[Baghdad Journal] Day Fifteen (March 27)

[Wade Hudson]

Day Fifteen (March 27)

by Wade Hudson

Today we sent out the following War Crimes Report:

[Editor's Note:  here wade included the same report which was in the
previous journal entry, day fourteen.  In case you missed it, it is
available online here: 
http://lists.inlet.org/pipermail/baghdadjournal/2003-March/000029.html ]

During and after dinner, conversation percolates about the observations at
the Abdullah Hamad Hassarri family. A consensus forms that if that
incident involved a U.S. fragmentation bomb word needs to get out. I ask
how we might verify the matter, and someone points to the French plastic
surgeon sitting at a nearby table. We talk with him and then discover that
a friend of ours, a video journalist, participated in the visit and could
place still photos of the scene on a compact disc for us. In addition, it
turns out that she has in her possession three pellets from the bomb
(later, I learn that the pellets were dug out of the holes that she
filmed).

So, after a game of chess, I draft a press release, and Joneed helps me
rewrite it a bit and get the spelling on the names correct. It reads as
follows:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (draft)

DATE: Friday, March 28, 2003
CONTACT: Kathy Kelly or Ramzi Kysia, El Fanar Hotel, 718-8007, 717-2833,
or  717-7440
SUBJECT:
U.S. Military Uses Anti-Personnel, Fragmentation Bomb on Civilians in Baghdad

According to Dr. Jacques Beres, a French plastic surgeon with 35 years
experience working in war zones, fragments from a bomb that exploded in a
Baghdad residential neighborhood Tuesday night came from an
anti-personnel, fragmentation bomb. One can only assume that the U.S.
military dropped the bomb.
        Lying on his bed at the Al Numaan Hospital, with his stomach,
thighs, legs, and feet heavily bandaged, Muneed Abid Haamid, 25,
told Montreal journalist, Jooneed Khan on Thursday that he was
asleep at past 11 o’clock at night with his wife, Sahhar, 23, and
child, Qaiser, 6, in bed with him upstairs when he heard a loud
explosion. The windowpanes shattered and debris flew through the
room. He instinctively, immediately covered his wife and child
with his body and soon felt blood pouring out of his stomach. His
mother cried out from downstairs and rushed up to take Qaiser
away. By then neighbors had rushed to help. His wife and child had
been released, while Muneed remained in the hospital.
        On the same day that Khan interviewed Muneed, an Iraq Peace Team
(IPT) monitoring team visited Muneed’s home, which belongs to his
father, Abdullah Haamid Hassawi. The home, House #74, Street #3,
District 317, is located in Al Tujjaar, a residential neighborhood
in Al Shaab in North Baghdad. Next door to their home, the team
saw damage to windows of the Balquis Secondary School for Girls.
In the Hassawi family home, the team saw rubble from walls on the
second  floor roof patio in the courtyard below, as well as
hundreds of marks in the outer walls made from small, uniform,
cubed, metal pellets with sharp edges three to five millimeters
thick. In an upstairs room, there was a large blood stained
mattress on the floor.
        Family members reported, as had Muneed at the hospital, that
Muneed, his wife, and their son Qaiser Muneeb, had been upstairs
on the mattress when metal fragments from the bomb came in through
the window. Those fragments broke the glass and hit and injured
them all, breaking the legs of the mother and son. They were taken
to the Al Nooman Hospital in the Aadhemiya area.
        The large number of pellet marks on the walls, from top to bottom,
but not on the floor of the patio or downstairs in the courtyard,
and the low level of damage done to the building, suggested to the
team that a fragmentation bomb may have exploded about eight feet
above the roof patio and sprayed pellets into the walls. From that
point, the bomb could have blasted fragments through the window,
hitting the three injured, as well as blow out the windows of the
school next door. Dr. Beres later confirmed that the pellets were
indeed from a fragmentation bomb. Photos of the scene are
available. IPT is having the tiny, but heavy, pellets examined to
determine if they are made with depleted uranium.
        IPT considers this use of fragmentation bombs to be yet another in
a long list of outrageous war crimes being committed against the
Iraqi people by the United States of America, even though Iraq has
never attacked the United States and poses no threat to the United
States. This crime against humanity is one more reason why the
people of the world must take sustained, nonviolent action to
bring an immediate halt to the war against Iraq.
###