BAGHDAD, 2 April 2003 — It was a most peculiar day. Overnight, the Americans had pulverized a neo-classical office block next to what was — before a previous pulverization — the Iraqi government’s Department of Air Armaments. Then, just before 10 yesterday morning, an aircraft could be heard diving high over Baghdad and a clap of sound from the other side of the Tigris, along with the usual gray-black column of smoke, signaled the end of another annex belonging to the sons of Saddam. Then came the bus trip.
The Iraqis wanted to take the press to see another example of US and British “imperialist-racist violence” and so we were trucked off to the outskirts of the city, to the campus of what was described as a ladies education college. Campus it was, with agricultural blocks and plant testing fields and a perimeter of palm groves. And the crime against humanity to which we were taken? A large crater in the lawn beside a women’s dormitory, a hundred smashed windows and some broken power lines. A hundred meters away, I found four black and white cows tethered in the grass and, perhaps 30 feet from the crater, a slit trench with sand bags; surely, we told ourselves, an ordinary part of any college campus.
Now let’s be fair. College staff have every right to take their own protection against America’s notoriously inaccurate “smart” bombs. But did they dig the slit trench? Did they park the civilian trucks and buses, scattered around the empty campus, 30 meters from each other and always under the foliage of trees? And if college personnel normally worked the gates, why was the campus guarded by armed and green-uniformed militiamen? The crater was 20 feet deep — the classic cruise missile’s gouge in the ground — and its blast was enormous. Internal doors were torn from their hinges, desks overturned, beds thrown across rooms. But no one was hurt; indeed, the college had been abandoned long before the attacks.
Now fast-forward to a press conference a couple of hours later by the ubiquitous, bespectacled and uniformed minister of information, Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, who announced casualties in Baghdad for the previous 36 hours of air raids as 125 wounded and 24 dead.
His figures for other governorates were, of course, somewhat less: 18 wounded in Qadisiyah and three dead, in Babylon more than 100 wounded and 18 dead, including nine children in the Hilla district.
