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- Friday, February 14, 2003
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Do they understand?
Bush/Blair/Saddam/Rumsfeld, and the whole stinking lot of them. THIS IS NOT A GAME. Real people really die. Unfortunately it's hardly ever the buggers that start it.
"Here is a bit of collateral damage: The first time I met Abu Ziad was in 1998. He had been the chief accountant with the British Iraqi Oil Company. Then, he had five children and lived in a big house by a bomb shelter. He recalled how during the Iran-Iraq war, when nearly 1 million young men died on each side, he would be at home in Baghdad, hearing the sounds of women wailing in the night for another lost son, husband or lover. He remembered thanking God that he had married late, and that his children were too young to be sent to fight. Then, three years after that war, President Saddam led them into another. At 2am on February 13 1991, two bombs hit the al-Amiriya bomb shelter near his home. The first was a drilling bomb that pierced the roof and cut open the central heating tank. Boiling water poured through the ceiling on to the women and children below, who were playing dominoes, watching Tom and Jerry videos dubbed into Arabic and eating kebabs.
"Only 15 minutes later, the second bomb exploded with such force that he never had the chance to identify the bodies of his wife and four of their five children: Zena, aged 14; Fuad, aged 12; Lena, aged seven; and Sadaad, aged six. "I saw a body being brought out, then I saw it was Zena's, but they were piling them on top of each other and I couldn't see if it was her. We weren't allowed to go close." Later that morning, Abu Ziad stood outside the shelter. He remembers noticing the ankles of the dead women and children. Their skin had been branded with the metal coils of red-hot mattress springs as they struggled to climb over the metal beds, and each other, to get out. The doors had been locked for security. Four hundred and six people, mostly women and children, died inside
Full story here. (Also linked in an entry below.)
