Free Market Forces

With the symbolic targets destroyed early on and the liberation of the city not going as planned, the allied planners are working their way down the list. On Friday they knocked out three telecoms exchanges using bunker-busting missiles that made the ground shake in the surrounding area. That night, they hit the Ministry of Information, long expected to be a target but perhaps delayed as the allies waited to see if the city would fall in the first week … The most severe damage occurred in two marketplace bombings, the worst one early Friday evening that killed over 50 and wounded just as many. At least 15 of the victims were children, and at the local mosque they washed the young, pale bodies punctured by shrapnel late into the night before they were carried in coffins through the streets. Bystanders talked of severed heads and limbs and a young man offered to show us the brains of a friend who had been standing next to him during the explosion. While we were looking at the crater, a man took us by the arm and led us through the dirt streets of the poor Shia neighbourhood, Al Shula. Inside a small, bare livingroom with two old wooden benches, a coffin lay covered by a blanket. The man took off the covering, opened the pine box and pulled a striped green blanket off a small body. The 12-year-old boy stared blankly, his arm folded awkwardly under him. Mohammed Abdul Karim Hamid Al Kinari was out buying tea at the market around the corner when the missile hit. As stood in the living room, his mother Tisar reached into the coffin, grabbing hold of Mohammed and began calling him back from the dead. ‘My baby, you are my only son,’ she said as relatives pull her off the corpse. ‘My baby, my son, my son.’ When they closed the coffin, Tisar beat the coffin with her fists and wailed, pulling her hair.

The missile sprayed hunks of metal through the crowds � mainly women and children � and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads. Three brothers, the eldest 21 and the youngest 12, for example, were cut down inside the living room of their brick hut on the main road opposite the market. Two doors away, two sisters were killed in an identical manner. “We have never seen anything like these wounds before,” Dr Ahmed, an anaesthetist at the Al-Noor hospital told me later. “These people have been punctured by dozens of bits of metal.”