Wednesday, April 02, 2003

The Times of Oman

Horror beyond belief

HILLA (Iraq) -- Dozens more Iraqi civilians were reported killed yesterday by US-British air strikes outside Baghdad, as the allies faced a political nightmare over the spiralling casualty toll of the war.

The British government admitted for the first time that Iraqi civilians may see US-British forces as villains not liberators.

"We know that for the moment we will be seen as the villains. We knew that from the reaction before the conflict started," Home Secretary David Blunkett told BBC television late on Monday.

In Brussels the European Commission called a checkpoint killings "a horrible and tragic incident ... It is not an isolated incident. Too many civilians have already lost their lives in this war."

As the blitz pounded away on day 13 of the war to topple President Saddam Hussein, officials and local Iraqis said 48 civilians had been slain by allied attacks in one area alone since Monday -- including every member but one of an entire family.

AFP reporters saw what seemed to be parts of cluster bombs, intended to inflict maximum casualties, at the site in Hilla, south of Baghdad. The International Committee for the Red Cross described the "horror" in Hilla, where a hospital official said 33 people, including women and children, had been killed, and 310 injured.

"There were dozens of smashed corpses," ICRC spokesman Roland Huguenin-Benjamin said.

An AFP correspondent saw many wounded and frightened children huddled in blankets on the floor of the hospital, left there because beds were full.

At the scene of the bombing, said to have taken place earlier yesterday in this farming town, dozens of homes had been flattened, and the bodies of hundreds of donkeys and chickens lay dead on the ground. What appeared to be the smaller mini-weapons from cluster bombs, equipped with small parachutes, covered a large area in the town, which lies just 80km south of Baghdad.

An AFP reporter travelling with US ground troops trying to take a canal near Hilla yesterday morning said their assault had been backed by air raids from two massive B-52 bombers.

Elsewhere, Razek Al Kazem Al Khafaji sat inconsolably among 15 coffins, bearing what he said were the bodies of his family killed on Monday night when a rocket fired by a US Apache helicopter ripped apart their pick-up truck.

He said they were fleeing fierce fighting in Nasiriya, further south, when they were hit in the town of Haidariya. He said the strike killed his wife, six children, his father, his mother, his three brothers and their wives.

Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Said Al Sahhaf said 19 civilians had been killed since Monday evening in Baghdad, and more than 30 in other parts of Iraq, including the provinces of Qadisiyah, Babylon and Salaheddin, some of whom could have included those killed in Hilla....