BAGHDAD, 20 August 2003 — From the devastation of the Canal Hotel to the anguished cries of families of the dead at the nearby Al-Kindi Hospital, yesterday’s car-bomb attack on a UN compound in Baghdad struck another sickening blow to this war-ravaged city.
As quickly as US troops could lift the dead and injured to open-topped army trucks outside the hotel’s smouldering remains, another batch of mutilated figures staggered or were dragged to the roadside, ready for the surgery room or the morgue. The afternoon blast ripped an entire corner from the hotel, and scores of onlookers outside could only gape at the devastation that lay behind the concrete walls of the UN-adopted compound. Twisted steel and reinforcement wire hung from the rent in the yellow-brick wall and smoke rose from nearby UN vehicles set alight by the explosion.
“The ceiling fell down, the windows and metal bars blew in,” said Mouna Naim, a reporter for French newspaper Le Monde. “The electricity was cut and we were full of dust. We didn’t know where we were walking. “The hall was totally devastated and it took me some time to get outside. It was carnage.”
Within half an hour, at least 30 US troop vehicles had lined the major road leading to the compound, backing up traffic into the city center. Amid chaotic scenes outside the compound, soldiers atop armed-to-the-teeth military vehicles hysterically called for calm as UN workers and hotel staff — some of them pouring blood from head wounds — crowded at the gate eager for news of their friends and colleagues inside.
“We stopped to take out the victims,” added Naim. “Some were very seriously injured on the shoulder, on the back, back of the neck and on the chest.
“People were lying down, some women were crying, others were shaking and some were cool. People were crying, were shouting and searching for their friends.” Army vehicles, police cars and stunned UN workers who had been inside the hotel when the attack happened jostled for space on the road outside, either trying to leave the scene or to get back in to help the rescue effort.
“Everybody was helping each other, it was remarkable,” said Naim. Ten minutes away at the Al-Kindi Hospital, grieving family members of the dead and injured filled the squalid corridors, the walls smeared with the blood of the some 30 people taken there by ambulance.
Every 10 minutes or so an ambulance would arrive with another bloodied charge. Dozens gathered at their openingdoors, apprehensively waiting to see if this delivery was a loved one.
In the admissions hallway, elderly women in traditional black Islamic garb crouched on the floor tearfully fingering strings of prayer beads. Younger women similarly dressed, held each other for support, their legs buckling beneath them as grief rendered them immovable.
Hisham Al-Taee, the brother of the translator to Sergio Vieira De Mello, the UN’s top man in Iraq who was killed in the car bomb, wept as he was reunited with two friends outside the hospital entrance.
“Thank God you are well, thank God you are alive,” he cried, as he kissed his friends with relief.
“But where is Ahmed? Where is my brother?” Ahmed had been treated and discharged minutes earlier, he later discovered. “He drove off in his Beetle. He is alive,” Al-Taee cried. For two other men, the news was not so good. They held each other and cried loudly in a nearby doorway, their tears drawing black lines of grime down their dusty faces.
Inside the hospital, the injured sat stunned, awaiting treatment and covered in filthy bandages. “I think I was lucky,” said one Canadian UN worker whose office in the hotel was destroyed in the blast.
“My office-chair shielded me from the mortar and rubble that fell in,” he added, blood seeping through a bandage around the crown of his head.
Al-Kindi hospital was filthy. Gathered crowds, many of them onlookers, smoked cigarettes in the surgery rooms as victims were being treated. And gurneys improvised from office chairs and food trolleys wheeled patients through hallways lined with rubbish and discarded cigarette ends. For two hours after the explosion, ambulances had to fight through throngs of battered cars to get the injured in and out of the hospital.
It was so short of equipment and staff that onlookers and passers-by had to help lift one victim, a large Iraqi policeman stripped to his white underpants and pouring blood from his head and limbs, into an ambulance.
Fifteen minutes later, the vehicle managed to pull away, but only at a snail’s pace, its driver honking to clear a path through the milling crowds.
