The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Within an hour and a half, the Americans had moved up the southern waterfront and were in danger of overrunning the old Ministry of Information. Outside the Rashid Hotel, they opened fire on civilians and militiamen alike, blasting a passing motorcyclist onto the road and shooting at a Reuters photographer who escaped with only bullet holes in his car. All across Baghdad, hospitals were inundated with wounded, many of them women and children hit by fragments of cluster bombs. By dusk, the Americans were flying F-18s in close air support to the marines, so confident of their destruction of Iraq’s anti-aircraft gunners that they could clearly be seen cruising the brown and grey skies in pairs over central Baghdad, turning lazily southwards and west while the cross-river shellfire continued.

  At mid-afternoon, the Americans had located an ammunition dump on the western bank of the river not far from the presidential palace—one of three they occupied—and blew up the lot in a sheet of flame several hundred feet high. For hours afterwards, shells could be heard whizzing from the conflagration, sometimes exploding in the sky. Even as they did so, the Americans—clearly intending to enrage Saddam and his ministers—transmitted live pictures of their exploration of the Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris, videotape that showed the presidential lavatory seat, Saddam’s marble-walled bathroom and gold-plated taps and chandeliers, and Special Forces soldiers sun-bathing—though there was no sun—on the presidential lawn.

  As night fell, I came across a small rampart of concrete at the eastern end of the great Rashid Bridge over the Tigris. Its three Iraqi defenders had propped their Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade launchers neatly in line along the top of the parapet. Hundreds of American tanks and armoured vehicles were pouring towards the Tigris from the south-west of Baghdad and these three Iraqis—two Baathist militiaman and a policeman—were standing there ready to defend the eastern shore from the greatest army ever known to man. That in itself, I thought, said something about both the courage and the hopelessness of the Arabs. The pain was still to come.

  IT WAS A SCENE FROM THE CRIMEAN WAR, a hospital of screaming wounded and floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff, it stuck to my shoes, to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency room, it swamped the passageways and the blankets and sheets. The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam’s regime—sometimes still clinging to severed limbs—are the dark side of victory and defeat, final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours, that war is indeed about the total failure of the human spirit.

  As I wandered amid the beds and the groaning men and women on them— Dante’s visit to the circles of Hell should have included these visions—the same old questions recurred. Was this for September 11th? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction? In a jammed corridor, I came across a middle-aged man on a soaked hospital trolley. He had a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket, hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor. A little girl lay on a filthy bed, one leg broken, the other so badly gouged out by shrapnel during an American air attack that the only way doctors could prevent her moving it was to tie her foot to a rope weighed down with concrete blocks. Her name was Rawa Sabri.

  And as I walked through this place of horror, the American shelling began to bracket the Tigris River outside, bringing back to the wounded the terror of death they had suffered only hours before. The road bridge I had just crossed to reach the hospital came under fire and clouds of cordite smoke drifted over the medical centre. Tremendous explosions shook the wards and corridors as doctors pushed shrieking children away from the windows.

  Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old Ottoman empire. But her equivalent is Dr. Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director and chief surgeon, a gently-spoken man who has slept an hour a day for six days and who is trying to save the lives of more than a hundred souls a day with one generator and half his operating theatres out of use—you cannot carry patients in your arms to the sixteenth floor when they are coughing blood. Dr. al-Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe how difficult it is to stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when they have been injured in the thorax, explaining that after four operations to extract metal from the brains of his patients, he is almost too tired to think, let alone in English.

  As I leave him, he tells me that he does not know where his family is. “Our house was hit and my neighbours sent a message to tell me they sent them away somewhere. I do not know where. I have two little girls, they are twins, and I told them they must be brave because their father had to work night and day at the hospital and they mustn’t cry because I have to work for humanity. And now I have no idea where they are.” Then Dr. al-Baeri choked on his words and began to cry and could not say goodbye.

  There was a man on the second floor with a fearful wound to the neck. It seemed the doctors could not stanch his blood and he was dribbling his life away all over the floor. Something wicked and sharp had cut into his stomach and six inches of bandages could not stop the blood from pumping out of him. His brother stood beside him and raised his hand to me and asked: “Why? Why?” A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had had to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I didn’t have the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl. There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and the hospital corridors echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful; it was followed by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children outside the wards.

  Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms, they had brought in three men who had been burned across their faces and arms and chests and legs, naked men with a skin of blood and tissues whom the doctors pasted with white cream, who sat on their beds with their skinless arms held upwards, each beseeching an absent saviour to rescue him from his pain. “No! No! No!” another young man screamed as doctors tried to cut open his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied like a horse. I thought he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and well fed but now he was a child again and he cried “Ummi, Ummi.” Mummy, mummy.

  I left this awful hospital to find the American shells falling in the river outside. I noticed, too, some military tents on a small patch of grass near the hospital’s administration building and—God damn it, I said under my breath—an armoured vehicle with a gun mounted on it, hidden under branches and foliage. It was only a few metres inside the hospital grounds. But the hospital was being used to conceal it. And I couldn’t help reminding myself of the name of the hospital. Adnan Khairallah had been Saddam’s minister of defence, a man who allegedly fell out with his leader and died in a helicopter crash whose cause was never explained. Even in the last hours of the Battle of Baghdad, its victims had to lie in a building named in honour of a murdered man.

  I AM DRIVING BACK to the Palestine Hotel. The noise of the shelling has receded. There are American tanks on the Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris but there is no fighting here. When we slow to turn into Saadun Street, I hear birds. Then the crack of a cannon and the hiss of a shell and we arrived at the Palestine to see a puff of grey smoke drifting from an upper floor. Sahaf and Naji Sabri are on the lawn below, still holding court, but then from the hotel entrance journalists and staff come shrieking into the dull sunlight carrying a sheet with something heavy inside, the material sopping with blood. Not for the first time that day, the Americans are killing journalists.

  That single tank shell, fired at the Palestine, hit the Reuters television bureau, killing one of the agency’s cameramen, father of an eight-year-old son, and wounding four other members of staff along with a cameraman for the Spanish Telé 5 channel. He was to die later. Was it possible to believe this was an accident? This was our first question on that awful day.

  These were not, of course, the first journalists to die in the Anglo–American invasion of Iraq. Terry Lloyd of ITN was shot dead by American troops in southern Iraq who apparently mistook his car for an I
raqi vehicle. Most of his crew were still missing. Michael Kelly of The Washington Post tragically drowned in a canal. Two reporters died in Kurdistan. Two journalists—a German and a Spaniard— were killed at a U.S. base on the edge of Baghdad, along with two Americans, when an Iraqi missile exploded among them. Nor could we forget the Iraqi civilians who were being killed and maimed by the hundreds and who—unlike their journalist guests—could not, as I have said before, leave the war and fly home Business Class. So the facts should speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they made it look bad. For a U.S. pilot had already that day killed Al-Jazeera’s reporter and badly wounded his colleague.

  The U.S. jet turned to rocket Al-Jazeera’s office on the banks of the Tigris at 7:45 a.m. Their chief correspondent in Baghdad, a Jordanian–Palestinian called Tareq Ayoub, was on the roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting a pitched battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi troops. As Ayoub’s colleague Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards, both men saw the plane fire the rocket as it swooped toward their building, which is close to the Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two American tanks had just appeared. “On the screen, there was this battle and we could see bullets flying and then we heard the aircraft,” Maher Abdullah said. “The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof—that’s how close it was. We actually heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit—the missile actually exploded against our electrical generator. Tareq died almost at once. Zuheir was injured.”

  Now for America’s problems in explaining this little saga. Back in 2001, the United States fired a cruise missile at Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul—from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast around the world. No explanation was ever given for this extraordinary attack on the night before the city’s “liberation”; the Kabul correspondent, Taiseer Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of journalism, Alouni was in the Baghdad office to endure the USAF’s second attack on Al-Jazeera. Far more disturbing, however, was the fact that the Al-Jazeera network—the freest Arab television station, which had incurred the fury of not just the Americans but, as we have seen, Saddam, for its live coverage of the war—gave the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad office in February and received its assurances that the bureau in Iraq would not be attacked. Then on 6 April a State Department spokesman visited Al-Jazeera’s offices in Doha and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite channel, repeated the Pentagon’s assurances. Within twenty-four hours, the Americans had fired their missile into the Baghdad office.

  The next assault—on Reuters—came just before midday after the Abrams tank on the Jumhuriya Bridge pointed its gun barrel towards the Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists were staying. Sky Television’s David Chater noticed the barrel moving. The French television channel France 3 actually had a crew in a room below Reuters and videotaped the tank on the bridge. After a long period of silence on the sound track, their tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the tank’s barrel, the sound of a massive detonation and then pieces of paint-work falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact.

  In the Reuters bureau on the fifteenth floor, the shell exploded among the staff. It mortally wounded their Ukrainian cameraman Taras “Sasha” Protsjuk— who was also filming the tanks—seriously wounded another member of the staff, Briton Paul Pasquale, and two other journalists, including Reuters’ Lebanese–Palestinian reporter Samia Nakhoul. On the next floor, Telé 5’s Spanish cameraman Jose Couso was also badly hurt. Protsjuk died shortly afterwards. His television camera and its “legs” were left in the office, which was swamped with the crew’s blood.

  The American response ignored all the evidence. Major General Buford Blount of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division—whose tanks were on the bridge— announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then ceased. But I had been driving on that road between the tank and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired—and heard no small-arms fire. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records utter silence before the tank’s armament is fired. It is my absolute belief that there were no snipers in the building. Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there—myself included—watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men should ever use the hotel as an assault point. This is, one should add, the same General Blount who boasted back in March that his crews would be using depleted-uranium munitions—the kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion of cancers after the 1991 Gulf War—in their tanks. For General Blount to suggest—as he clearly did by saying that the sniper fire stopped once the Reuters camera crew were hit—that the crew were in some way involved in shooting at Americans merely turned an unbelievable statement into a libellous one.

  Again, we should remember that three dead and five wounded journalists do not constitute a massacre—or even the equivalent of the hundreds of civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And it was a truth that needed to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has killed a few journalists of its own over the years, along with tens of thousands of its own people. The name of Farzad Bazoft came to mind. But something very dangerous appeared to be getting loose. Blount’s explanation was the kind employed by the Israelis after they have killed the innocent. Was there therefore some message that we reporters were supposed to learn from all this? Was there some element in the American military that had come to hate the press and wanted to take out journalists based in Baghdad, to hurt those whom Britain’s home secretary, David Blunkett, had claimed to be working behind enemy lines? Could it be that this claim—that international correspondents were in effect collaborating with Mr. Blunkett’s enemy (most Britons having never supported this war in the first place)—was turning into some kind of a death sentence?

  I knew Tareq Ayoub. I broadcast to Doha during the war from the same Baghdad rooftop on which he died. I told Ayoub then how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage—seen across the entire Arab world—of the civilian victims of the Anglo–American bombing. Sasha Protsjuk of Reuters often shared the Palestine Hotel’s insupportably slow elevator with me. Samia Nakhoul had been a friend and colleague since the 1975–90 Lebanese civil war. She is married to the Financial Times’s correspondent David Gardner. And now she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad hospital. And Major General Buford Blount dared to imply that this innocent woman and her brave colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, did this tell us about the war in Iraq?202

  Earlier, the U.S. Air Force bombed a civilian housing complex in the Mansour district of Baghdad because American intelligence officers believed Saddam was staying there. Their four 2,000-pound bombs dismembered thirteen Iraqi civilians—by chance, they were mostly Christians—but Saddam was not there. Days later, a fourteenth Iraqi—a baby—would be discovered under the pile of rubble thrown up by the bombs. From Qatar, the BBC reported that U.S. intelligence knew it was not a “risk-free” operation. No risk to the Americans, mark you, only a risk that Iraqi civilians would die for nothing—which they did—and there was, as expected, no apology.

  Yet still civilians were being cut down. America’s “probing” raids, their advance up one street, their retreat down another—always covered by the massive use of firepower—were cutting down the innocent in a way that, so we all thought, must have its effect on the post-invasion psychology of the Iraqis. Could all this be forgiven in the name of “liberation”?

  We always went to the hospitals. They lay in lines, the car salesman who’d just lost his eye but whose feet were still dribbling blood, the motorcyclist who was hit by bullets from American troops near the Rashid Hotel, the fifty-year-old female civil servant, her long dark hair spread over the towel she was lying on, her body pockmarked with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb. For the civilians of Baghdad, this was the di
rect result of America’s “probing missions” into Baghdad. It looked very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit to the presidential palace, the videotape of Saddam’s golden loo. But the innocent were bleeding and screaming with pain to bring us our exciting television pictures and to provide Bush and Blair with their boastful talk of victory. I saw one boy in the Kindi Hospital, his mother and father and three brothers all shot dead when they approached an American checkpoint outside Baghdad. I watched two-and-a-half-year-old Ali Najour lying in agony on the bed, his clothes soaked with blood, a tube through his nose, until a relative walked up to me. “I want to talk to you,” he shouted, his voice rising in fury. “Why do you British want to kill this little boy? Why do you even want to look at him? You did this—you did it!” The young man seized my arm, shaking it violently. “Are you going to make his mother and father come back? Can you bring them back to life for him? Get out! Get out!”

  In the yard outside, where the ambulance drivers deposit the dead, a middle-aged Shiite woman in black was thumping her fists against her breasts and shrieking at me. “Help me,” she cried. “Help me. My son is a martyr and all I want is a banner to cover him. I want a flag, an Iraqi flag, to put over his body. Dear God, help me!” It’s becoming harder and harder to visit these places of pain and grief and anger. And I’m not surprised. The International Red Cross is reporting civilian victims of America’s three-day offensive against Baghdad arriving at the hospitals now by the hundreds. The Kindi alone had taken fifty civilian wounded and three dead in the previous twenty-four hours. Most of the dead—the little boy’s family, the family of six torn to pieces by an aerial bomb in front of Ali Abdulrazek, the car salesman, the next-door neighbours of Safa Karim—were simply buried within hours of their being torn to bits. There was no point in bringing corpses to a hospital.