May 11, 2003

For Family That Lost 10 to Bomb, Only Memories and Grief Remain

By MARC SANTORA



ASRA, Iraq, May 10 — All that is left for the Hamoodi family are the photographs.

A father's hand reaching for the shoulder of his daughter. A boy at his grandfather's knee. A toddler all dressed up in a gray suit, red tie and pink Mickey Mouse hat.

All are dead now.

On the photos are numbers, scratched in ink, to mark the people who were killed.

All 10 of them, all from this one family, were lost in the burst of a single allied bomb on the morning of April 5.

The first bomb hit the street outside the house at 5:30 a.m., recalled Abed Hassan Hamoodi, 72, the family patriarch. "Three more hit neighboring houses," he said, "but nothing happened to us yet."

The family was crowded into a small bunker they had constructed in the back of the house. It had a reinforced concrete ceiling and was far from any windows, a safe room built to help the family survive two decades of war.

Fourteen people were in the room when the last bomb hit, around 6 a.m. It was an American bomb that struck the Hamoodi home, in an attack called in by British forces.

"My wife had been reading the Koran and fell asleep with it across her chest," Mr. Hamoodi said. Suddenly, the force of the blast ripped the wall off the side of the house and buried the family in rubble.

As Mr. Hamoodi frantically climbed through the wreckage, pulling three people to safety, the looters arrived. He saw his wife still clutching the Koran, covered in ash and lifeless, as scavengers made off with her jewelry.

"It is not human, what happened to us," he said.

His story is widely known in this city. The family is well educated and well respected. None had ever joined the Baath Party, but all were important members of the community. Mr. Hamoodi's son, Dr. Akram Abed Hassan Hamoodi, is the senior surgeon at Taalimi Hospital. He was working when the attack took place. The other four of Mr. Hamoodi's five children were killed.

It has not been easy determining the numbers of civilians killed throughout Iraq in the weeks of war and allied bombing. Part of the difficulty is that the hospitals were barely functioning and unable to keep detailed records. Also, many victims were buried privately. Iraqi militiamen often wore civilian clothing, further complicating matters.

But now, a month after British troops entered this city, aid agencies are starting to try to come up with statistics.

There is clear evidence that Iraqi forces used civilians as human shields, and there is some evidence that the British used artillery-launched cluster bombs, said Saman Zia-Zarifi, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is working in Basra. Those two factors account for many of the casualties.

He said the hospitals had reported only 70 civilian casualties, but he was told that they stopped keeping track during the chaotic early days of the war and that the 70 were mostly people who were still alive when they were brought to the hospitals for treatment. As far as an overall figure for southern Iraq, Mr. Zia-Zarifi said researchers were still trying to compile numbers, but it was going to be difficult. The place that would normally keep such records, the Forensics Institute, lost all its documentation to looting.

Mr. Hamoodi said he could tell his story because he was educated and spoke English, but his neighbors were less fortunate. The same morning so many in his family were killed, he said, 13 other people were killed in adjacent houses.

The block remains a mess of bombed-out buildings, where grieving families compete with thieves searching for anything of value.

British military officials said the bombing raid was meant to target Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali for his decision to use chemical weapons against Iraqi citizens. They had received intelligence reports that he was staying in a house in the neighborhood, and after hours of deliberation, they decided to call in airstrikes.

There is no evidence that General Majid was killed in the attack. But the girl in the photo smiling brightly in her pink dress, Zeena Akram, 12, was.

Mustafa Akram, 13, who loved to read books and did not like to kiss girls or even his aunt on the cheek, was also killed.

So was Zain El Abideen Akram, 18, who so badly wanted to be a doctor like his father that when he was only 13 he would pester visitors by insisting on taking their blood pressure.

Then there was Zainab Akram, 19, who loved fashion and the latest European music. And Hassan Iyad, 10, who had begged his father to let him come stay at Grandpa's house.

Ammar Muhammad was not yet 2 when his grandfather pulled him from the rubble and tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but his mouth was full of dust and he died.

Noor Elhuda Saad, an infant dressed up in a pink jumper in family photos, eyes still scrunched together, was killed. As was Wissam Abed, 40, the joker of the house who was to be married in June.

Dr. Ihab Abed, 34, who scored near perfect marks on her medical boards and lived near Basra University, came to her father's house because she was frightened of the fighting near her home. She was killed.

Khairiah Mahmoud was the mother of 10 and grandmother of many more. Married to Abed as a young woman, she was insistent that the family be together as often as possible.

"Khairiah would not let us eat lunch or dinner unless everyone had gathered," her husband said.

She, too, was killed.

A month after the bombing, their bodies remain in temporary graves awaiting a time when they can be taken to the holy city of Najaf.

Every day now, the routine in the Hamoodi house is the same. Visitors from as far as Baghdad come to pay their respects, having heard the tragic story. Many of them are strangers. The family sits with them, preparing tea and lunch and anything else their guests may need.

Three of Abed's sons, who are British citizens and live in Manchester, England, have returned home to help their father.

This was a family that says it thought the American-led war a good thing. "We were so delighted to see them coming to protect us from the regime," Mr. Hamoodi said. "All they have done is create a graveyard."

Like everyone in the family, he expressed shock at the state of postwar Iraq, blaming a lack of planning by the victors. Mr. Hamoodi, who worked as a senior consultant in the oil industry for 45 years, much of that time under British management, said he was appalled that a month after the bombing, nobody from the American or British forces has come to the neighborhood to offer condolences and explain what went wrong.

His sons have written letters to President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, trying to hold them to account for not doing more to protect civilians.

"I consider what was done to be a crime of war," Mr. Hamoodi said. "How would President Bush feel if he had to dig his daughters from out of the rubble?"



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

http://nytimes.com/2003/05/11/international/worldspecial/11FAMI.html