Mussab al-Khairalla
Reuters
14 September 2005
BAGHDAD, Sept 14 (Reuters) - The bodies of the dead and the dying lay slumped on the cold tile floors of Baghdad's Kadhimiya hospital on Wednesday, the bloody victims of one of Iraq's deadliest suicide bombings.
Weeping relatives were left to hold up bags of saline for the wounded after equipment ran out in the hospital, one of the city's busiest. Wards overflowed, leaving dozens lying in shock on the floor, desperate for treatment.
The ground was littered with blood-stained bandages and empty plastic bags of medicine, while the corridors echoed with the screams of patients, some of whom lost limbs in the blast.
"Oh Ali! Ali!" cried one man through a grimace, invoking the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, a revered Shi'ite imam.
Stunned doctors in white coats tried to assess the worst cases and decide who could wait, who needed urgent surgery and for whom it was already too late.
One man, half naked and curled up in a ball on the grime- ridden floor, shook uncontrollably, his body still in shock from the attack. Doctors stepped over him, and the pool of blood around him, as they tended to even worse cases.
The scenes at Kadhimiya were repeated at Yarmouk and at other hospitals and clinics throughout Baghdad -- all those close to the scene of the bombing.
The attack occurred shortly after dawn as crowds of men gathered in a square in Kadhimiya, a predominantly Shi'ite area of Baghdad, to look for work as day labourers.
It is a daily ritual across the capital, where unemployment runs high and young men are desperate for any work.
WITNESS TO DEATH
Nayif Atshan, 58, was close to the scene of the blast. He said a man in a pick-up truck pulled up to the crowd of men and asked if anyone wanted work. Some jumped in the back and others crowded around. Then the man got back in the pick-up and it blew up, Atshan said.
"I still remember the man's beard," he said, as he lay in Karama hospital, part of his leg blown off.
"After the explosion, cars were burning around me and flesh was scattered everywhere, it was raining blood," he said.
It was one of more than half a dozen car bomb attacks around the capital on Wednesday, a seemingly coordinated series of strikes that was later claimed by a group linked to al Qaeda.
In all, more than 150 people were killed and around 200 wounded in Baghdad, Iraqi police and health officials said.
The Kadhimiya bombing was the second deadliest since the war in Iraq began -- the worst coming in February this year when 125 people, including dozens of police recruits, were killed when a car bomb exploded in Hilla, south of Baghdad.
The extent of violence in the country, unabated after more than 2-1/2 years of conflict, has left a large proportion of the population psychologically scarred, experts say, while more and more families have lost one or more relative.
Hassan Mayid, a labourer from Sadr City, was hit by two pieces of shrapnel in the Kadhimiya blast. Relatives tended to him in hospital, relieved that he was still alive.
"I saw people burning around me," he said. "I even saw some without body parts and one man had his intestines lying out.
"Why did they kill labourers like this? I wish the government would wipe out all terrorists," he said.
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Citation:
Mussab al-Khairalla. "Baghdad hospital corridors fill with dead, wounded", Reuters, 14 September 2005.