[A-List] Iraq: popular opposition to US

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

'Are our people not also terror victims?'
MICHAEL TIERNEY in Baghdad
The Herald, 19 September 2002

AHMED Dhlea Alubaldi is 28. His day starts with prayers and the memory
of his sister, Sheima. She was 15 when she died in the Al Amiriyah
shelter in Baghdad when a two-ton laser-guided missile was fired from a
US Stealth bomber, on February 13, 1991, during the Gulf war.

Sheima was sleeping, alongside more than 400 men, women and children,
when the bomb exploded through two metres of reinforced concrete roof. A
second bomb was targeted through the ventilation system, cutting off the
air supply. The temperature inside reached 400 degrees.

According to Ahmed, a slight man with a nervous smile, his sister
"exploded into one thousand pieces". He knows this, he says, because he
was sleeping roughly eight metres from her.

Ahmed takes a stroll around the shelter, past the shape of a hand seared
into the concrete - it was his own - and past the shape of men and women
whose bodies were blasted so forcefully that they are imprinted on the
walls.

"Everyone thought they were safe. No-one expected them to bomb the
innocents." He pauses between sentences. "They call September 11 a
terrorist attack. OK. But what about this? Are our people not victims
also?"

He walks towards the large, gaping hole punctured in the ceiling,
littered with steel ribbons, and points. "Mr Blair, Mr Bush," he calls
out, "Do you want this to happen again? Do you want the blood of
innocents on your hands? I cannot sleep at night thinking about Sheima.
I think they sleep very well."

The US accused Saddam Hussein of using the people in the shelter as a
human shield, saying that it was a command post.

Ahmed, who now works in a nearby shop, vividly recalls the morning when
the shelter was attacked. When he awoke, the shelter was on fire. "The
screaming and burning and shouting was terrible. A door had collapsed on
me and I pushed it off. To my left was an old man who was crying. He
asked me to save him. He had no legs, they were blown off to stumps.

"I tried to look for Sheima but I couldn't see her. The bomb had landed
right on top of her and many other women and children."

He points to the photographs of the charred bodies that line the wall.
They show twisted, black, headless, footless and armless bodies. All of
them died terrible, painful deaths. "Sheima could not be identified, she
was completely . . ." He stops short and breathes heavily. "She was 15
years old, my beautiful sister. There was no reason for her to die. Tony
Blair, can you see her face?"

On a good day, there will be the occasional flash of his sister's face,
a gesture and a smile, reminding him of better days. On a bad day he
cannot get her face out of his head, and it haunts him. His mother
refuses to believe that she is dead. She still opens and closes the
curtains to the small bedroom where she once slept.

"The US always talks about terrorism, but they are terrorists. Their
actions are an example of terrorism. What happened here was terrorism.
They cannot do this to us again. We cannot be attacked."

He stops. "But if they come to my country I will fight against America.
I don't know how to fight, but I will. I will fight for my country and
my people."

During the visit we are accompanied by an official government guide.

Earlier in the day, we visited Dr Luayl L Quasha, senior consultant
pathologist at Al-Mansour Children's Hospital in Baghdad. This
gregarious man works under increasing pressure with spiralling levels of
child mortality rates. According to Dr Quasha, 48, the under-five child
mortality ratio in Iraq has increased from 56 per 1000 in 1985-89, to
131 per 1000 during 1995 to 99. One in every eight children dies before
his or her first birthday.

On the walls of the hospital are pictures of beautiful healthy, blonde
Western babies. In the wards it is a different story. Dr Selma Haddad,
senior oncologist, introduces us to a Kurdish child, Swara Yasim, who is
four. His day starts on a soiled mattress smelling of urine. He is
suffering from bone marrow failure. He was admitted six days ago and has
started a course of drugs to stimulate the bone marrow.

"There is not enough, never enough drugs," says Dr Haddad. "We never
have the correct ones. The sanctions see to that."

It costs a lot of money for the families of sick children to go to
hospital. Sometimes they stay away because they cannot afford the cost
of the trip, usually from rural areas of the north and south. "We do
what we can." According to the doctor 60% of mothers are anaemic and one
child in three suffers from chronic malnutrition.

The few hospitals in Baghdad are deteriorating inexorably. Power cuts
affect refrigerated medicines and foodstuffs. The whole social fabric of
the country is collapsing.

The Iraqi government blames the West for the predicament of its people
because it is unable to sell its oil on the open market. Many Western
governments instead blame Saddam, saying aid is available for food and
medicines. They claim Saddam uses the money for his weapons programmes
rather than feed his country's children.

"The sanctions are about collective punishment," says Dr Quasha when we
return to his sparse room. "Before the sanctions we could buy a car for
a few thousand dinars, now you can hardly buy a piece of paper with our
money. We can barely afford to treat any child adequately. The supply of
hospital medicine is very limited. We are struggling to save lives.

"I am a doctor. I trained in England for a short time. I love your fish
and chips. I love your British breakfast. Manchester United. None of
this makes any sense to me."

I ask him if he is ready for another war. He shrugs. "Of course, we are.
We are putting our medicine aside, our bandages, our fluids, bandages,
antibiotics." Then he asks me. "Do you love war? No, I reply. He looks
away. "I don't love war either."