By Robert Fisk in Baghdad - 18 March 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=502309
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=3703 (Full Story)
Scenes from hell come every day in
Iraq, but last night's car bomb cut down the innocent with savage abandon,
destroying not only a hotel but an entire extended Iraqi family - children,
wives, mothers, Egyptian security workers - who were watching the Iraqi-Saudi
football finals on television.
Article Length: 604 words (approx.) - Independent Portfolio Article
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By Robert Fisk in Baghdad - 18 March 2004
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=3703 (Full Story)
Scenes
from hell come every day in Iraq, but last night's car bomb cut down the
innocent with savage abandon, destroying not only a hotel but an entire extended
Iraqi family - children, wives, mothers, Egyptian security workers - who were
watching the Iraqi-Saudi football finals on television.
It also planted another seed of hatred in Iraqi hearts for the occupiers who
claim to have liberated them a year ago. The target was the Jebel Lubnan -
Lebanese Mountain - hotel and American workers were wounded but, as so often
today, the Iraqis were the principal victims.
There were at least 17 dead, including one Briton. From the swaying wall of a
blasted building opposite the ruins, I watched them pulling the corpses - let us
speak frankly, the bits of corpses - out of the rubble of the Zeir family home
while hundreds of angry men screamed at American troops to let them rescue the
wounded.
The troops refused to allow them to help and within an hour of the explosion,
the word had gone around: the Americans had set off the blast; the car bomb was
not a car bomb, but a missile fired from a helicopter. The children's bodies
were more or less intact. The adults came out in parts.
The bomb - it was, of course, in a car and the crater was 20 feet deep - had
detonated in a narrow street in the Karada district of Baghdad, scarcely 500
yards from the plinth on which the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by
American troops in front of the world's cameras on 9 April last year when US
forces entered the city.
The bombing followed the killing of at least seven Westerners and an unknown
number of Iraqis over the past four days in Iraq. Only a day earlier, according
to Raad Nasr who lived opposite the hotel, the staff of the Motorola telephone
company had moved out of the Jebel Lubnan, a cause for further suspicion - were
they warned of the bomb, the neighbours demanded to know? - and the bomber set
off his explosives opposite the Zeir home and a house for guards of the Baghdad
Private Hospital.
Most of the latter, like the Motorola workers, were Egyptian. The Zeirs - a
Christian family, for this street of the city is a small Christian enclave -
were not only watching the football match but receiving guests who wanted to
visit a female relative who was ill. At this moment, the bomber arrived.
The explosion smashed windows a mile away, set the hotel on fire and turned
surrounding houses into piles of bricks, wood and body parts. Like many smaller
hotels close to the Palestine Hotel, the base for major international news
agencies in Baghdad, the Jebel Lubnan had few security men outside and depended
on its anonymity for its protection.
For days now, the occupation authorities have feared that guerrillas would
strike at 'soft' targets in Baghdad to prove that the Americans cannot maintain
security a year after the invasion.
The explosion occurred in the middle of the United States' huge troop rotation
in Iraq - the largest in the US military's history - when up to 250,000 American
soldiers are in the country.
The US authorities announced later that American citizens had been wounded, a
statement that only further enraged the men and women desperately seeking news
of their loved ones. 'We are suffering - us - and they don't care', a woman in a
black abaya gown screamed at me. 'Why is it only you people who are so precious?
It is us who are dying.'
Officers of the new Iraqi police force, Iraqi fire brigade personnel and even
some of the wounded were clawing at the rubble in their effort to find
survivors. But everyone we saw brought from the smashed houses was dead; their
last journey to the ambulances wreathed in smoke from the still smouldering
fires. In the darkness, US helicopters were circling the fire, a symbol of
impotence in the face of the ever-growing insurgency which is consuming Iraq.