Report from the Brigade: the eleventh day of the invasion (CSCAweb: 07-04-03)
Translation from Spanish by Donald Murphy. (www.nodo50.org/csca )
Baghdad/Madrid, 30 March, 2003On this, the eleventh day of the US/UK military aggression against Iraq, the Spanish Brigade Against the War Mohammed Belaidi in Baghdad reports that, as on previous nights, the bombing attacks on the city have been kept up continuously, producing heavy explosions near the Brigade's lodgings at 24:00, 2:00 and 5:00 local time. And all through the night, minute after minute, the persistent hum of the B-52 warplanes could be heard clearly and distinctly.
Attacks on telecommunications centres
As the Brigade observed this morning, the heavy impacts heard during the night had targeted telecommunications centres. That of Sallajiyya, on the left bank of the Tigris River, in the neighbourhood of the same name and next to Baghdad’s new Central [Railway] Station, was attacked five times in the early hours of the morning. This 5-storey structure was torn apart from the inside by implosion bombs, exposing to passers-by a view of its ruined interior, now a mass of tangled cables and charred furniture. The tall communications tower, however, is still standing.
This telecommunications centre is situated a hundred metres from the cardiac surgery centre Ibn Al Baitar, from which it is separated by only a fence.
The Brigade was also able to see the communications centre in Omar Ben Abdelasis street, in the Addamiyya district, which has already suffered several attacks in recent days and which at 11:00 yesterday morning was again targeted, this time by two US missiles. Another launched against the centre hit an adjacent building of residences and businesses at the intersection with Antar Square. The missile hit the side of the building and converted the street-corner into a crater. The sides and rear wall of the two-storey communications centre, some 50 metres wide, along with the buildings lining the adjoining side-streets, were seriously damaged. Surprisingly, there were no victims, possibly because this part of the building houses shops and businesses and this last attack occurred in the early hours of the morning. The left wall of the structure has caved in, but miraculously the nearby dwellings were not crushed. From outside one can see the metal framework and doorjambs of the telephone exchange blown apart and exposed to view. Since early morning, workers have been bringing tables and computers out of the building. Here the communications tower has not collapsed either.
The Addamiyya communications centre is located opposite the Faculty of Education.
The communications centre located in the Sha'ab district, an area which has likewise been hit repeatedly by US bomb and missile attacks since the beginning of the military aggression, was also attacked again yesterday. Technicians were working this morning to restore telephone service. All of the city has been left without telephone connections. The Brigade, which until two days ago was able to communicate normally by telephone with the outside world through the telephones in the vicinity of its lodgings, has had to begin using a satellite telephone to continue making and receiving calls.
Systematic attacks on civilian neighbourhoods
After observing on its visits to various of the city's hospitals that injuries caused by the US attacks are in the vast majority civilians from neighbourhoods that have been bombed repeatedly since the aggression began, the Brigade has decided to keep a record of the victims hospitalized there in a random sampling of the city’s hospitals. It can be stated, from the testimonies of the injured and of hospital personnel in these centres, that many cases of injury and death among the civilian population go unreported.
Today the Brigade visited Naoman Hospital, in the Addamiyya district, whose residents have been the repeated victims of US bombing raids. This centre recorded 20 injury victims from the attack carried out on the neighbourhood this past 25th of March who have since been released. No deaths have been recorded among the residents of Addamiyya, even though there have indeed been deaths registered in other hospitals. However, the centre has been continuously receiving injury cases on various days resulting from US missile attacks on the Sha’ab district the 24th, 28th, and 29th of March, observing cases of injury within the same family from the same attacks and from others on different days but in the same neighbourhoods.
The Brigade visited Omar Abdel Karim, age 29, who works and lives in Sha’ab, and who was wounded in the abdomen by the impact of the missiles that fell on the neighbourhood at 16:40 on the 29th of March. Seven families in the surrounding area were affected by the attack.
His neighbour, Munib Habib Hamid, a 31-year-old shop assistant, in serious condition, on oxygen and unable to speak, was injured the same day by shrapnel in the abdomen, legs and chest, along with his wife and son.
Another neighbour, Georgis Basar, a worker of Egyptian nationality, was hit by shrapnel from fragmentation bombs in the same neighbourhood on the 28th of March. He has fragments of shrapnel embedded in his hands and legs. Munir has lived and worked in Baghdad for 14 years and says that there are about 100,000 Egyptian workers still in the country, despite a great number of his countrymen having left Iraq during the Gulf War of 1991. Munir says that he feels he is among brothers here and that he will stay on in spite of everything.
The generosity of a besieged people
Notwithstanding the devastation and commotion which US troops and warplanes are causing in the country, the people of Baghdad continue to demonstrate their finest virtue, along with their cordiality. The Brigade are overwhelmed when they walk through the streets of neighbourhoods which despite having been attacked are full of life and in which residents go about their business with a naturalness that is only disturbed by the constant, persistent sound of US military aircraft overhead. Knowing that these neighbourhoods have been and will continue to be the scenes of US attacks on the city, it is moving to witness daily their resident’s limitless hospitality: today in the market of Addamiyya, where the Brigade went to stock up on food, fruit and water, the food-sellers did not want to accept money for these provisions, offering them instead as gifts.
The generosity of this people, besieged and subjected for the last 12 years to a permanent aggression from outside and today attacked openly in their own neighbourhoods, streets, markets and homes, is one expression more of their maturity, showing both to themselves and to the world how collective courage can be applied to a people's own self-defence, in the face of a blatant, cowardly attack from the sky with missiles and shards of shrapnel.
Resistance from both militia and populace
As a mechanism of collective defence against this outside aggression, and despite the fact that the US air attacks are carried out indiscriminately, in daylight or darkness, the citizens of Baghdad embody an explicit will to resist, expressed in the "normality" recovered each day in the places of public transit – in the streets, squares and markets. Only at night, although a curfew has not been officially declared, do people retire to their homes, as is in any other part of the world. During daylight hours, public transport continues to function, in the form of the red double-decker buses so characteristic of the streets of Baghdad, and private vehicle traffic remains heavy in the city centre. Areas destroyed by bombs are immediately cleared of rubble so that they may be rebuilt. Each day more businesses are open and men and women of all ages circulate freely in the streets. Soldiers, militia and armed civilians blend with ease into the rest of the population. They buy their heads of lettuce at the food-stalls, stopping to rest with their Kalashnikovs between their legs; they drink tea in the cafés while chatting with teenagers and old men, visit shops or play with the children in the street --scenes that are repeated everywhere and awaken vivid memories of images of our own cities during the Civil War against fascism. There is no separation between the military's defence of the city and the people's own. This is a popular, voluntary resistance movement forged with coherence, determination, courage and dignity. These are the elements with which this people's resistance is inscribed, even though the threat of the US troops' entry into the city weighs more and more heavily upon them. A popular resistance nurtured in the people's own history and taught by the example which for more than fifty years their brothers, the Palestinians, have given them and continue giving by their struggle against Israeli aggression and occupation.
Today, 30 March, as the Palestinian people celebrate their Day of the Land, the Palestinians and Iraqis are one people engaged in the same fight against the same violence and aggression that Israeli Zionist barbarism and the fascism of the US regime inflict upon them both.
From Baghdad, all of our support and solidarity go out to the Palestinian people.
The Spanish Brigade against the War: Mª Teresa Tuñón Álvarez, Mª Rosa Pañarroya Miranda, Ana Mª Rodríguez Alonso, Belarmino Marino García Villar, José Bielsa Fernández, Imanol Telleria, Javier Barandiaran, Manu Fernández y Carlos Varea González
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