D'une la prise de Bagdad ne signifie rien sinon des problemes pour les americains pendant les 10 prochains jours.

In Basra, Growing Resentment, Little Aid
09.04.2003 [16:53]  
   
 
The day the Iraq war began, Abid Hassan Hamoodi, 72, patriarch of one of Basra's most prominent families, gathered everyone into the storeroom of the nine-bedroom family home. Because it was away from the street, he thought, that room was the safest place in the house for the children and grandchildren to sleep.  
 
The room turned out to be a death trap.  
 
In the early morning hours Saturday, while they slept, 10 members of his family were killed by two missiles fired from a warplane that destroyed the house, Hamoodi said. The victims, including seven children, were crushed when the back room of the house became a pile of cement rubble. Hamoodi said he lost his wife, a daughter, a son and seven grandchildren. He dug out three other family members with his bare hands, he recalled today, after hearing cries of "Baba! Baba!" -- "Father! Father!" -- from under the collapsed brick.  
 
Hamoodi, a retired safety manager for South Oil Co., is not a political man. His children are professionals -- mostly doctors, with some engineers -- and he has three sons living in Britain. As head of a respected Shiite Muslim family, he might have been expected to welcome the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq to end the three-decade rule of President Saddam Hussein. But, instead, he is angry.  
 
"What was the purpose of the American invasion of Iraq?" he asked during a Muslim ceremony marking three days of mourning for the dead. "Was it to topple Saddam Hussein, or to kill innocent people?  
 
"Why did this happen?" he asked. "Ten lives are gone. The house was completely destroyed. . . . You came to save us, to protect us. That's what you said. It's now the contrary. Innocent people are killed."  
 
The extent of Hamoodi's loss may be unusual, his rage fueled by grief. But the sentiment he expresses -- that the U.S.-British occupation has produced more harm than good -- is widely voiced here in Basra.  
 
Allied war planners had predicted that Basra, Iraq's second-largest city with 1.3 million inhabitants, would welcome U.S. and British troops. The Shiite majority here rebelled against Hussein's government after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and hundreds, if not thousands, were killed when the government crushed the revolt and the United States failed to intercede.  
 
Many residents have indeed expressed relief that the Baath Party apparatus, led by Sunni Muslims, is gone. And many have voiced their anger at the abuses committed in Hussein's name over the years.  
 
But alongside the demonstrations of joy lies ambivalence -- even hostility -- toward the British military presence. Mostly, this is the result of a 21/2-week siege of the city that many residents say produced unnecessary civilian casualties. The Hamoodi family's tragedy is one example. But there are others, visible in hospital emergency wards where women and children lie suffering from burns and amputated limbs.  
 
And now, two days after British troops advanced into the city, finding little resistance, many more residents are complaining about their behavior. Some people say their relatives have been taken away for questioning by British troops who suspect them of being pro-government militia members.  
 
Hamdia Khudain is looking for her sons, Falah Hassan, 27, and Salah Hassan, 22. They stayed in the family home, next to a Baath Party branch office, while other family members went elsewhere for safety. But when she returned, her sons were missing. Neighbors said they were taken away by British troops, who knocked down a wall that separated her home from the Baath complex.  
 
"I want my sons -- just tell me where they are!" she beseeched a reporter. "It is the responsibility of the British army. They came in order to set us free from Saddam, not to take our children."  
 
Others complain that the British soldiers have entered their houses for searches, kicking in doors and upending furniture, because they live near Baath or militia facilities. Safaa Ju, 33, a Christian Iraqi businessman, showed reporters where British soldiers kicked in a bedroom door and ransacked another room in his home, because, he speculated, a senior intelligence officer had a house in the same middle-class neighborhood.  
 
By far the most common complaint -- voiced here repeatedly to any foreigner who stops a car and attracts a crowd -- is that Basra has descended into anarchy and British forces have done little to establish security.  
 
The looting frenzy has touched nearly everything. Government offices, banks, shops, hotels and homes have been stripped bare. Carjackings have begun as well. Tahrir Hospital, in the port area, reported one of its vehicles was taken at gunpoint this morning, a few hundred yards from the main gate. Another hospital reportedly had an ambulance stolen. Looters were later seen using the ambulance to load looted furniture from another house.  
 
"Now that the British have military control, there's no law and order," said Andres Kruesi, the delegate here of the International Committee of the Red Cross. "People steal everything. They even steal fire trucks."  
 
"We felt safe when Saddam Hussein was controlling the situation," said Ammar Mohammed, 32, who works as a security guard for a hotel. "Now, this safety, this security, is absent."  
 
"We need security. There is no security in the city," said Archbishop Gabriel Kassab, 64, leader of southern Iraq's small Catholic Chaldean community. "I think that is the responsibility of the Americans and British. Before they came, the city was very quiet. . . . Then there was trouble."  
 
British military commanders agree that looting and disorder is a problem, but they say they are not here as a police force. British military officials announced today that a local sheik, whom they did not name, has been chosen to set up a city administration. But in the meantime, the power vacuum continues.  
 
Col. Chris Vernon, a spokesman for the British military, told the Agence France-Presse news agency there was no humanitarian crisis in Basra, which has enough food to last until the end of May. But he said the British forces would try to increase supplies of drinking water.  
 
Today, British officers placed troops at places considered key installations, such as hospitals and some public utilities, to prevent looting. But there are too few troops to protect the entire city from freely roaming mobs.  
 
Until a government and police force can be formed, however, the British troops provide the only security in town, and as a result they are facing the rising anger of residents.  
 
"With the British soldiers, it is free now -- free to take anything you want," said Hayder Toma, 31, an employee of the state electrical company, who is afraid the city's electrical system will collapse because thieves are taking the machinery.  
 
"The occupying power has an obligation to keep things running," said the Red Cross's Kruesi. "They're not a police force, but they're an occupying power, so they have to establish a police force."
 
  Источник: Keith B. Richburg/The Washington Post  

Amid Allied jubilation, a child lies in agony, clothes soaked in blood
09.04.2003 [16:48]  
   
 
They lay in lines, the car salesman who'd just lost his eye but whose feet were still dribbling blood, the motorcyclist who was shot by American troops near the Rashid Hotel, the 50-year-old female civil servant, her long dark hair spread over the towel she was lying on, her face, breasts, thighs, arms and feet pock-marked with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb. For the civilians of Baghdad, this is the real, immoral face of war, the direct result of America's clever little "probing missions" into Baghdad.  
 
It looks very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit to the presidential palace, the videotape of Saddam Hussein's golden loo. But the innocent are bleeding and screaming with pain to bring us our exciting television pictures and to provide Messrs Bush and Blair with their boastful talk of victory. I watched two-and-a-half-year-old Ali Najour lying in agony on the bed, his clothes soaked with blood, a tube through his nose, until a relative walked up to me.  
 
"I want to talk to you," he shouted, his voice rising in fury. "Why do you British want to kill this little boy? Why do you even want to look at him? You did this ? you did it!"  
 
The young man seized my arm, shaking it violently. "Are you going to make his mother and father come back? Can you bring them back to life for him? Get out! Get out!" In the yard outside, where the ambulance drivers deposit the dead, a middle-aged Shia woman in black was thumping her fists against her breasts and shrieking at me. "Help me," she cried. "Help me. My son is a martyr and all I want is a banner to cover him. I want a flag, an Iraqi flag, to put over his body. Dear God, help me!"  
 
It's becoming harder to visit these places of pain, grief and anger. The International Committee of the Red Cross yesterday reported civilian victims of America's three-day offensive against Baghdad arriving at the hospitals now by the hundred. Yesterday, the Kindi alone had taken 50 civilian wounded and three dead in the previous 24 hours. Most of the dead ? the little boy's family, the family of six torn to pieces by an aerial bomb in front of Ali Abdulrazek, the car salesman, the next-door neighbours of Safa Karim ? were simply buried within hours of their being torn to bits.  
 
On television, it looks so clean. On Sunday evening, the BBC showed burning civilian cars, its reporter ? "embedded" with US forces ? saying that he saw some of their passengers lying dead beside them.  
 
That was all. No pictures of the charred corpses, no close-ups of the shrivelled children. So perhaps I should warn those of what the BBC once called a nervous disposition to go no further. But if they want to know what America and Britain are doing to the innocent of Baghdad, they should read on.  
 
I'll leave out the description of the flies that have been clustering round the wounds in the Kindi emergency rooms, of the blood caked on the sheets, the blood still dripping from the wounds of those I talked to yesterday. All were civilians. All wanted to know why they had to suffer. All ? save for the incandescent youth who ordered me to leave the little boy's bed ? talked gently and quietly about their pain. No Iraqi government bus took me to the Kindi hospital. No doctor knew I was coming.  
 
Let's start with Mr Abdulrazek. He's the 40-year-old car salesman who was walking yesterday morning through a narrow street in the Shaab district of Baghdad ? that's where the two American missiles killed at least 20 civilians more than a week ago ? when he heard the jet engines of an aircraft. "I was going to see my family because the phone exchanges have been bombed and I wanted to make sure they were OK," he said. "There was a family, a husband and wife and kids, in front of me.  
 
"Then I heard this terrible noise and there was a light and I knew something had happened to me. I went to try to help the family in front of me but they were all gone, in pieces. Then I realised I couldn't see properly." Over Mr Abdulrazek's left eye is a wad of thick bandages, tied to his face. His doctor, Osama al-Rahimi, tells me that "we did not operate on the eye, we have taken care of his other wounds". Then he leant towards my ear and said softy: "He has lost his eye. There was nothing we could do. It was taken out of his head by the shrapnel." Mr Abdulrazek smiles ? of course, he does not know that he will be forever half-blind ? and suddenly breaks into near-perfect English, a language he had learnt at high school in Baghdad. "Why did this happen to me?" he asks.  
 
Yes, I know the lines. President Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than us if we hadn't invaded ? not a very smart argument in the Kindi hospital ? and that we're doing all this for them. Didn't Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, tell us all a few days ago that he was praying for the American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren't we coming here to save them ? let's not mention their oil ? and isn't President Saddam a cruel and brutal man? But amid these people, such words are an obscenity.  
 
Then there was Safa Karim. She is 11 and she is dying. An American bomb fragment struck her in the stomach and she is bleeding internally, writhing on the bed with a massive bandage on her stomach and a tube down her nose and ? somehow most terrible of all ? a series of four dirty scarves that tie each of her wrists and ankles to the bed. She moans and thrashes on the bed, fighting pain and imprisonment at the same time. A relative said she is too ill to understand her fate. "She has been given 10 bottles of drugs and she has vomited them all up," he said.  
 
The man opens the palms of his hands, the way Arabs do when they want to express impotence. "What can we do?" they always say, but the man was silent. But I'm glad. How, after all, could I ever tell him that Safa Karim must die for 11 September, for George Bush's fantasies and Tony Blair's moral certainty and for Mr Wolfowitz's dreams of "liberation" and for the "democracy", which we are blasting our way through these people's lives to create?  
 
 
  Источник: By Robert Fisk in Baghdad/The Independent