The Iraqi authorities escorted journalists to Hilla yesterday to show themcivilian casualties of the war. Lara Marlowe reports from Babylon Province, south of Baghdad.
A hospital employee opened the door to the refrigerated unit where they stored the bodies from three days of US bombardment.
The corpses were piled one on top of the other, two or three deep, and I was able to look at only one before turning away; the sight and stench were overwhelming.
In the parking lot nearby, taxis waited to collect the dead, with hastily nailed plywood coffins strapped on their roofs. A rough brown blanket waited in each box to wrap the remains in.
In the first three days of this week, 61 Iraqi civilians were killed and close to 200 others wounded in outlying districts of this town, near the ancient city of Babylon, according to doctors and hospital administrators.
Hilla is 100 km south of Baghdad, 40 km south-east of Karbala, where US forces claim to have made an important break through Iraqi lines yesterday. But as a visit to Hilla Hospital shows, the advance towards the capital is exacting a high cost in civilian lives.
"On Tuesday, a family of 11 were killed," Mr Abdel-Hussein al-Mussawi, a hospital director said. "An American tank fired on their farm, 22 km from Hilla. The bodies had horrible wounds. There were three girls, two women, and six boys and men. In the whole farm, the people who brought them found only a hen that survived."
Dr Ali Abbas Hashem, a neurosurgeon, said: "I received more than 200 wounded in the emergency room on Sunday and Monday. Eighty per cent of them were civilians; most were women and children."
The wounded came from Nadir, Mohandesin, Towarij, Mohaweid, Kifl and Akramin, six neighbourhoods on the southern outskirts of Hilla, on the road to Najaf.
Dr Hashem's implied estimate that 20 per cent of the wounded were soldiers confirmed my impression that up to a fifth of the people in this frontline area were military, the remainder civilian. Soldiers seemed to live as an integral part of the population.
Dr Hashem unwittingly admitted there were Iraqi troops fighting in the area. "A few days ago, the Americans brought Apaches in and let soldiers down, about 5 km outside Hilla, on the Karbala road," he said. "But they failed, and they came back to punish the people who made them fail."
Many, if not all, of the dozens of wounded I saw yesterday were struck by US cluster bombs - long containers dropped by parachute, opening in flight to release thousands of little "bomblets" which detonate in the air or land as unexploded mines.
"There were boxes in the air and they exploded over the houses," a man named Mohamed Moussa said. All eight members of his family were wounded.
"Some of the bombs are still in our house, unexploded," he continued. "They look like bunches of grapes, white and silver. Each bomb has something like a thread on it and when you touch it, it explodes."
A British television journalist was able to visit Nadir, one of the worst-hit neighbourhoods, where he found the parachutes used to drop cluster bombs and unexploded fragments of the deadly anti-personnel weapons. Mr Moussa said his family lived next to a milk factory and a wheat silo in Nadir - the sorts of places where Iraqi soldiers are believed to take cover.
The US has reportedly fought Republican Guard units in the Najaf, Karbala and Babylon region with cluster bombs, but their use against civilians is strictly forbidden. Under the Geneva Convention, civilians must be safeguarded, even if there are military personnel among them.
In room after hot, airless room, upstairs in the Hilla Hospital, wounded Iraqis, with drips in their arms, some with plaster casts on their limbs, stared at visitors, their eyes glassy with pain and shock.
Samira Murza Abdel Hamza (48), literally wept tears of blood. Fragments of shrapnel had lodged in both her eyes, turning them bright red. Pieces of metal pierced her chest and knees too. "It was cluster bombs," Mrs Abdel Hamza's son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said. "They explode 70 metres in the air and spread out like hand grenades."
The Iraqi soldier gestured to his mother and the refrigerated mortuary units we could see out the window. "They are attacking the Iraqi people," he said. "They forced this war upon us. We want it to finish as soon as possible."
Five-year-old Houda Nasser stood next to 10-year-old Miriam's bed, trying to comfort her big sister. The gash on the right side of Houda's head was still bleeding. Her stained gauze bandage kept falling off and her black hair was matted with the sticky liquid. A patch covers Miriam's right eye after an operation and she has bomb fragments in her waist and thigh.
"The girls were playing in front of the house," their mother Fatima said. "I heard the explosion and I ran out and found my daughters on the ground, bleeding. Their father was unconscious."
Blood flowed through a transparent tube from 20-year-old Rahad Hakim's chest into a bottle on the floor beneath her bed. "The doctors removed a piece of metal from near her heart," Rahad's mother Nidal Hadi said. "Now she has internal bleeding."
Mrs Hadi (40), is a widowed English teacher. She too was wounded in the US attack on Nadir. "But I am strong and my daughter needs help; I must stay beside her."
I was about to move on to other victims in other rooms, but Mrs Hadi stopped me. "I want to ask Bush why he hurt me and my daughter," she said. "I am a civilian - I am not the government. Why is he killing us?"