The bearded militiaman knelt in the rain and used his gun to shift the earth of the bomb crater. ”There is a hand still here in the ground,” said Wasim al-Shinmari. ”I can’t touch it. I’m sorry, but I just can’t touch it.”
He exposed what looked like a pale lump of human flesh against the dirt, and then dissolved in sobs. ”The bodies went to hospital, but the hand is here,” he said.
At least 14 Iraqis were killed and dozens injured on Wednesday morning when two American bombs fell out of the sky, and on to a crowded marketplace.
On Thursday Iraqi Health Minister Omid Medhat Mubarak said 350 people have died in air raids since the start of the war, 36 had been killed in raids on Baghdad in the preceding 24 hours, and 200 people were wounded.
Wednesday’s bomb attack was the single worst act of carnage in six days of an American aerial assault on the Iraqi capital carried out by B-52 bombers, F-17 jet fighters and cruise missiles, at all hours of the day.
”I saw a dozen bodies or more. They were inside the cars, outside the cars, even in the buildings,” Shinmari said. ”Children, ladies, men … nobody had any warning.”
The people of the Shaab neighbourhood, on the northern perimeters of Baghdad, never had an inkling they would be next. Iraqis had learned to adapt to the rhythm of the bombs, venturing out if they had to, by daytime largely, and with great caution to avoid official areas known to be the target of the United States’s wrath.
The main Ali Benabi Talib artery carried a reasonably heavy flow of traffic. The small garages and grocery shops that line the eastern side of the road were open for custom; the residents of the flats on the western side were at home.
Nobody paid much attention to the roar of the planes overhead; it was the third or fourth sortie since daybreak.
”I heard the bombing attacks all morning long, but they were relatively far away,” said Abdel Razak. ”I certainly didn’t expect anything here. This is a civilian area.”
That false sense of security in US technology, and its precision-guided bombs, was abetted by the weather, an orange apocalyptic haze that engulfed the city.
At 11.30am on Wednesday, they were brutally disillusioned. The relatively small size of the craters, one on either side of the main road, gave little indication of the bombs’ lethal force. When they exploded, within seconds of each other, two men from the district, Tahir (26) and Sarmat (21), were idling away the day in a small shop that sells water heaters. In an instant the shop gave way, swallowing up the two men.
The sideways force of the blast spewed chunks of masonry and body parts across a six-lane highway. Chunks of shrapnel tore through plaster facades, leaving pockmarks on the interior wall. Brick shopfronts collapsed, amid cascades of glass that extended for 200m. Two cars hurtled in the air, landing on their sides.
The lethal impact of the blast was augmented by cruel circumstance. Witnesses said an oil tanker had been parked in the area moments before the bombing. Five cars along a slip road were carbonised, and flames licked the first-floor windows of buildings.
One of the burnt-out cars had contained a family with three children, said Hisham Madloul, picking his way through the debris in flip-flops.
”There were three families in the building upstairs and many children. We have committed no sin. We are not guilty. Why are they doing this? We are innocent people.”
He paused for breath, and went on. ”What does Bush want?”
It was not a question Alaa Ahmed (12) was equipped to answer from his bed at al-Kindi hospital. He lay on his pink pillow, with his head and right hand swathed in bandages, gazing vacantly with huge brown eyes at the circle of white coats around him.
Above his bed, the doctors said several of the 21 people travelling in the same minibus as Alaa had been brought to hospital, some horribly burnt, some with grievous internal injuries, and others dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, reports David Macfarlane, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHI) announced this week that there are several hundred thousand displaced people in Northern Iraq, but the International Committee of the Red Cross says the situation has yet to reach crisis point.
”For the time being we don’t think that there is a major crisis,” a Red Cross representative said on Monday. ”The majority of those displaced left before the conflict, leaving the cities for the villages relatively well prepared.”
The Red Cross’s comment follows the UNOCHI’s report last week that displaced people in the north of Iraq numbered between 300 000 and 450 000. — Â