Grisly new landmark in Iraq
2004-09-30 18:45
Baghdad - The father carried his tiny dead son, wrapped in a white blanket, and shoved his way on Thursday through the hospital corridor yelling for the body of his other boy slain in a triple bombing in Baghdad that killed 42 people, mostly children.
"This is my son Ahmed, This is my son Ahmed," the man howled in the clatter of the emergency ward smelling of organs and flesh and pushed his way past other parents desperately searching for their young sons and daughters' bodies.
"Where is Akeel? Akeel," he shouted, elbowing his way past other weeping parents to a sobbing relative who passed him his second lifeless child wrapped in a blood-stained blanket.
Thursday afternoon, adults and children in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Al-Amel, where the streets are filled with rubbish and sewage, were gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a brand new water pump station built by the US military.
It was the type of project the Americans were betting would win Iraqi support for the new US-backed government and wean people away from the insurgency and from resentment over the US presence.
Instead, a celebration meant to foster goodwill turned into just another day of bloodshed as two car bombs ripped fireballs and sent shrapnel flying and a third explosion jolted the area, climaxing a month that saw close to 500 people killed.
Mushrooming black smoke clotted the sky and a pile of listless US soldiers, cut and bleeding, were lifted from the pavement into Humvees by their comrades, amid a sea of lifeless children.
"There is no conceivable justification for attacking innocent Iraqi civilians who were attending the opening of a water pumping station," said the US's James Hutton.
Pools of blood
In the Yarmuk hospital, cleaning ladies splashed water on the floor and mopped away pools of thick red blood.
Doctors jostled one another as they tended the scores of wounded people - some of them Iraqi national guard still in uniform, with weapons in their holsters - as their stretchers quickly turned red.
The corridors echoed with shouts, curses and tears as women wailed like banshees and grief-stricken men pummelled their chests and faces.
A pair of men started punching each other and a hospital orderly tried to intervene, as they traded curses, one of them praising the ousted dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the other fearful for his country's future.
The first man yelled: "Shut up. Under Saddam nothing happened like this. Our children weren't killed."
The other answered back, his voice laced with hatred: "This is not Jihad (holy war), this is against Islam, Islam is innocent of this.
"They (the attackers) have desecrated the resistance."