The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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 phr
ase “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.

  And now his soldiers—and the civilians of Iraq—were paying the price. I ventured out on 5 April, in a fast car with a government driver who had already been “bought” by The Independent and was now loyal to Fisk rather than Saddam. It was just as well. We drove at speed towards the airport, then turned back towards the city as we heard the power-diving of jets. These were glimpses of fear and death, mere sketches to take back with me to fill out the front page of our Sunday on this last weekend of the invasion. Beside the highway, a squad of troops was stacking grenades as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of U.S. air strikes. The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq’s last front line. An Iraqi armoured vehicle was still smouldering, a cloud of blue-grey smoke rising above the plane trees under which its crew had been sheltering. Two trucks were burnt out on the other side of the road. The American Apache helicopters had left just a few minutes before we arrived. A squad of soldiers, flat on their stomachs, were setting up an anti-armour weapon on the weed-strewn pavement, aiming at the empty airport motorway for the first American tanks to come thrashing down the highway.

  A truck crammed with more than a hundred Iraqi troops, many in blue uniforms, all of them carrying rifles that gleamed in the morning sunlight, sped past me towards the airport. A few made victory signs in the direction of my car—my driver was touching 145 kilometres an hour on the speedometer—but of course one had to ask what their hearts were telling them. “Up the line to death” was the phrase that came to mind. Two miles away, at the Yarmouk hospital, the surgeons stood in the car park in bloodstained overalls; they had already handled their first intake of military casualties.

  A few hours later, an Iraqi minister was to tell the world that the Republican Guard had just retaken the airport from the Americans, that they were under fire but had won “a great victory.” Around Qadisiya it didn’t look that way. Tank crews were gunning their T-72s down the highway past the main Baghdad railway yards in a convoy of armoured personnel carriers and jeeps and clouds of thick blue exhaust fumes. The more modern T-82s, the last of the Soviet-made fleet of battle tanks, sat hull-down around Jordan Square with a clutch of armoured vehicles. Across vast fields of sand and dirt and palm groves, I saw batteries of Sam-6 anti-aircraft missiles and multiple Katyusha rocket-launchers awaiting the American advance. The soldiers around them looked relaxed, some smoking cigarettes in the shade of the palm trees or sipping fruit juice brought to them by the residents of Qadisiya whose homes—heaven help them—were now in the firing line.

  But then a white-painted Japanese pick-up truck pulled out in front of our car. At first, I thought the soldiers on the back were sleeping, covered in blankets to keep them warm. Yet I had opened my car window to keep cool this early summer morning and I realised that all the soldiers—there must have been fifteen of them in the little truck—were lying on top of each other, all with their heavy black military boots dangling over the tailboard. The two living soldiers on the vehicles sat with their feet wedged between the corpses. So did America’s first victims of the day go to their eternal rest.

  DAWN ON 6 APRIL started with a series of massive vibrations, a great “stomping” sound that physically shook my room. Stomp, Stomp, Stomp, it went. I lay in bed trying to fathom the cause. It was like the moment in Jurassic Park when the tourists first hear the footfalls of the tyrannosaur, an ever-increasing, ever more frightening thunder of regular, monstrous heartbeats. From my window on the east bank of the Tigris, I saw an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun firing from the roof of a white four-storey building half a mile away, shooting straight across the river at something on the opposite bank. Stomp, Stomp, it went again, the sound so enormous that it set off the burglar alarms in a thousand cars along the riverbank.

  And it was only when I stood on the roadway a few minutes later that I knew what had happened. Not since the last Gulf War in 1991 had I heard the sound of American artillery fire. And there, only a few hundred metres away on the far bank of the Tigris, I saw them. At first they looked like tiny armoured centipedes, stopping and starting, dappled brown and grey, weird little creatures that had come to inspect an alien land and search for water.

  You had to keep your eye on the centipedes to interpret reality, to realise that each creature was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, that its tail was a cluster of U.S. Marines hiding for cover behind the armour, moving forward together each time their protection revved its engines and manoeuvred closer to the Tigris. There was a burst of gunfire from the Americans, a smart clatter of rocket-propelled grenades and puffs of white smoke from the Iraqi soldiers and militiamen dug into their foxholes and trenches on the same riverbank further south. It was that quick and that simple and that awesome.

  Indeed, the sight was so extraordinary, so unexpected—despite all the Pentagon boasts and Bush promises—that one somehow forgot the precedents that it was setting for the future history of the Middle East. Amid the crack of gunfire, the tracer streaking across the river and the huge oil fires that the Iraqis lit to give them cover to retreat, one had to look away—to the great river bridges farther north, into the pale green waters of that most ancient of rivers—to realise that a Western army on a moral crusade had broken through to the heart of an Arab city for the first time since Maude marched into this same city of Baghdad in 1917 and Allenby into Jerusalem in 1918. But Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot, in reverence for Christ’s birthplace, and yesterday’s American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour about it.

  The marines and Special Forces who spread out along the west bank of the river broke into Saddam Hussein’s largest palace, filmed its lavatories and bathrooms and lay resting on its lawns before moving down towards the Rashid Hotel and sniping at both soldiers and civilians. Hundreds of Iraqi men, women and children were brought in agony to Baghdad’s hospitals in the hours that followed, victims of bullets, shrapnel and cluster bombs. We could see the twin-engined American A-10s firing their depleted-uranium rounds into the far shore of the river.

  From the eastern bank, I watched the marines run towards a ditch with rifles to their shoulders to search for Iraqi troops. But their enemies went on firing from the mudflats to the south until, one after another, I saw them running for their lives. The Iraqis clambered out of their foxholes amid the American shellfire and began an Olympics of terror along the waterside; most kept their weapons, some fell back to an exhausted walk, others splashed right into the waters of the Tigris, up to their knees, even their necks. Three soldiers climbed from a trench with their hands in the air, in front of a group of marines. But others fought on. The Stomp, Stomp, Stomp of the American guns went on for more than an hour. Then the A-10s came back, and an F-18 fighter-bomber that sent a ripple of fire along the trenches, after which the shooting died away.

  It seemed as if Baghdad would fall within hours. But the day was to be characterised with that most curious of war’s attributes, a crazed mixture of normality, death and high farce. For even as the Americans were fighting their way north up the river and the F-18s were returning to bombard the bank, Sahaf, the Iraqi minister of information, turned up to give a press conference on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, scarcely half a mile from the battle. As shells exploded to his left and the air was shredded by the power-diving American jets, Mohamed Sahaf announced to p
erhaps a hundred journalists that the whole thing was a propaganda exercise, the Americans were no longer in possession of Baghdad airport, reporters must “check their facts and re-check their facts—that’s all I ask you to do.” Mercifully, the oil fires, bomb explosions and cordite smoke now obscured the western bank of the river so that fact-checking could no longer be accomplished by looking past Sahaf’s shoulder.

  What the world wanted to know, of course, was if Baghdad was about to be occupied, whether the Iraqi government would surrender and—the Mother of All Questions—where was Saddam? But Sahaf used his time to condemn Al-Jazeera for its bias towards the United States and to excoriate the Americans for using “the lounges and halls” of Saddam Hussein to make “cheap propaganda.” The Americans “will be buried here,” he shouted above the battle. “Don’t believe these invaders. They will be defeated.” Only a week ago, Sahaf had informed us that the Americans would acquire graves in the desert. Now their place of interment had moved to the city. And the more he spoke, the more we wanted to interrupt Sahaf, to say, “But hang on, Mr. Minister, take a look over your right shoulder.” But of course, there was only smoke over his right shoulder. Why didn’t we all take a drive around town, he suggested.

  So I did. The corporation’s double-decker buses were running and, if the shops were shut, stallholders were open, and near Yassir Arafat Street, men had gathered in cheap tea-houses to discuss the war. I went off to buy fruit, and the shopkeeper didn’t stop counting my dinars—all 11,500 of them—when a low-flying American jet crossed the street and dropped its payload 1,000 metres away in an explosion that changed the air pressure in our ears. But every street corner had its clutch of militiamen, and when I reached the side of the Foreign Ministry on the western bank of the river upstream from the marines, an Iraqi artillery crew was firing a 120-mm gun at the Americans from the middle of a dual carriageway, its tongue of fire bright against the grey-black fog that was drifting over Baghdad.