. Information Minister Sahaf promised that the Americans would perish like snakes in the desert—even as those same Americans were massed on the outskirts of Baghdad. Almost encircled by his enemies, Saddam now appeared on state television to urge Iraqis to fight to the death against the Anglo-American invasion force, because “victory is in reach.” He appeared in military uniform and black beret beside an Iraqi flag with a white cloth as background. Accusing the Americans of fighting by stealth, he told Iraqis they could fight with “whatever weapons they have.” The enemy, he said, “is trying in vain to undermine our heroic resistance by bypassing the defences of our armed forces around Baghdad. The enemy avoids fighting our forces when they find out that our troops are steadfast and strong. Instead, the enemy drops some troops here and there in small numbers, as we had expected. You can fight these soldiers with whatever weapons you have.” The phrase “as we expected” suggested that the Iraqis had in fact been taken by surprise by the mobility of the American tactics which had, in effect, erased the very notion of the “front line” upon which Iraqi troops were traditionally taught to fight. “Remember that brave old farmer who shot an Apache helicopter with his rifle,” Saddam remarked. The chopper had been brought down on 24 March, and conspiracy theorists immediately suggested that the president's television address might have been recorded more than a week ago in anticipation of a siege of Baghdad. They need not have bothered. In the last days of his rule, Saddam had become the repository of his own myth, a man who—even as Bush threatened him with war—had preferred to write romantic novels in his palaces.