"I wanted to be an army officer when I grow up but not any more. Now I want to be a doctor - but how can I? I don't have hands," said Ali

BAGHDAD, April 8 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - ALi Ismael Abbas, 12, was fast asleep when war shattered his life.

A missile obliterated his home and most of his family, leaving him orphaned, badly burned and blowing off both his arms, the Daily Mirror correspondent in the Iraqi capital told his story Tuesday, April 8.

With tears running down his face, he asked: "Can you help get my arms back? Do you think the doctors can get me another pair of hands? If I don't get a pair of hands, I will commit suicide."

"I wanted to be an army officer when I grow up but not any more. Now I want to be a doctor - but how can I? I don't have hands."

Lying in a Baghdad hospital, an improvised metal cage over his chest to stop his burned flesh touching the bedclothes, he said: "It was midnight when the missile fell on us. My father, my mother and my brother died. My mother was five months pregnant".

"Our neighbors pulled me out and brought me here unconscious. Our house was just a poor shack. Why did they want to bomb us?"

He did not know the area where he lived was surrounded by military installations.

Hospital staff were overwhelmed by the sharp rise in casualties since U.S. soldiers moved on Baghdad and intensified the aerial assault.

Ambulances rushed in with victims, many carried in bed sheets after running out of stretchers.

Doctors struggled to find them beds. Staff had no time to clean the blood from trolleys. Patients' screams and parents' cries echoed across the wards.

With many staff unable to get there due to the bombing, doctors worked round the clock performing surgery, taking blood, giving injections and ferrying wounded.

Osama Saleh al-Duleimi, an orthopedic surgeon and assistant director at Kindi, said they were overloaded and suffering shortages of anesthetics and painkillers.

The Red Cross has been touring hospitals with first aid and surgery kits. Spokesman Roland Huguenin-Benjamin said: "They were overwhelmed by sheer numbers - during fierce bombardment they received up to 100 casualties an hour."

Doctors who treated victims of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Gulf War were taken aback by the injuries. Dr Duleimi, 48, said: "This is the worst I've seen in the number of casualties and fatal wounds".

"This is a disaster because they're attacking civilian".

Dr Sadek al-Mukhtar said: "In the previous battles the weapons seemed merely disabling. Now they're much more lethal.".

"Before the war I did not regard America as my enemy. Now I do. War should be against the military. America is killing civilians," he said.

The U.S. and British aircraft are used to targeting residential areas far away from military sites since the invasion began on March 20.

Some 55 Iraqi civilians were killed and 50 others injured during a U.S.-British aerial raids on a poor residential marketplace in Baghdad on March 28, only days after 29 others killed in another residential area in the Iraqi capital.

The U.S. military officials also admitted 650 Iraqis breathed their last when the central town of Najaf was pounded by the U.S. and British jet fighters on March 26.

The civilian deaths infuriated people all over the world who felt further skeptical over alleged aims of "liberating" the Iraqi people by launching this military offensive.

"Was this what they call "rich in history"?" wrote the famous British columnist Robert Fisk on Tuesday.

"The British, Australians and Arabs "liberated" Damascus from the Turks in 1918. The Israelis occupied Beirut in 1982 and lived, not all of them, to regret it. Now the armies of America and, far behind them, the British are moving steadily into this most north-eastern of Arab capitals to dominate a land that borders Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia," he added.