BAQUBA, Iraq, 29 July 2004 — Dozens of slippers float on a big pool of blood and mud where hundreds of young men stood earlier yesterday waiting to join the new Iraqi police force.
“I want to defend my homeland, because if we do not take matters into our own hands we will never rid ourselves of the occupation,” said Ziad Abdul Rahman, 27, sitting on a hospital bed with bloodstained bandages wrapped around his torso and leg.
He came to Baquba yesterday morning from the town of Muqdadiya further north after his cousin told him that his name was on a list of 600 potential candidates for the local police force. Abdul Rahman arrived a little before 9:00 p.m. (0500 GMT) outside the police station in the Mahata neighborhood where candidates were being screened and interviewed.
After he made sure again that his name was on the list he lined up with hundreds of other men, who were told that they would be called into the station in groups of 10. “People started shouting and shoving each other, so I got squeezed to the back, and as I was speaking to someone next to me the car blew up.” he said. “I fell to the ground, then bodies were falling on me, but I managed to pick myself up and run away.”
Witnesses and police said they saw a black Daewoo overtake a minibus carrying about 20 passengers, then slam right into the recruits and blow up. “The dead are recruits and passersby,” said Col. Abdul Salam Said. “This serial killing will not end.”
All that was left of the car bomb was a burned up chassis and bits of the engine strewn all over the curbside and inside nearby shops, which were virtually destroyed. Body parts and car parts flew up and landed on nearby rooftops from the impact of the blast.
Twisted shutters and cut-up electric cables littered the street as the gutted body of the minibus stood to the side. “I saw the burned up bodies of those inside the bus,” said Ahmed Ismail, 30, who lives nearby and had rushed to the scene to help lift the dead and injured. “There were several bodies inside the shops and on the rooftops.”
Khalil Salim, 30, wearing a bloodied white dishdash (traditional dress), stood in a daze at the scene. “I am looking for my mother. She was sitting by my side when the car blew up and I became unconscious” he said, explaining that he was driving by at the time and saw the car blow up right behind him through his rearview mirror.
At the Mahata furniture shop the two owners stood in despair amid their shattered coffee tables and sofas. Sabah Arif said that the line of prospective recruits was so long yesterday morning that it snaked around his shop and into the side street.
“Every day they line up outside the shop,” said Arif, 61. “I have repeatedly told the police officer that it is wrong and dangerous, but he said that there was no other place to take the men.” The carpenter had closed his shop briefly to go buy wood, and as he was dropping off some of it at his other workshop nearby, he heard the blast. “The earth trembled beneath me and I rushed back,” he said.
At Baquba’s general hospital, several women had collapsed to the ground outside the morgue hitting their faces and screaming hysterically as they were being comforted by relatives. About a dozen charred bodies were lined up outdoors, some covered with scraps of cardboard or dried-up palm branches.
In one ward, Suriya Mohammed sat at a bedside fanning her son Kahtan Khalaf, 21, who had shrapnel wounds in one leg. “The only reason I signed up was to improve my lot, but if it’s going to be like this, I do not think I want to join the force,” he said.
The honeymoon for Iraq’s interim government was short. Exactly one month after Washington handed over sovereignty, guerrillas yesterday shattered any pretence that the US withdrawal to the political sidelines and the transfer of more security duties to Iraqis would weaken the insurgency.
The violence is a grim omen as Iraq prepares for a major political gathering in a few days and then elections in January. But analysts said Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, trying to build legitimacy among Iraqis, needed to avoid calling too much on 140,000 American troops in Iraq to fight the insurgents, even as his own security forces take the brunt of attacks.
Christopher Langton, a Middle East expert at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he believed the United States was not shirking its responsibility. “The deal at the handover was the US would respond if asked for help. I don’t feel it’s incumbent upon the US to inject its presence,” Langton said. “If they suddenly re-emerge in terms of security it will seem like nothing has changed.”
Under the terms of the handover, Iraq’s fledgling security forces can request backup from US troops in operations — and have done so. The government has also approved airstrikes on suspected foreign militants in the rebellious town of Fallujah.
In the first two weeks after Allawi’s government took over, signs of hope appeared. There were few acts of headline-grabbing violence. Ordinary Iraqis said they felt safer and were pleased to see the United States, publicly at least, stand aside. Some even dared to believe their country could be finding its feet after a raging 15-month insurgency that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
