VIEW FROM BAGHDAD: The poorest of the poor in Baghdad were yesterday grieving after another explosion ripped through a market, reports Lara Marlowe
The shrill, inconsolable wailing of women came from within the Hamdani household yesterday morning. The small, one-storey mud-brick dwelling faces the market alley where a rocket exploded on Friday evening, as residents of Shu'ala completed their pre-dinner shopping.
Three Hamdani brothers, Ali, Hussein and Mohamed, aged 20, 18 and nine, were killed by the blast, along with 52 other civilians. Iraqi newspapers reported that 15 of the dead were children between the ages of four and 12, two dozen of them women.
Abdel Hassan Hamdani (46), a railway employee and the uncle of the three dead brothers, came out to show me their death certificates.
"This is our country," he said calmly. "Even if they kill all of us, we won't let them take one centimetre of our land."
The people of Shu'ala, like the 17 killed in a similiar air raid in ash-Shaab last Wednesday, are Shia Muslims, mostly farmers from the south and their descendants who sought an easier life in Baghdad in the late 1950s.
Those in Shu'ala are the poorest of the poor, the people Ayatollah Khomeini used to call "the dispossessed". Women wearing the black chador move silently through the dusty streets, where stinking goats feed on rubbish.
On Friday night, as coffins lined up in the mosque and ambulances ferried other dead and wounded to an-Noor hospital, Shu'ala descended briefly into an angry frenzy. "I will kill all Americans. I will kill all Americans," a young man screamed. He lost three brothers and a sister in the explosion.
"We found a woman's body on the roof," a teenage boy murmured, standing in the crater in front of the devastated market stalls. "We found a head with no body."
But by yesterday Shu'ala had withdrawn into its grief and slow-burning anger. Black banners, each bearing the name of those the people here regard as martyrs, hang from walls and fences.
Families have a choice of two Koranic verses. "God promises that every life on this earth will end; no one is immortal," says one version of the death notice. "The soul of Mohamed Jaber Hassan, brother of . . . son of . . . has returned to God, as it is written in the book," say the others.
On every street in Shu'ala, there's a mourning tent filled with plastic chairs, where the families of victims receive condolences.
At an-Noor Hospital, Dr Tarek Taher, a surgeon, said 52 of the bodies he received were dead on arrival. Some were so decimated that they fell into pieces when relatives came to collect them from shelves in the refrigerated morgue.
There were about 100 wounded. "We performed a lot of laprotomies [opening the abdomen\] to remove chunks of metal from their livers, stomachs and bowels," Dr Taher said.
"Those with chest injuries we shifted to Ibn Nafas Hospital for cardiovascular surgery. There were a lot of brains blown out, trauma to the skull, fractures, burns."
Those farthest from the blast received shrapnel wounds; like Iklass Fa'ak, a 26-year-old mother of four who was choosing vegetables, and her niece, Zeinab (14), who had gone with her, and sad-faced little Douha Abdel Karim (12), who went to buy sweets with her friend Milad Fadel (15).
All were about to be discharged from hospital, but their fear has intensified along with the physical pain. "Every time I hear a plane or an explosion, I am terrified," Mrs Fa'ak said.
At the beginning of the war some Iraqis believed US and British assurances that civilians would not be targeted. But the bombing of two marketplaces in as many days has brought a new sense of vulnerability to the capital.
The Pentagon suggested the explosion in Shu'ala was caused by an anti-aircraft missile fired by the Iraqis, which fell back to earth and detonated.
Residents of Shu'ala heard a jet circle overhead just before the explosion. Many scattered in those few seconds. They swear there were no military targets nearby, although another Western reporter who visited the neighbourhood the following day said he saw tracked artillery in sidestreets. One foreign correspondent found a piece of debris with what appeared to be missile serial numbers and codings.
"An anti-aircraft shell kills two or three people, not more than 50," argued an Iraqi journalist who covers the military. "It was a dirty American missile," insisted the Iraqi military spokesman, Gen Hazem al-Rawi.
"You get used to it; war is like this," said Dr Taher, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war. "But I feel sorry for the people of Shu'ala, because they are innocent victims. They're not fighting on the front line. They have nothing to do with this war."
When the ambulances started arriving at an-Noor hospital on Friday night, several nurses collapsed in tears. "They couldn't help, because they were crying," Dr Taher said. "But I'm a man. I have to suppress my trauma to keep going."
Will it get worse? I asked.
"Yes," he said, the stress audible in his laughter. "The Americans are still far away. When they come nearer . . . I'm afraid, really afraid - for my own life, for other innocent people. You see, I am one of the innocent people."
