August 19,2003


THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE


by Caoimhe Butterly in Baghdad


Anwar Adel Khardom points  to her heavily pregnant,shrapnel-sprayed stomach as she fluctuates between composure and frantic, inconsolable grief. 'What sort of life will this child be born into?' Her thirteen year old daughter Hadil, frail arms bruised and scarred with shrapnel, head bandaged with white gauze, remains wide-eyed and observant, fanning her mother with a woven fan as the heat of an oppressive, airless day reaches it's midday climax.The room is crowded with relatives and friends who drink the bitter coffee and cry and keen in memory of  Anwar's husband, Adel, her 18-year old son Haider, 17-year old daughter Ola, and 8-year old daughter Mervat-all shot dead by U.S.soldiers seven days before. 'How could they, why did they do it-they must of known we were a family-how could they kill my babies?', Anwar asks continually as she holds a picture of her beautiful, smiling children immortalised on the black banners hung on the outside walls of her family home,each of their names withshaheed (martyr) scripted next to it, proclaiming the family's tragedy to the hushed street outside.



The car that carried Anwar's family into a  line of fire that pumped more than twenty bullets through the windshield and chassis into the warm living flesh,vital organs and skulls of her husband and children remains outside.The seats and headrests were ripped apart by bullets and remain covered in faded,darkened bloodstains.Hadil's blood-stained handprints on the outside of the car are the same colour,left there as she groped her way out of the car that held dead Ola and Haider and dying Adel and Mervat, trying to follow her mother as Anwar ran towards the house they had just come from,screaming for help. No help came,at 9:30 p.m. on August 7 in Hyatt al Tunis,a residential neighborhood in Baghdad.U.S. soldiers continued to shoot so erratically at anyone attempting to help the wounded,that they proceeded to injure at least five other civilians and two of their own soldiers, as other troops stationed in a military base stationed at the end of the street joined in. Ground troops from the First Brigade,First Armoured Division proceeded to fire round after round into the darkened street ,shattering the quiet of a summer night and destroying the remnants of tolerance held by that,and many other communities,towards an occupational presence whose benign veneer grows thinner by the day. When the up to twenty minutes of constant shooting stopped,three civilians were dead and more wounded.Saef A.,a 21-year old university student, who drove in a car with two friends down the same road into the path of U.S. occupational forces(who were in the process of raiding and searching a local store,and ,having been subjected to the standard continual diet of mis-information and racism,suitably terrified enough to view all Iraqis as potential or actual enemies)was shot repeatedly and then-as his two friends,both wounded,leapt out of the car,witnesses report seeing a soldier approaching the car, point a gun with a grenade-launcher attached at the still-living Saef, and shoot, causing the car, and Saef's body to be engulfed in flames.

Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna



Residents boast about the size and scope of Askar and Balata, "largest refugee camps in the West Bank"; Balata, birthplace of the intifada, Askar the less glorious cousin. But from the hundreds of stricken faces watching as they pulled the body out of the smoldering rubble it suddenly becomes clear that Askar is a very crowded small town of 13,000.

"Min"(who) they ask, looking as though they know the answer.
"Faez" The name travels rapidly through the crowd, heads go into hands among those digging and those scavenging and those collecting cloths and other salvageable items in makeshift sheet parachutes brought from neighboring houses.

This is not, of course, the first time the Israelis have broken the Hudna. There was the murder of little Machmoud Quabaya and the severing of his sisters arm by an `accidental' burst of machine gunfire into their car at the notorious checkpoint at Barta, a village trapped between the wall and the green line.
He is one of 11 palestinians killed in July, including extrajudicial
assasinations, the 280 wounded the 316 quietly arrested even as a few hundred others were released in the full glare of the flashbulbs. That is not even to mention the 100 house demolition orders in East Jerusalem alone, the land confiscations and the unconscionable progress of the suffocating apartheid wall through the farmlands and villages of the West Bank.

nolympics submits

We spent the better part of this afternoon in the middle of a firefight. We left our hotel at around 1 pm, headed for the Jordanian embassy, which was hit by a car bomb early this morning.  As we drove out, we saw a tall column of thick black smoke rising straight up into the windless sky just a mile or two away.  We told our driver to turn around and we sped to the scene.  We were the first journalists there.

We found the smoke coming from the flattened skeleton of a US humvee, burning pathetically in the street.  There were two other vehicles in the convoy, another humvee and a 2-1/2 ton truck.  The soldiers in those vehicles were taking cover behind their rides and waiting for reinforcements. We hustled up just behind them and took cover on the sidewalk.  An al-Jazeera cameraman and a couple of others came in behind us.