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The six-year-old girl lay on the hospital trolley. Her orange sweatshirt was dotted with some of the 101 Dalmatians from the film loved by children the world over. Blood oozed from her sleeve. She had been hit in the back of the head by a piece of shrapnel in her home in Baghdad. Her name was Sarah.
On the same trolley in the morgue was Karar, her seven-year-old brother. Part of his face had been torn off and there was a gaping wound in his chest. The siblings had died at the same instant on Friday morning, the latest in a mounting list of innocent Iraqi casualties.
Upstairs, Shafaa Awaid, their mother, was tending to two surviving children, Sajud, 2, and Sajad, 3, who were badly hurt in the blast and required surgery. She spoke in an almost robotic manner, numbed by grief.
"My tears are strangled in my eyes," she said. "They will not gush. They are burning my soul and they will stay inside me as a constant reminder of my anger towards the Americans and British who did this to my babies."
In the Arab world, such images will fuel yet more anger against the West and breed suspicions that the war has less to do with liberating Iraqi people than subjugating them.
Whether the explosion that killed Awaid's children on Friday or the one later that day in a crowded Baghdad souk, in which 58 people were killed, were caused by allied planes, as Iraq says, or stray Iraqi fire, as allied officials suggest, made little difference to relatives of victims: it was America and Britain, they said, who had started the war.
"Tell Bush and Blair that their end is near," she said. "Tell them that the scorching tears and pain of the mothers of Iraq will burn them and send them to hell."
She recalled what had happened. One minute she could hear her children laughing and playing as she washed breakfast dishes in the kitchen. Then came the explosion.
"All I could see was the blood splattered against the walls," she said, keeping one eye on the tiny form of her daughter Sajud, who lay moaning on a bed with her stomach wrapped in a bandage.
It was followed in the evening by another huge blast at a crowded market in the same Alshulaa suburb of Baghdad. The local hospital struggled to cope and the people who worked there could not contain their anger. "Is this enough?" shrieked Osama Fadel, one of the doctors. "Is this enough for America and Britain?" After calming himself, he began to cry.
"Yes my job as a doctor is to maintain objectivity and simply perform my humanitarian mission to treat people, but when I witness carnage and crimes like this it also becomes my duty and job to speak out against it," he said.
The rising civilian toll and the despair it inflicted were not limited to Baghdad. Children's shoes, charred carpet, an old sewing machine and cooking pots littered what was left of the home of Hussein Jasim and his family yesterday amid the date palms of the fertile farmland 12 miles south of the capital.
A missile fired by an American warplane had landed in the family's front yard as they were eating breakfast.
In the local hospital, Hussein was mourning Samar, his 13-year-old daughter, who had been shredded by shrapnel and died in his arms. Her blood stained his clothes and he kept muttering "Airplane, airplane", in bewilderment.
For him, nothing could justify the attack. "I am a peaceful man, just a farmer, and I have done no harm to America or Britain," he said. "Why then are my daughter dead and my son dying?" On a bed, her dust-covered face streaked with tears and her legs and right arm burnt, his wife Hamida tried to come to terms with the tragedy.
Mahmoud, their six-year-old son, was groaning and slowly dying in an adjacent bed and she was too injured to hold him as she wanted to. His chubby face was perfectly whole but beneath the blankets his little body was perforated with holes. Hussein was trying to keep him warm and rubbing water on his lips as he kept crying "Hurt, hurt".
Yasdin Ahmed, the chief surgeon, shrugged in despair. In the last week, he said, the 120-bed hospital had received 150 civilian casualties, many of them women and children. Sixteen had died. "They had many types of wounds, from the brain to the chest to the abdomen, and also burns."
In Baghdad yesterday a crowd gathered at the site where the missile had struck in the market. People were cursing America and sobbing for the dead as more American warplanes left trails of vapor in the sky overhead.
"May God kill Blair and Bush together," shouted a child as two coffins were brought out of a building. The thud of explosions could be heard in the distance.
Black clouds of smoke billowed above from trenches of oil dug and set ablaze by the defenders of Baghdad in an attempt to confuse allied aircraft. Children played football on the road. A young boy in an Arsenal T-shirt stood gazing into the skies. In the back of everybody's mind was the fear that the bombing could resume at any moment.
"Is this what they mean by liberation?" shouted one of the onlookers. "Slaughtering women, children and babies. Who told them we wanted to be liberated in the first place?" In a tiny room in a house in the market, women beat their chests as they mourned a woman whose eight-year-old twins died in the blast. The woman had taken them to buy some sweets, explained her grief-stricken 18-year-old son. They did not come back.
The wailing of grief in the nearby hospital, meanwhile, was punctuated with calls for revenge. "Bush and Blair will pay for this," said Khodur, the brother of Shafaa Awaid.
"Make no mistake, we will avenge the deaths of Iraqi children when I personally visit the United States and blow myself as a human bomb in a crowd. I will kill their children just as they have killed ours."
(China Daily March 30, 2003)
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