 |
|
red_mustard
|
|
Im serouis. According to the "Inside Saddam's Bunker" MSNBC report a few months ago some of his ex-butlers were saying he's on Internet chat rooms and forums. Also he has an AOL and Hotmail account. Both of these were confirmed by the CIA and made public, and the services henceforth cut. This was in 2000-2001
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Alexander's Horse
|
 |
Panmunjon, hands up!
Jan 1970
time: 15:27
|
|
This is the sickening reality of war:
quote:
Missile kills nine in one family: 'Why was this done?'
April 9 2003, 11:00 AM
The warplane's missile had just killed his wife, a daughter, a son and seven grandchildren.
Then, Abid Al-Hussan Hamoodi, 72, heard hope - a child's muffled call for help from under a metre of rubble in a storage room of his home, where he and his family had been sleeping since the war began more than two weeks ago.
"I heard a noise crying 'Baba, Baba!' (father) and I kept digging until a head came up," Al-Hussan said. "We were never expecting that a rocket would hit the rear of the house."
He dug out two of his grandchildren, ages five and six months, and a daughter-in-law. She lost four of her five children in the aerial assault on Saturday morning, the day before the British stormed Basra.
"Why was this done?" Al-Hussan asked. "What mistake have we committed? None. We have never created a problem. If the coalition people knew something (about the intended target), why didn't they tell us" so that residents could flee?
"I'm finished and I'm losing control of myself and I can't cry any more. ... To me, my life is finished."
One of the hidden stories of the war in Iraq is the number of civilian casualties. In Basra, the death toll has been estimated at a few hundred people, according to doctors and employees at two of the city's hospitals.
But the absence of law and order in invaded cities such as Basra makes an official count nearly impossible.
Physicians and employees at local hospitals have not tallied the number of injured and fatally wounded civilians. Many doctors and hospital managers have not shown up for work because of the war, exacerbating the confusion.
"We don't have exact numbers," said Dr Uday Abdel Hussein at Tahrir Hospital in northern Basra.
In the capital of Baghdad, precise numbers of casualties also are unavailable. In the past week, the government stopped updating numbers of civilian dead and wounded.
The air strike on Saturday near Al-Hussan's home was one of the last allied sorties before the British tank and troop invasion of Basra on Sunday. His house was near the apparent target, the Iraqi intelligence headquarters and its residential compound a block away.
Al-Hussan had not left the house since the war began. He made sure everyone in his two-story corner house slept in the two metre by three metre storage room, far from the windows and courtyard. Food was stockpiled in freezers to last three months and surplus water was stored in a garden well.
The first missile struck the street, jolting everyone awake, and then the plane fired again. A nearby home was obliterated; two neighbour families lost eight relatives.
But Al-Hussan's loss was even more staggering: his wife, Khayeria Mahmoud, 67; his son Wessan Abid Hassan, 40, who was an engineer; daughter Eahab Abi Hassan, 35, who was a doctor; grandson Zain Al Abideen Akram, 16; grandson Moustafa Akram, 15; granddaughter Zina Akram Abid Hassan, 13; granddaughter Hassan Ayed Abd, 10; grandson Ammar Mohammed, 2; grandson Zainab Akram Abid, 18 months; and granddaughter Noor Saad, 6 months.
Yesterday afternoon, Al-Hussan sat in a panelled parlour of the home of his son, who lost four of his five children. The fifth child, a boy, was one of the four survivors. Al-Hussan's son, Akram Abid Al Hassan, director of a local teaching hospital, was at work at the time of the attack.
About 100 men also sat in the parlour and on a patio as part of the three-day Muslim period of mourning, in which an imam's prayer filtered through the palm trees and over the walls.
As Al-Hussan mourned yesterday, he also pondered the British invasion of Basra. Three of Al-Hussan's sons are British citizens who live in Manchester. He began working for the British in 1945 for the Basra Oil Co, which was renamed the South Oil Co after Iraq nationalised its vast oil wealth. He retired in 1992.
His children and their spouses work as doctors, a neurosurgeon, a computer engineer, a pharmacist, and a businessman in Basra, southern Iraq's largest city.
"I was feeling like the luckiest person in the world until this happened," Al-Hussan said.
Although he is a Shi'ite Muslim - most of who oppose Saddam Hussein - Al-Hussan said he avoids politics.
Shi'ites bury their dead in Najaf in southern Iraq, but because the war has made travel to that city difficult, the patriarch buried his wife and nine members of his family in temporary graves in Basra.
"Do we deserve this? I don't think so," Al-Hussan said. "No one has come to apologise. ... I lost my family. I lost my house."
The heart-wrenching local accounts of casualties - as well as the looting and lawlessness in Basra - is turning some public opinion against the British troops.
Andres Kruesi of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Basra said there is a "total lack of authority" in the city of about 1.3 million people. British troops, he said, "are not a police force, but they have to establish a police force as the occupying power".
British military leaders have dispatched foot patrols and stationed tanks and armoured vehicles at hospitals and major intersections in an effort to deter criminals.
Some residents said the city was better when Saddam was in control.
"We felt safety with Saddam Hussein. He was controlling the situation very well," said Ammar Mohammed, 32, a marine engineer.
KRT
|
Innocent people die. End the war now please.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Kaak
|
|
quote:
why didn't they tell us" so that residents could flee? |
sorry, next time i guess they should come in with loud speakers, and announce that the civilians should leave, and the bad guys should stay put...
|
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:27.
Apolyton Time is 00:27. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
09-04-2003 09:24
Attachment: 
|
