28Oct03-Michael Howard-Iraqis celebrate. Then brutal reality dawns: One by one, the bombers struck - killing men, women and children as they prepared for holy month of Ramadan
Michael Howard in Baghdad
Tuesday October 28, 2003
The Guardian
For most Baghdad residents, it should have been a day of double celebration. The start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and no Saddam Hussein to spoil the party.
Workers looked forward to reduced office hours and a seasonal bonus in their pay packets. Grocery stores and sweet shops did brisk business as families prepared for ifthar, the evening meal that ends the daylight fast.
Then reality dawned. In 45 terrifying minutes, a series of apparently choreographed attacks left 34 Iraqi police officers and civilians dead, and at least 224 injured. An American soldier was also killed.
If this was to have been the country's first taste of Ramadan liberated from Saddam's regime, it was a bloody reminder that the struggle for Iraq was far from over.
The carnage began at 8.30am at the al-Baya'a police station in southern Baghdad when a white "police car" packed with explosives drove at the local police station.
Seconds later 15 Iraqis - men, women, and children - and an American soldier had died, while bloodstained survivors staggered around, confused and dazed.
The bomber, dressed as an Iraqi police man and driving the car disguised as a police vehicle, had gained access to behind the barriers at the police station in the suburb of al-Allam.
A detective, his legs still bleeding from shrapnel wounds from the blast, said: "I was in my office and suddenly there was a loud explosion and glass flew across the room at me. I was taken outside behind the building and I saw a group of policemen lying on the ground."
Five minutes after the attack, an ambulance drove up to the security barriers outside the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in central Baghdad.
An Iraqi guard working for the Red Cross told reporters: "I saw an ambulance coming very fast towards the barrier and it exploded."
At least 12 people were killed and 23 injured by the blast, which blew down a perimeter wall and shattered windows in the ICRC building as well as those of a nearby hospital where the dead and injured were taken.
"We don't know why we have been attacked. We always fought for the welfare of Iraqi people," said Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC.
The next suicide car bomb attack came 20 minutes later in northern Baghdad and was directed against a police station in al-Shaab district.
At least eight people died in the blast, and many were wounded. "A Landcruiser raced towards the police station. They [the police] shot at it, but it turned and exploded," said Taher Hussein, who lives nearby.
Half an hour later and the target again was a police station, this one in the wealthy suburb of al-Khadra, in southern Baghdad.
The police station is situated near a school, a clinic, and a mosque. Three children were reported to be among the dead. Eyewitnesses said a boy of 12 standing 200 metres away was decapitated by flying metal.
"A car tried to cross the central reservation and head for the police station," said Ammar Abbas, who owns a local grocery store. "It got stuck and blew up. Then there was chaos, people running away, people on the ground."
An ambulance driver who ferried the injured to hospital said that amid the confusion one Iraqi man had been shot and wounded by a US military policeman, who had been inside the station, as he tried to approach his house to check for damage.
The day's carnage could have been worse.
One suicide bomber did not get through and produced what a US military spokesman described as "some valuable clues to who might be behind this wave of bombings". The suspect was seized at 10.15am in Baghdad Gedeeda, or New Baghdad, in the eastern part of the capital. Iraqi police shot and captured the bomber before he could deliver his deadly cargo, wrapped up in another Landcruiser and again aiming at Jadida police station.
Shouting "Death to the Iraqi police. Death to the collaborators," the man tried to get out of his car, which was stuffed with TNT, and was shot as he exploded a grenade.
Before drifting into unconsciousness the failed suicide attacker told police he was a Syrian national.
Brigadier General Mark Hertling of the US 1st Armoured Division said that it was "a reasonable supposition," that the other suicide bombers were also foreign nationals. The attacks, which were "criminal and sacrilegious, but also amateurish", bore the hallmark of foreign capability, he said.
This was a marked change in thinking for the US military.
A day before General Martin Dempsey, ground commander of the 1st armoured, said: "We have no evidence of an infusion of foreign fighters into Baghdad."
Gen Hertling described yesterday as a great day for the Iraqi police, because security precautions around the target sites had prevented the bombers from destroying them.
But that was scant comfort to the policemen or to the hundreds of ordinary Iraqis who were caught up in the mayhem.
Of the 34 people killed in the bombings, 26 were Iraqi civilians - the rest were Iraqi policemen and one American soldier.
Throughout the morning ambulances screamed across the capital in the direction of plumes of smoke, and emergency services were stretched to the limit.
In al-Yarmouk hospital, where a number of injured children were being treated, Ali Hussein, a doctor, said: "This is all Saddam's work. He's behind the Ba'athists and the Islamists and the foreign fighters. Everything leads to his door. This is not resistance, this is revenge against the Iraqi people for our disloyalty."
A morning of terror
8:30am A suicide bomber dressed as a policeman and driving an explosives-laden police car detonates the vehicle at the al-Baya'a police station in south Baghdad. An American soldier is among those killed, says the US military
8:35am A suicide bomber driving an ambulance blows up the explosives-rigged vehicle outside the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in central Baghdad. At least 12 people are killed, including two of its employees
8:55am A suicide driver detonates his car bomb at a police station in the northern Baghdad district of Sha'ab, near a market place
9:15am A suicide bomber detonates his vehicle at a police station in the southern Baghdad district of al-Khadra, demolishing the front of the station
10:15am Police foil an attempt by a fifth suicide driver to set off his bomb-rigged car on Jadida police station in the eastern district of New Baghdad. He explodes a grenade, wounding an officer and himself
guardian.co.uk |
