Toronto Star
The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh.
The wards of the Hilla teaching hospital are proof that something illegal — something quite outside the Geneva Conventions — occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky.
Cluster bombs, the doctors say. And the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil, and Akramin and Mahawil, and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
The 61 dead who have passed through the Hilla hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said.
"If it hadn't exploded, and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded."
Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them — perhaps the metal "butterfly" which contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs — that springs open to release them in showers above the ground.
Some died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lie in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hilla hospital.
The teaching college has received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night — the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital, or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their villages — and of these, doctors say, about 80 per cent were civilians.
Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field — as they were along the highway north to Baghdad yesterday? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages — even if aimed at military targets — thus crosses the boundaries of international law.
So it was that 27-year-old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And five-year-old Zaman Abbais was hit in the legs and 48-year-old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said the containers which fell to the ground were "like a grenade."
Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself, and wounds to the stomach and thighs.
I didn't realize that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding.
Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters in a pool of blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures.
A crew from Sky Television managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from Nadr with them, the wicked little metal balls that are intended to puncture the human body still locked into their frame like cough drops in a metal sheath. They were of a black colour which glinted silver against the light.
So who dropped these terrible weapons? The deputy administrator of the Hilla hospital and one of his doctors told a confused tale of military action around the city in recent days, of Apache helicopters that would disgorge special forces troops on the road to Karbala.
One of their operations — if the hospital personnel are to be believed — went spectacularly wrong one night when militiamen forced them to retreat. Shortly afterwards, the cluster bomb raids began, although the villages that were targeted appear to have been on the other side of Hilla to the abortive American attack.
One thing was clear: There is no front line in the fighting around Babylon, that U.S. forces strike into the land around the Tigris River by air and then withdraw, and that Iraqi forces do much the same in the other direction.
The most recent raid occurred on Tuesday when 11 civilians were killed, two of them women and three of them children, in a village called Hindiyeh. Needless to say, it is not the first time cluster bombs have been used against civilians. During Israel's 1982 siege of West Beirut, its air force dropped cluster bomblets manufactured for the U.S. Navy across several areas of the city, especially the Fakhani and Ouzai districts, causing ferocious and deep wounds identical to those I saw in Hilla yesterday.
This is insane, cluster bombs against civilians?
