Iraq: a descent into civil war?
Luke Harding in Baghdad, The Guardian
Wednesday September 15, 2004
Lying amid the debris strewn near Al-Karkh police station was the photo of a young man in a blue T-shirt. The passport snap had been part of his application to join Iraq's police force.
Yesterday, however, he and dozens of other recruits queueing outside the station in central Baghdad were blown to pieces by a car bomb. Near the photo, someone had heaped the shoes of the dead and injured into a neat pile.
The destruction from the suspected suicide blast which killed 47 people and injured 114 was everywhere: bits of metal, glass, a broken billiard table, a dead bird and pools of blood.
There was nothing left of the recruit in the photo.
"The bomb went off at 10am. A lot of people were queueing up to join the police," said Allah Hamas, 31, who owns Allah's Famous Falafel Stand, next to the police station.
"I handed a customer a sandwich. Suddenly there was an explosion and a piece of metal ripped off the top of his head.
"After that I ran out to help. We covered the dead with blankets. I saw at least 30 bodies. Thirteen of them were burnt completely. Some people were scattered into pieces. We found them among their files and photos."
It was the deadliest single incident in the Iraqi capital for six months, but there was nothing unique about the explosion; it took place a few hundred metres from Haifa Street, a well-known centre of resistance to the American occupation and the scene of heavy fighting on Sunday. It was embarrassingly close to the green zone and the US embassy.
But it reveals a grim truth about the nature of Iraq's evolving insurgency: Iraqis are killing Iraqis.
In recent months, and especially since the handover of "power" to the unelected interim government, Iraq's resistance has concentrated its efforts on killing those who collaborate with the Americans - the police officers, would-be police officers, translators, governors and government officials.
It is beginning to look like, and feel like, civil war.
In another incident yesterday, gunmen ambushed a minibus full of policeman in Baquba, north-west of Baghdad, killing 11 of them and a civilian. They were on their way home to their base.
In Ramadi, clashes between US troops and insurgents left eight dead and 18 wounded.
Responsibility for the attacks in Baghdad and Baquba was claimed yesterday by Tawhid and Jihad, Iraq's shadowy and fastest-growing militant group, which is allegedly linked to the Jordanian al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In reality, though, the real identities of the insurgents remain opaque. They undoubtedly include a handful of foreign fighters, but the majority are Iraqi nationalists violently opposed to the continuing occupation of their country.
"What happened here has really got nothing to do with Islam," said Rafid Ahmed, whose shop in Al-Karkh was destroyed.
Mr Ahmed said his two neighbours in the next-door barber's shop were killed. He survived only because he opened up late.
"Why are these people targeting Iraqi police recruits? They just want to get a salary because they are unemployed," he said. "The people who did this are terrorists."
What would he do now? "Wait and see," he said. "This store provided an income for a whole family."
In the row of ruined neighbouring shops there were bloodstains on the ceilings. A few metres away, beyond a pavement strewn with rubble and bits of tree, the explosion had dug a large crater. The blackened engine of the car had landed 30 metres away.
Mingled with the smell of incinerated metal was something else: burnt flesh.
Another witness, Raad Tawfiq, 40, contradicted the claims of Tawhid and Jihad. "It wasn't a suicide bomb," he said. "They blew the car up by remote control. People in the restaurant spotted them leaving, but it was too late.
"This was a massacre," he said.
In the run-up to the January elections, Iraq's pro-US interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, faces some stark choices. He and the US military can try to reoccupy the towns they have abandoned, or accept that there is little prospect of the polls taking place in much of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.
Some Sunni groups have dismissed the elections as a "fake", and no one quite knows whether the insurgency will fizzle out after January or, as seems more likely, become more intense.
The interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, said yesterday that the elections should go ahead. "Unless the UN says it is impossible to hold it, we're going to hold it at that time," he said.
As we drove away from Haifa Street yesterday, gunfire rang out from the nearby houses. Two green US helicopters circled menacingly. At the weekend a helicopter opened fire on unarmed demonstrators dancing round a burning Bradley armoured vehicle. Thirteen were killed, including a TV journalist working for the Arab station Al-Arabiya.
Those wounded in Baghdad yesterday were being treated in Al-Karkh hospital, a short walk from the market where the bomb exploded. American tanks and armoured vehicles had parked nearby, before moving off and leaving behind whirling clouds of dust.
Mr Hamas, the falafel shop owner, said he only survived yesterday by the grace of God. But he added: "I'm dead. I already feel I'm dead."