On Another Grim Day, Bodies Lie Everywhere in Baghdad
September 14, 2006
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
nytimes.com
BAGHDAD, Sept. 13 — Nearly 90 Iraqis were killed or found dead here on Tuesday and Wednesday, an Interior Ministry official said, making for a particularly grim day even amid the intense sectarian violence.
At least 60 bodies were found throughout Baghdad between 6 a.m. Tuesday and 6 a.m. Wednesday, the ministry official said. Forty victims were unknown; 20 were identified.
Nearly all were shot in the head, had clear signs of torture, or were blindfolded, bound or gagged, and most were discovered in neighborhoods of western Baghdad with heavy Sunni Arab populations, he said. The other deaths reported by the ministry were in bombings and other attacks on Wednesday.
American military officials, who have been more aggressive in challenging body counts if they consider them inaccurate, disputed the number found, saying the actual number was roughly half what the ministry had reported.
According to the Baghdad morgue, whose statistics often prove to be higher than figures reported by news services or the Interior Ministry, the bodies of 1,535 victims of violent deaths, an average of 50 a day, were received in August. In July, the average was 60 a day. A recent study of civilian deaths by the United Nations found that by June, Iraqis across the country were being killed at a rate of more than 100 a day.
As the Iraqi police gathered up the bodies, several car bombs rocked Baghdad, killing or wounding dozens more. Among the attacks was a bomb that detonated shortly after 9 a.m. in southern Baghdad, killing 15 people, including 7 Iraqi police officers, and wounding 25 police officers and civilians, an American military spokeswoman said.
The Interior Ministry also said a bomb planted in an unattended car near a police station in eastern Baghdad exploded about 11:30 a.m., killing eight policemen and wounding 19 civilians.
The United States military also said two American soldiers had been killed. One died Monday from wounds sustained in fighting in Anbar Province, the largely insurgent-controlled region west of Baghdad. Another was killed Tuesday south of Baghdad when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.
In the capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone, a prosecutor in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein demanded Wednesday that the judge be removed for showing bias toward the former dictator and for letting him harangue witnesses.
Mr. Hussein is on trial for his role in the so-called Anfal military campaign in 1988 against Kurdish villages in northeastern Iraq. He and his co-defendants are accused of genocide in the killing at least 50,000 Kurds, including many in chemical weapon strikes.
He was tried earlier this year in the killing of 148 men and boys in 1982 in a Shiite village, Dujail, but that verdict is not expected for another month or two.
During the court session on Tuesday, Mr. Hussein called the Kurdish witnesses who had described atrocities at the hands of Mr. Hussein’s military “agents of Iran and Zionism.” And he warned witnesses that he would “crush your heads,” according to an account by The Associated Press.
As the trial resumed Wednesday morning, a prosecutor, Munqith al-Faroon, accused the judge of letting “the defendants to go too far, with unacceptable expressions and words,” according to a pool report filed by a reporter for The Daily Telegraph of London. Mr. Faroon said the judge had allowed defendants to “treat the chamber as a political forum.”
The judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, who was a judge during Mr. Hussein’s rule, responded coolly, not raising his voice. “The judge coordinates and makes peace among the people in his presence,” he said.
The court heard a powerful and graphic account from Omer Othman Mohammed, who said he was a member of the Kurdish pesh merga militia who was caught in a chemical-weapon strike by Iraqi jets in April 1988 that left him badly burned from his chest to his legs.
“It was so fast, we were shocked,” Mr. Mohammed testified, according to The Daily Telegraph’s pool report. “The rockets did not explode, but they just broke. One hit close to me. When it broke, the chemical inside, it covered me. It was a liquid, not a gas. I was shocked. I was in pain.
“There was severe pain as if there was a high pressure on me or as if I was touching an electric current, or as if boiling water was being poured on my body. There are feelings you cannot describe to the people around you, even your loved ones.”
Mr. Mohammed said he got up after the attack and saw that pieces of the rockets had sliced through some of his comrades.
“I saw people without their heads, I saw legs and arms,” he said. “I saw parts of the body of my beloved friends. I called to a friend of mine and he came to me. I asked him for a mirror and asked him to bring me a first aid kit. I looked at my eyes and they were terribly red. I was suffering from terrible pain.”
Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Omar al-Neami contributed reporting. |
