A wounded Iraqi child cries, shocked by the barbaric U.S.-led attack on Baghdad

BAGHDAD , March 23 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Exposing the barbarism and heinous crimes of the U.S.-led occupation forces against the Iraqi civilians, veteran war reporter Robert Fist toured Baghdad hospitals to get a hands-on experience of the situation there after deadly two nights of air strikes.

“Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is ‘as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed" but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday (Saturday) morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body,” Fisk wrote, reported The Independent Sunday, March 23.

“The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs,­ they were bound up with gauze,­ and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg,” he said.

Doha , in effect, was the first of 101 patients brought to the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital after America 's blitz on the city began Friday night, March 21. Seven other members of her family were wounded in the same cruise missile bombardment; the youngest, a one-year-old baby, was being breastfed by her mother at the time.

“There is something sick, obscene about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we turn up and take pictures of their wounded children,” the respected British journalist added.

In the awake of the devastating attacks, the Iraqi minister of health decided to hold a press conference outside the wards to emphasize the "bestial" nature of the American attack.

“The Americans say that they don't intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain.

This War Is All About Suffering

So let's forget for a moment, Fisk said, the cheap moralizing of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip around the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital .

Fisk drew the attention to the lies about “coalition forces,” noting that this U.S.-led war was primarily about endless suffering.

“Take 50-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman who now lays on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders …­ they are now twice their original size ­ who was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missile struck Baghdad .

“Her five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt's front door when the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding although the blood has clotted around her toes,” he said.

“I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere," she told Fisk. "It was on my arms, my legs, my chest."

“Isra Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel wounds to the legs as she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the blitz began. Imam Ali is 23 and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and lower bowel,” Fisk said.

Being posted on the few examples of the deplorable conditions in Baghdad, Fisk lashed out the Bush administration, accusing it of waging a bloody war based on its military juggernaut on helpless people under the pretext of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

“And all this, I asked myself yesterday, was all this for 11 September 2001 ? All this was to "strike back" at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali have nothing ­ absolutely nothing ­ to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than has the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wonder, that these children, these young women, should suffer for 11 September?” He wondered. 

Should We Blame Them For Their Own Wounds?

Fisk said it has been always the case that the occupation forces claim they never targeted civilians, who “had been perhaps hit by shrapnel from their won anti-aircraft fire.”

“Wars repeat themselves. Always, when "we" come to visit those we have bombed, we have the same question. In1991, I remember how American reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire?

“Should we laugh or cry at this? Should we always blame "them" for their own wounds? Certainly we should ask why those cruise missiles exploded where they did, at least 320 in Baghdad alone, courtesy of the USS Kitty Hawk,” he wondered.

Fisk also refuted the myth of bush’s “selected targets,” asserting that the so-called targets were scattered across Baghdad ’s city and the occupation forces did not care whether or not there were civilians there but were only fixed on one thing: their colonial desires. 

“It is the same old story. If we make war – however much we blather on about our care for civilians – we are going to kill and maim the innocent. Targets are scattered across the city. The poor – and all the wounded I saw yesterday were poor – live in cheap, sometimes wooden houses that collapse under blast damage,” he said.

Dr Habib Al-Hezai, whose FRCS was gained at Edinburgh University, counted 101 patients of the total 207 wounded in the raids in his hospital alone, of whom 85 were civilians – 20 of them women and six of them children – and 16 soldiers. A young man and a child of 12 had died under surgery.

“It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life. But then again, no one under the present regime would want to spend too long looking at such things, would they?” Fisk said.

Things Unscathed For Invaders

Fisk further drew an interesting comparison between this invasion and the 1991 desert war. He said the Americans at that time struck everything at hand’s reach. But now they are keen on keeping Iraq ’s infrastructure unscathed for their own use in post-war era.

He asserted that what has been spared is not a gift to the Iraqi people: “It is for the benefit of Iraq ’s supposed new masters.”

“They burned for 12 hours after the first missile strikes. And Iraqis have noticed what all this means. In 1991, the Americans struck the refineries, the electricity grid, the water pipes, and communications. But yesterday, Baghdad could still function.

“The landline telephones worked; the internet operated; the electrical power was at full capacity; the bridges over the Tigris remained unbombed. Because, of course, when – "if" is still a sensitive phrase these days – the Americans get here, they will need a working communications system, electricity, transport,” he underlined.

Again, there has been no attempt, Fisk said, by the U.S. to destroy the television facilities because they presumably want to use them on arrival.

During the bombing on Friday night, an Iraqi general appeared live on television to reassure the nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile explosions blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television camera.

“So where does all this lead us? In the early hours of yesterday morning, I looked across the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the colonnaded ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and the sky was lowering with smoke, the buttressed, rampart-like palace – sheets of flame soaring from its walls – looked like a medieval castle ablaze,” he said.

Mongols Back Again

Fisk said Baghdad was fervently desired by the invaders from Alexander, the Mongols, the British to the Americans, pointing out that they were all defeated and found fierce resistance from the Iraqi people. 

The famed reporter said this war is not whatsoever legitimate given that the U.S.-led occupation forces are only driven by one seductive thing: OIL.

“Xenophon struck south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad and then the British. All departed. Now come the Americans. It's not about legitimacy. It's about something much more seductive, something Saddam himself understands all too well, a special kind of power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq wished to demonstrate as he smashed his way into the land of this ancient civilization,” he said.

“Yesterday afternoon the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around the city of Baghdad in the hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 3.20pm London time, followed by the utterly predictable sound of explosions,” he concluded.

The Iraqi capital Baghdad came under massive bombardment late Friday by at least 320 missiles that turned vast sections of the Iraqi capital into an inferno.

The British and U.S. bombing blitz wounded 207 civilians, most of them women and children, Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf said Saturday, march 22.

The casualties, who were being cared for in five different hospitals around the capital, were "hit in their homes", Sahhaf said.