The Great War for Civilisation (193 page)

Far more harrowing than the pictures of the dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra's largest hospital as victims of the bombardment are brought to the operating rooms, shrieking in pain. A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl's guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a trail of blood leads from the impact of an incoming—presumably British—shell. Next to the crater is a pair of plastic slippers.

The Al-Jazeera tapes—most of which will never be seen—are the first vivid proof that Basra remains totally outside British control. Not only is one of the city's main roads to Baghdad still open—this is how the tapes reached the Iraqi capital—but Iraqi General Khaled Hatem is interviewed in a Basra street, surrounded by hundreds of his uniformed and armed troops, telling Al-Jazeera's reporter that his men will “never” surrender to Iraq's enemies. Armed Baath party militiamen can also be seen in the streets, where traffic cops are directing lorries and buses near the city's Sheraton Hotel.

Mohamed al-Abdullah, Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Basra, must be the bravest journalist in Iraq right now. In the sequence of three tapes, he can be seen interviewing families under fire and calmly reporting the incoming British artillery bombardments. One tape shows that the Sheraton Hotel on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab has sustained shell damage. On the edge of the river—beside one of the huge statues of Iraq's 1980–88 war “martyrs,” each pointing an accusing finger across the waterway towards Iran—Basra residents can be seen filling jerrycans from the sewage-polluted river.

On 22 March the Iraqi government said that 30 civilians had been killed in Basra and another 63 wounded. On 27 March it claimed that more than 4,000 civilians had been wounded in Iraq since the war began and more than 350 killed. But Mr. al-Abdullah's tape shows at least seven more bodies brought to the Basra hospital mortuary over the past thirty-six hours. (One of them, his head still gushing blood onto the mortuary floor, was identified as an Arab correspondent for a Western news agency.) Other grisly scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another girl lies on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child has its feet blown away. There is no indication whether American or British ordnance killed these children. The tapes give no indication of Iraqi military casualties.

But at a time when the Iraqi authorities will not allow Western reporters to visit Basra, this is the nearest to independent evidence we have of continued fighting in the city and the cost of resisting the British army. For days, the Iraqis have been denying optimistic reports from “embedded” reporters—especially from the BBC—who give the impression that Basra is “secured” or otherwise effectively under British control. This the tapes conclusively prove to be untrue. There is also a sequence showing two men, both black, who are claimed by Iraqi troops to be U.S. prisoners-of-war. No questions are asked of the men, who are dressed in identical black shirts and jackets. Both appear on the tape nervous and looking at the camera crew and at the Iraqi troops who are crowded behind them.

The dead civilians, however, will soon be erased from the story of war. They are among the statistics that will be for ever kept from us. They will become unknown, the undead, the “collateral damage” that will simply not end up in the Pentagon or British Ministry of Defence archives—or at least, not in any file that the public will be allowed to see. Thus the little girl will not have lost her head. Her companion will not have lost her brain. The third child's feet will remain firmly attached to her body. At least for the historical record—for there will be no historical record. That is part of our new war.

On 28 March we realised that the Americans—perhaps because they were not advancing as fast as they planned—did not want to keep Baghdad's communications intact. It was difficult to weep over a telephone exchange. True, the destruction of the local phone system in Baghdad was a miserable experience for tens of thousands of Iraqi families who wanted to keep in contact with their relatives during the long dark hours of bombing. But the shattered exchanges and umbilical wires and broken concrete of the Mimoun International Communications Centre scarcely equalled the exposed bones and intestines and torn flesh of the civilian wounded of Iraq. “Command and control centres” is how the CENTCOM boys described the targets they zapped in the early hours of the 28th. It represents another of those little degradations that we—as in “we, the West”—routinely undertake when things aren't going our way in a war. Back in “our” 1991 blitz on Baghdad, we started off on the presidential palaces and barracks, then moved on to communications, then electricity and then water treatment plants. In Serbia in 1999, it was the same story. First went the Yugoslav army barracks and arms factories, then the road bridges, phone system, the electricity. Now the same old story has begun in Baghdad. The presidential palaces and barracks have been hit. Time to smash the phones once again.

Obviously, “we” hoped it wouldn't come to this. The Anglo–American armies wanted to maintain the infrastructure of Baghdad for themselves—after they had “liberated” the city under a hail of roses from its rejoicing people—because they would need working phone lines on their arrival. But after a night of massive explosions across the city, communications had been sacrificed. The huge Rashid telecommunications centre—destroyed in the 1991 bombardment—was struck by a cruise missile that penetrated the basement of the building. The exchange in Karada—where Baghdadis pay their phone bills—was ripped open.

Outside each of these blocks—as outside every government institution here— can be found a giant billboard of Saddam, doing whatever is appropriate to the relevant ministry or department. In front of Baghdad Central Station, for example, a Saddam in a felt hat is acting as signalman to speed an express on its way to Basra—services to the city, by the way, are now officially “suspended” because of the British military siege. At the Mimoun exchange, Saddam is standing in front of the telecommunications mast. At the Rashid offices, he is talking on an old-fashioned Bakelite black telephone while taking notes on a pad with a large brown biro.

No more. Because “we” have decided to destroy the phones and all those “command and control” systems that may be included, dual use, into the network. So now most Baghdadis have to drive across town to get news of each other; there is more traffic on the roads than at any time since the start of the war. Down, too, went Baghdad's Internet system. Iraqi television, whose studios were bombed by the Americans on 26 March, can only be watched between a growing number of power cuts.

So what's next? Electricity or water? Or, since power runs the water pumps, both? Each day brings news of events which—on their own—have no great import but which together add a grim new dimension to the invasion and its aftermath. At the end of March, hundreds of tribesmen from across Iraq met at the Baghdad Hotel before meeting Saddam. The Iraqi tribes—ignored by the military planners and Washington pundits who think that Iraq is held together only by the Baath party and the army—are a powerful force, their unity cemented by marriage and a network of families who provide a force as cohesive as the Baath party itself. Tribesmen guard the grain silos and some of the electricity generating stations around Baghdad. Two of them were credited with disabling an Apache helicopter captured a week earlier. And now tribal leaders arrived from all over Iraq, from Fallujah and Ramadi and Nineveh and Babylon and Basra and Nasiriyah and all the cities of Mesopotamia. So much for Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon's contention that Saddam has “lost control” of southern Iraq. They will return today and tomorrow to their cities and villages with instructions on how to oppose the American and British armies. Saddam has already issued one set of orders that tells the tribesmen “to fight [the Americans and British] in groups and attack their advance and rear lines to block the way of their progress . . . If the enemy settles into a position, start to harass them at night . . .”

I am puzzled about this. Guerrilla forces may harass an occupying army but will do little harm during an invasion when the overwhelming firepower and movement of the invaders can suppress any opposition. Only when the occupying soldiers settle into barracks and routine patrols do they become vulnerable. So is Saddam giving these tribesmen their marching orders for the war—or their instructions for the postwar occupation? Could it be that Saddam is confronting the possibility of military defeat in the field? Is there a future insurrection being planned here in Baghdad as the Americans storm up the road towards Nasiriyah?

On the tenth floor of the Palestine Hotel where I live amid the cell-like rooms of more than a hundred other journalists, I have squirrelled away a library of books to read in the long, loud nights. William Shirer's
The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich and J. F. C. Fuller's The Second World War, to remind me of what real war is like, and Tolstoy's
War and Peace
to recall for me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror—I can heartily recommend the Battle of Borodino to anyone—and some volumes of poetry and a big, disorderly pile of newspaper and magazine articles which I tore from my Beirut archives before leaving for Amman and Baghdad. Tonight, I pull out a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written well over five months earlier, and almost without thinking, I pull my pen from my pocket and start scribbling harsh lines in the margin of this prophetic article:

If Providence does not intrude, we will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the “On to Berlin!” bravado with which French poilus and British Tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cake-walk neoconservatives predict . . . To destroy Saddam's weapons, to democratise, defend and hold Iraq together, U.S. troops will be tied down for decades. Yet, terrorist attacks in liberated Iraq seem as certain as in liberated Afghanistan. For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world. With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon . . . We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.

IT WAS AN OUTRAGE, AN OBSCENITY. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three children in their still-smouldering car. Two missiles from an American jet killed them all—twenty-one Iraqi civilians—torn to pieces on 27 March before they could be “liberated” by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself at the scene, to call this “collateral damage”? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red-and-yellow dust and rain that morning.

It was a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs. Bush and Blair still fondly hoped would rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. “Roar, flash,” he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them. I am faced by the same old question: How to record so terrible an event? Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told. For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?

Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch for customers at the Nasser restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb Street. The missile that killed them landed next to the westbound carriageway, its blast tearing away the front of the café and cutting the two men—the first forty-eight, the second only eighteen— to pieces. A fellow worker led me through the rubble. “This is all that is left of them now,” he said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with blood. At least fifteen cars burst into flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the centre of the street that had been flipped upside down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The second missile hit on the eastbound carriageway, sending shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block with the words “This is God's possession” written in marble on the outside wall.

The building's manager, Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway as soon as he heard the massive explosion. “I found Ta'ar in pieces over there,” he told me. His head was blown off. “That's his hand.” A group of young men and a woman took me into the street and there, a scene from any horror film, was Ta'ar's hand, cut off at the wrist, his four fingers and thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His colleague, Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled a few feet away, a pale red-and-grey mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked for Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.