Scorching Iraq

U.S. Marines, moving through this still-contested city, opened fire at anything that moved Tuesday, leaving dozens of dead in their wake, at least some of them civilians. Helicopter gunships circled overhead, unleashing Hellfire missiles into the squat mud-brick homes and firing their machine guns, raining spent cartridge cases into neighborhoods. Occasionally a tank blasted a hole in a house. Several bodies fell in alleys. It was impossible to know which casualties were civilians and which were members of the Iraqi militias… “I started feeling comfortable, like I knew what I was doing,” said Cpl. David Barringer, 25, a reservist who is a firefighter from Gulfport, Miss. “I never really felt scared,” he said, saying he had shot one militia fighter and maybe three. “Everything we were taught, it all comes back to you.”

Attempts by US marines to take bridges over the river Euphrates, which passes through Nassiriya, have become bogged down in casualties and troops taken prisoner. The marines, in turn, have responded harshly. Out in the plain west of the city, marines shepherding a gigantic series of convoys north towards Baghdad have reacted to ragged sniping with an aggressive series of house searches and arrests. A surgical assistant at the Saddam hospital in Nassiriya, interviewed at a marine check point outside the city, said that on Sunday, half an hour after two dead marines were brought into the hospital, US aircraft dropped what he described as three or four cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing 10 and wounding 200.

In the south, the unexpected resistance by armed civilians using guerrilla tactics has thrown into sharp relief the basic contradiction between the military and political objectives of the Bush administration in Iraq. Faced by a well dug in and hostile military force inside Nasiriyah, Najaf and Basra, US and British military commanders had to decide whether or not to call in artillery fire and aircraft strikes in order to minimise their own casualties when they went in, or to avoid calling in such strikes in order to minimise civilian casualties and the consequent anger of the populace against them. Reports from the frontlines suggest that initially the senior commanders resisted insistent appeals by their field commanders to ‘soften’ the enemy, but eventually gave in. As a result, civilians died in considerable numbers in Najaf and Nasiriyah on Monday. On Tuesday, the British declared Basra a ‘legitimate military target’, and artillery shells and bombs began to fall upon that city too. Inevitably, civilians have begun to die in Basra too.

A tape from Basra’s largest hospital shows victims of the Anglo-American bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain. A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A little girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl’s guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors try to strip her for surgery … Other harrowing scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another small girl was lying on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child had its feet blown away.