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The Fall of Baghdad

The Penguin Press

Chapter One

At about nine o'clock, after having dinner at one of Baghdad's two restaurants still open for business, we heard that there had been a bombing in which many civilians had been killed. We raced out to the place, which was on the northern outskirts of Baghdad. About twenty minutes later, we arrived at the Al-Nur General Hospital in the Shia suburb of Al Shualla. There, the hospital director, Dr. Haqqui Razuki, told us that a warplane had struck a marketplace just a few hundred yards away. Razuki was polite but angry; he believed the attack had been deliberate. The bombing had occurred a couple of hours earlier, at dusk, when the market was crowded with people. Thirty-five dead and forty-seven injured people had been brought into his hospital, but some of the casualties had been taken elsewhere. (The final death tally was sixty-two.) Wordlessly, Razuki's assistant led us through hallways thronged with soldiers, doctors, relatives of the wounded-into a rear garden. There, we passed a man who had his face turned to the wall. He was sobbing in a loud, grief-stricken way into his folded arms. We walked on. A few moments later, still sobbing, he came up behind us fast and then, breaking into a run, he overtook us.

We arrived at an aluminum hut. The sobbing man was standing there with some other men next to a young hospital attendant wearing a filthy smock. The attendant opened the door, and a blast of cold air came out. Inside, I could see four dead men lying in contorted poses. The weeping man dove wildly inside, crying disconsolately, but another man, a friend of his, pulled him back out and away from the doorway. The dead men's bodies were torn up and bloody, and their clothes were ragged and dirty. There was a lot of blood on the floor. Some nurses appeared, older women wearing white head scarves, and began keening quietly.

One of the dead men was placed on a metal stretcher and brought outside. Other men arrived carrying a plain wood coffin and placed the dead man inside it. Several of the men broke down in tears and held their heads with their hands as this took place, calling out the dead man's name, "Haidar," over and over again. They placed the lid on the coffin and hoisted it onto their shoulders. As they set off, they repeatedly chanted the Koranic verse "There is only one God." As they went by, the morgue attendant came and stood very close to me. I gagged at his stench, which was of dead bodies.

In the local mosque, where the dead were being taken to be washed and prayed over, people stood around quietly. A stream of coffins came and went through the front door. Men smoked cigarettes or simply stared. A black banner across one wall was illustrated with an image of the decapitated head, gushing blood, of Imam Ali Hussein, the martyr of Shia devotion. I followed one of the coffins as it was taken outside, the bearers singing their praise to God, as before in the hospital. On a vacant lot just outside, they set down the coffin and knelt in prayer. Red tracer fire from an antiaircraft gun floated into the sky above us.

I walked down the lane to the scrubby little marketplace where the bomb had hit. It had left a tiny crater, just a meter in diameter and very shallow, at the edge of a little plaza surrounded on two sides with modest market stalls. The stalls were ravaged looking, their tin roofs torn up, and a large pool of water had formed in front of a burst waterpipe, which still gushed torrentially. From one of the houses across the street, I heard the sound of a woman crying. Soon, other people began weeping too, and as they did, the woman's cries became screams.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Fall of Baghdad by Jon Lee Anderson Excerpted by permission.
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