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The same guy who forwarded me the Palestine emails a year or so back just sent me this: (sorry for the long post)
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British peace activist Jo Wilding has been sending reports from Iraq,
and she's asked that they be distributed as far and wide as possible.
Jo was part of the International Solidarity Movements' protest that
highlighted the Israeli siege at the Church of the Nativity in
Bethlehem last year, and for this was promptly deported from Israel.
In December she appeared in court defending her actions on why she
broke the unjust, 11 year old, U.N. imposed Iraqi sanctions, by
importing dates to the UK - these same sanctions are recognised by
the U.N. as being the underlying cause for the deaths of over half a
million innocent Iraqi children.
The full collection of her Iraqi reports are online here
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March 25th - The Farmhouse at Dialla
It's hard now to tell the bombings from the storm: both beat at the
windows and thunder through the city, but after a missile explodes,
flocks of birds fill the sky, disturbed by the shock waves. After a
gust, they are replaced by a cornucopeia of rubbish, drifting in the
smog of sand and dust and smoke which has turned the air a dirty
orange so thick it blotted out the sun and everything went dark in
the middle of the day. Even the rain was filthy: the cleansing,
healing drops fill with grime on the way down and splatter you with
streaks of mud.
In the end three people died yesterday in the farmhouse which was
bombed at Dialla, including the young wife, Nahda, who was missing in
the rubble. She, along with Zahra, the eight year old daughter and
her aunt, Hana, were buried this morning. People are taken for burial
in coffins but are buried in shrouds and a pick up returned to the
remains of the house with the three caskets, cobbled out of small
pieces of wood, riding in the back.
In fact the couple had been married just one week, not three as I
wrote yesterday, and a neighbour showed us a flouncy pink invitation
to the wedding festival. Omar, the bridegroom, sat silently crying on
the floor in the hospital corridor, leaning on the wall, body bent,
head in his hands.
Neighbours said the bomb hit at 4pm yesterday. The plane had been
flying overhead for a while, they said, when it fired three rockets,
one of which demolished the entire upper storey of the house. It
looked as if it had only ever been a bungalow until, clambering
through the hallway, we came to the stairs, leading up to nothing.
Small farmhouses sat between cultivated fields, the occasional cow,
two or three compact plots, then another building. A couple of sheep
held court over the empty marketplace as we entered the village, over
the small Dialla Bridge across a slim branch of the Tigris. There was
nothing which could explain the attack: nothing which even looked
like a target that, perhaps, the pilot might have been aiming for. It
made no sense. The villagers said the plane had been circling
overhead. Its pilot must have seen what was there.
The animal shelters behind the house were crumpled, the family's cow
lying crushed under her roof. They wouldn't have known that yet,
still in the hospital. The windows of sixteen houses nearby were all
broken, the neighbours told us, and the blast made the children's
ears bleed.
Ration sacks were piled in the kitchen and there was a bowl of green
beans which looked as if they were being prepared for an evening
meal. Two or three of the neighbours invited us to eat in their
homes. Humbling seems too small a word for the experience of being
invited to share food and hospitality, by people with so little,
while crouching in the rubble of their friends' and neighbours' home
which was obliterated, with several lives, by my country, only the
previous day.
Hours earlier, in the Al Kindi hospital, we had gone to take a
statement from another casualty. He was dying, his family around him,
so we didn't go into the room. As we walked away one of the men came
after us with a tin of sweets to offer us. "Thankyou for coming," he
said in English. These people constantly overwhelm me with their
dignity, their kindness, their gentle grace and warmth.
March 26th
The Iraqis call it orange weather: some say it is on their side. It's
not even 5 o'clock and the sun won't set till nearly seven but it's
dark outside. I half imagined the war being like this, the sky
staying dark all the time, but without the orange. It stinks as well,
of smoke and oil and I don't know what else. The darkness and the
grime and the fierce cold wind lend an unnecessary sense of
apocalypse to the flooded craters, broken trees, gaping windows and
wrecked houses where the bombs have hit.
I know I'm not supposed to understand this, so I won't bother telling
you I don't. Today I met Essa Jassim Najim, a 28 year old first-year
engineering student from a farming family near Babylon. He couldn't
speak because of shrapnel wounds to his head and neck but his father
explained that three days ago they were attacked by two groups of
Apache helicopters. The first group attempted to land and the farmers
resisted them with guns, aided by the Civil Defence Force. The second
group of helicopters attacked the house, destroying it with a
missile.
Another farming community in Al Doraa also reported an attack by
Apache helicopters at 4pm on Saturday. Atta Jassim died when a
missile hit his house. Moen, his eight-year-old son had multiple
bowel and intestinal injuries from shrapnel: part of his intestine
had been removed. His six-year-old brother Ali and mother Hana were
also injured by shrapnel.
Saad Shalash Aday is another farmer, from Al Mahmoodia in South
Baghdad. He had a fractured leg and multiple shrapnel wounds
including a ruptured spleen, perforated caecum, colon and small
bowel, abdominal and leg wounds. Two of his brothers, Mohammed and
Mobden, were also injured and ten year old twin boys Ahmed and Daha
Assan were killed in the same house when a bomb exploded two or three
metres from the building. The doctor, Dr Ahmed Abdullah, said two
other men were killed in the same attack around 6pm yesterday
(Tuesday): Kherifa Mohammed Jebur, a 35 year old farmer and another
man whose name nobody present knew.
Eight houses and four cars were destroyed and cows, sheep and dogs
were killed. The eyewitnesses described two bombs, each causing an
explosion in the air, and cylindrical containers - cluster bombs,
some of which exploded on the ground. Others did not explode. The two
explosions were about 300 metres apart, with a few minutes between
them. From first hearing the plane overhead until the second
explosion, they estimated, took about 10 minutes.
"Is this democracy?" the men demanded to know, gathered by Saad's
bed. "Is this what America is bringing to Iraq?"
At 9 this morning a group of caravans was hit with cluster bombs,
according to the doctors. A tiny boy lay in terrible pain in the
hospital, a tube draining blood from his chest, which was pierced by
shrapnel. They said he was eight, but he looked maybe five. The
doctors were testing for abdominal damage as well. I'm not sure
whether he knew yet, or could understand, that his mother was killed
instantly and his five sisters and two brothers were not yet found.
His father had gone to bring blood for him and his uncle, Dia, was
with him.
Rusol Ammar, a skinny ten year old girl with startling eyes, flinched
occasionally when breathing hurt her - she had multiple injuries from
glass and shrapnel, as well as a fractured hand. Dr Ahmed explained
that, at the velocity caused by an explosion, even a grain of sand
could cause injury to a child Rusol's size. They weren't yet sure
what was in her chest.
Her dad said something hit their street and exploded. They were in
their house and tried to close the door against the fireball but the
windows blew in and the glass and shrapnel flew everywhere. His other
children were unhurt. Rusol smiled the most gorgeous smile when we
told her how brave she is, and that it will give courage to children
everywhere when we tell them how brave she is.
Her dad asked the same question we'd heard before. "Is this
democracy?"
Dr Ahmed is Syrian but has lived and worked 27 years in Iraq. He
wasn't working yesterday but estimated about 30 casualties came into
Al Yarmouk hospital. That's just one hospital and yesterday was a
fairly light day of bombing. It makes no sense for me to speculate
about the plans and intentions of the US/UK military, because I don't
know, but several incidents of attacks on farms have been reported to
us.
Farms are not a legitimate target, even if you want to land your
helicopter on them. From the legal perspective, the presence of a
military objective within a civilian area or population does not
deprive the population of its civilian character, even if you can
call landing a helicopter a military objective. You cannot bomb an
area of civilian houses knowing that people in the vicinity are
likely to be hurt by flying glass and shrapnel.
More than that though, more than the illegality of it, this is wrong.
It's desperately, horrifyingly, achingly wrong. I don't mean this to
be a casualty list, never mind a body count - I couldn't even begin
and I've no intention of describing blood and gore to you, but take
this as an illustration, as a small picture of what's happening to
people here, of what war means. |
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It was fun, they asked me questions, I asked them questions. They drew pictures of me. I gave them candy and gum. At the end, I was down on one knee talking to the littler ones. A boy sat on my other knee. He touched my scarred face and asked "Bomb do that?" I said yes. He pulled up his sleeve and showed me burn scars on his arm and said "Bomb did that." I didn't know what to say. I just hugged him really tight. He put his little arms around my neck and whispered into my ear "We don't like bombs." Like it was a secret just between him and me. As if everyone else liked bombs so we had to be quiet about it.