March 17th - The Farm (2)
We went to look for a family we met last year in the hospital just after their farmhouse was bombed, to find out how they are and to look, again, for the intended military target.
March 17th
The Farm (2)
“We are farmers. We are farmers.” Fatima kept screaming it, over and over, cradling one child after another, the fourth dead in the rubble of the farmhouse they fled to for sanctuary from Baghdad. It was almost a year ago, March 23rd, at four in the afternoon. Three people were killed: Fatima’s 8 year old daughter, Zahra, her sister Hana and her brother’s new wife Nahda, who was 18.
Surviving family members and neighbours said they saw the plane circling overhead for some time before it fired three rockets, one of which hit the house, destroying the entire upper storey. Everyone said at the time that there was nothing military in the area, nor anything that they could imagine was the intended target. We always wondered though, even after we drove around the area and couldn’t find anything, whether they were told by the security services what to say to us.
The school we went to in the morning was in Diyala Bridge, near to where the farm was so we decided to go and look for them, find out what had happened. Taalib drove us there last time and he gave us approximate directions and said to ask when we were nearby for the house that was bombed in the war.
We drove down the track past a few houses, none of them familiar. We stopped and asked and were directed back to the first house we passed. We didn’t recognise the woman outside, nor the children who peered out through the windows. They talked about most of the family being killed. Their bombing was at midnight, demolishing three houses, on March 29th, six days after the attack that we knew about.
Layla pointed out the remains of the houses. Sixteen or seventeen people died altogether. She is the second wife of the brother of the owner of the house that’s now been rebuilt. The first wife was killed in the attack. He’s in the UK now staying with family members and receiving treatment after losing his arms in the bombing.
Mustafa Taha, a sixteen year old boy, listed eight of his family who were killed. Kamila Abid Kadem, his 50 year old mother, his sisters Muna and Abir Taha, 24 and 20, his 13 year old brother Mohammed Taha, 50 year old Ismail Abbas, 11 year old Abbas Smail and Mustafa’s cousins Ezhar and Sabiha, both 27 year old women. Mustafa had shrapnel wounds in his shoulder but he’s physically OK now.
“We heard the plane above us for about 15 minutes and suddenly we were underground.” He pointed to a smaller boy, fourteen years old, sitting on the edge of a step from the house. “He lost all of his family.”
Nabil Sabah stood up very straight. “I was at the house of my uncle and I came back at noon and the house was destroyed. My mother and father and all my five brothers and sisters were dead. The rocket hit the house directly.” Speechless, I looked around at the family, their faces still devastated, their bodies still weighed down with grief.
“Asafa” I said to Nabil. I’m sorry, although it was a pointless thing to say..
He nodded, dignified, and he didn’t cry but his little body slumped somehow as if something was crumbling inside him, consumed by the pain which was undiminished, still raw and unaddressed.
Taha Abbas, the uncle who Nabil lives with now, said, “We came back to the house and there were many people missing. We searched in the rubble and there were pieces of them everywhere. Some of them we found with their heads off. We are farmers. We have lived here since 1958.”
He’s rebuilt his own house and his brother’s. There are 8 in the house now, with water and occasional electricity. He thinks the military base three kilometres away might have been the intended target, although after 15 minutes of circling he’s unsure how they could have hit the house instead, how they could miss by three thousand metres.
“The tanks and troops come through here all the time. It is hard for us to like them after what they have done to us. We have nothing. We are just hanging around trying to live. The Iraqi government has never asked about us, nor the Americans. No one has come and asked about us until you.”
They had no knowledge of another house in the area being hit, so we crossed the river and asked more people. “Do you mean the house where two women and a child were killed?” someone asked. That was the one.
Though the house was in pieces last time, we knew it when we saw it. There’s a drop from the dirt track down to the house. I knew the man who came out. When I first saw him I thought he was smiling. He was on the far side of the emergency room, covered with blood and grime. An older man, his father, the owner of the house, was brought through in a wheelchair and he came to him, held the arm of the wheelchair, asked him a question I couldn’t understand. It was a grimace, not a smile, his face desperate.
Ajama shook his head and Khalid collapsed, gasping for breath as if his was tied to Nahda’s, still under the wreckage of the house. When we went the next day to get directions to the house, he was hunched in the corridor, still bloody, head on his knees, tears falling silently, endlessly.
They welcomed us into the house, Khalid, his brother Omar and their mum. Walking in I found the memory transposed onto the present, the rubble now swept away, the second storey replaced and the walls repainted, the windows whole and cushions laid around the outside of the room. Khalid fetched some photos of the house before it was repaired but for me, that was still more vivid than the clean building around me.
Among the photos was one of Hana, Khalid’s sister. “She was in the last year of her studies,” Umm Khalid said. “She was studying to be a teacher of Arabic. She would have finished in the summer.” Khalid hasn’t got any photos of Nahda. They were all destroyed in the bombing. The only one is a passport photo in her ID papers, a very young woman. “She was only eighteen years old and they murdered her,” Umm Khalid said and had to wipe her eyes.
“Can you imagine how we felt?” Umm Khalid asked. “It was the seventh day after the weeding. We brought the bride to the house at four o’clock and at four o’clock we were bombed.”
Umm Khalid talked about Nada, Fatima’s oldest daughter. She was speaking in Arabic but her gesture, a long sweep of the hand along the thigh, was unmistakeable, the gouge in Nada’s leg unforgettable and still, she said, causing her problems. How is Rana, I asked. Rana was eight when the bombing happened, suffering badly with concussion and struggling to breathe when we met her.
“Rana is alright. For us, we are all alright,” Umm Khalid said. “You can see we are alright. But for them, they are broken. Their family is broken.” Fatima has gone back to Baghdad with her three surviving children, Nada now 15, Rana 9 and Mohammed 5. “They came from Baghdad because their home was close to the Air Force Centre and the National Theatre and they thought the Air Force Centre would be bombed. Of course it was bombed, but how could they have expected that we would be bombed as well?”
We asked them again what they thought was the intended target. Still they said there is nothing military in the area, nothing related to communications or electricity generation. We’d driven all over the area looking for the house and again found nothing that explained the attack in terms of a mistake, an attempt to hit a legitimate target. We passed the Tuwaitha nuclear power station quite a distance away, drove around its heavily wired perimeter wall but, even had that been within ten kilometres of the farmhouse, it didn’t explain the attack. Even in the furthest reaches of lunacy I can’t believe anyone aims to blow up a nuclear power station close to a city they plan to occupy.
Ajama came back from a funeral. One of his relatives was killed in the crossfire of an ambush, some Iraqi militiamen, some US troops; he happened to be travelling along the road. He was friendly, polite, thanked us for coming. No one has been to ask about us since you last came, he said, not the new Iraqi government, not the Americans, nobody has offered any help.
“But we are afraid. We welcome you but I am afraid that if we are seen with foreigners in our home people will tell the Americans we are working for the resistance or tell the militias we are working for the Americans. They will ask who are these people, how did you have communication with them, how did they know where to find you to come and visit your house. I don’t know anyone who this has happened to but we hear stories. We hear of it happening.”
He runs a small company with a few employees. Khalid works as an engineer in the electrical plant which took him on after he graduated a couple of years ago, in Karrada, a long journey to work each day. They are somewhere between the traditional and the modern, still farmers but also working outside in professions. The entire area is Shia.
Before we left we had to know whether they were told by Mukhabarat, the security police, what to say to us. “They did not tell us anything. They did not come to us.” There’s no reason, now, to disbelieve him. Yet he is more afraid now that he was before the war, more afraid to talk to foreigners, more afraid to draw attention to himself. Ajama thanked us repeatedly, kept apologising for his fear.
We went looking for the bereaved family of three dead and found the still devastated remnants of the families of seventeen more. Raed worked on a survey of deaths and spoke to a doctor in Nasariya who gave him the details of casualties who came into the hospital but estimated that perhaps a quarter to a third of the dead actually came to the hospital; the rest were simply buried.
The survey was never properly published, thousands of forms still awaiting analysis. Marla, the American woman who set up CIVIC, the organisation which started the survey, is the darling of the US liberal media, utterly unchallenging to the status quo, but always willing to talk about her crusade for compensation for the victims. She talks about how she went door to door asking about casualties and deaths, a version which irritates the people who set up the teams of volunteers who actually did go door to door carrying out the research.
The result of it all has been a paltry $10 million (about 5.5 million pounds) to USAID, the US Agency for International Development, the department responsible for awarding reconstruction contracts for Iraq exclusively to US companies.
It hasn’t reached, and will never reach, Nabil in his uncle’s house, still grieving for his entire family. It will not reach Khalid, widowed within a week of his wedding, Fatima, whose family was broken by the loss of Zahra at the age of nine, nor ease the disability Nada is still suffering with her leg, never mind the psychological pain that hasn’t healed.
The Farm (2)
“We are farmers. We are farmers.” Fatima kept screaming it, over and over, cradling one child after another, the fourth dead in the rubble of the farmhouse they fled to for sanctuary from Baghdad. It was almost a year ago, March 23rd, at four in the afternoon. Three people were killed: Fatima’s 8 year old daughter, Zahra, her sister Hana and her brother’s new wife Nahda, who was 18.
Surviving family members and neighbours said they saw the plane circling overhead for some time before it fired three rockets, one of which hit the house, destroying the entire upper storey. Everyone said at the time that there was nothing military in the area, nor anything that they could imagine was the intended target. We always wondered though, even after we drove around the area and couldn’t find anything, whether they were told by the security services what to say to us.
The school we went to in the morning was in Diyala Bridge, near to where the farm was so we decided to go and look for them, find out what had happened. Taalib drove us there last time and he gave us approximate directions and said to ask when we were nearby for the house that was bombed in the war.
We drove down the track past a few houses, none of them familiar. We stopped and asked and were directed back to the first house we passed. We didn’t recognise the woman outside, nor the children who peered out through the windows. They talked about most of the family being killed. Their bombing was at midnight, demolishing three houses, on March 29th, six days after the attack that we knew about.
Layla pointed out the remains of the houses. Sixteen or seventeen people died altogether. She is the second wife of the brother of the owner of the house that’s now been rebuilt. The first wife was killed in the attack. He’s in the UK now staying with family members and receiving treatment after losing his arms in the bombing.
Mustafa Taha, a sixteen year old boy, listed eight of his family who were killed. Kamila Abid Kadem, his 50 year old mother, his sisters Muna and Abir Taha, 24 and 20, his 13 year old brother Mohammed Taha, 50 year old Ismail Abbas, 11 year old Abbas Smail and Mustafa’s cousins Ezhar and Sabiha, both 27 year old women. Mustafa had shrapnel wounds in his shoulder but he’s physically OK now.
“We heard the plane above us for about 15 minutes and suddenly we were underground.” He pointed to a smaller boy, fourteen years old, sitting on the edge of a step from the house. “He lost all of his family.”
Nabil Sabah stood up very straight. “I was at the house of my uncle and I came back at noon and the house was destroyed. My mother and father and all my five brothers and sisters were dead. The rocket hit the house directly.” Speechless, I looked around at the family, their faces still devastated, their bodies still weighed down with grief.
“Asafa” I said to Nabil. I’m sorry, although it was a pointless thing to say..
He nodded, dignified, and he didn’t cry but his little body slumped somehow as if something was crumbling inside him, consumed by the pain which was undiminished, still raw and unaddressed.
Taha Abbas, the uncle who Nabil lives with now, said, “We came back to the house and there were many people missing. We searched in the rubble and there were pieces of them everywhere. Some of them we found with their heads off. We are farmers. We have lived here since 1958.”
He’s rebuilt his own house and his brother’s. There are 8 in the house now, with water and occasional electricity. He thinks the military base three kilometres away might have been the intended target, although after 15 minutes of circling he’s unsure how they could have hit the house instead, how they could miss by three thousand metres.
“The tanks and troops come through here all the time. It is hard for us to like them after what they have done to us. We have nothing. We are just hanging around trying to live. The Iraqi government has never asked about us, nor the Americans. No one has come and asked about us until you.”
They had no knowledge of another house in the area being hit, so we crossed the river and asked more people. “Do you mean the house where two women and a child were killed?” someone asked. That was the one.
Though the house was in pieces last time, we knew it when we saw it. There’s a drop from the dirt track down to the house. I knew the man who came out. When I first saw him I thought he was smiling. He was on the far side of the emergency room, covered with blood and grime. An older man, his father, the owner of the house, was brought through in a wheelchair and he came to him, held the arm of the wheelchair, asked him a question I couldn’t understand. It was a grimace, not a smile, his face desperate.
Ajama shook his head and Khalid collapsed, gasping for breath as if his was tied to Nahda’s, still under the wreckage of the house. When we went the next day to get directions to the house, he was hunched in the corridor, still bloody, head on his knees, tears falling silently, endlessly.
They welcomed us into the house, Khalid, his brother Omar and their mum. Walking in I found the memory transposed onto the present, the rubble now swept away, the second storey replaced and the walls repainted, the windows whole and cushions laid around the outside of the room. Khalid fetched some photos of the house before it was repaired but for me, that was still more vivid than the clean building around me.
Among the photos was one of Hana, Khalid’s sister. “She was in the last year of her studies,” Umm Khalid said. “She was studying to be a teacher of Arabic. She would have finished in the summer.” Khalid hasn’t got any photos of Nahda. They were all destroyed in the bombing. The only one is a passport photo in her ID papers, a very young woman. “She was only eighteen years old and they murdered her,” Umm Khalid said and had to wipe her eyes.
“Can you imagine how we felt?” Umm Khalid asked. “It was the seventh day after the weeding. We brought the bride to the house at four o’clock and at four o’clock we were bombed.”
Umm Khalid talked about Nada, Fatima’s oldest daughter. She was speaking in Arabic but her gesture, a long sweep of the hand along the thigh, was unmistakeable, the gouge in Nada’s leg unforgettable and still, she said, causing her problems. How is Rana, I asked. Rana was eight when the bombing happened, suffering badly with concussion and struggling to breathe when we met her.
“Rana is alright. For us, we are all alright,” Umm Khalid said. “You can see we are alright. But for them, they are broken. Their family is broken.” Fatima has gone back to Baghdad with her three surviving children, Nada now 15, Rana 9 and Mohammed 5. “They came from Baghdad because their home was close to the Air Force Centre and the National Theatre and they thought the Air Force Centre would be bombed. Of course it was bombed, but how could they have expected that we would be bombed as well?”
We asked them again what they thought was the intended target. Still they said there is nothing military in the area, nothing related to communications or electricity generation. We’d driven all over the area looking for the house and again found nothing that explained the attack in terms of a mistake, an attempt to hit a legitimate target. We passed the Tuwaitha nuclear power station quite a distance away, drove around its heavily wired perimeter wall but, even had that been within ten kilometres of the farmhouse, it didn’t explain the attack. Even in the furthest reaches of lunacy I can’t believe anyone aims to blow up a nuclear power station close to a city they plan to occupy.
Ajama came back from a funeral. One of his relatives was killed in the crossfire of an ambush, some Iraqi militiamen, some US troops; he happened to be travelling along the road. He was friendly, polite, thanked us for coming. No one has been to ask about us since you last came, he said, not the new Iraqi government, not the Americans, nobody has offered any help.
“But we are afraid. We welcome you but I am afraid that if we are seen with foreigners in our home people will tell the Americans we are working for the resistance or tell the militias we are working for the Americans. They will ask who are these people, how did you have communication with them, how did they know where to find you to come and visit your house. I don’t know anyone who this has happened to but we hear stories. We hear of it happening.”
He runs a small company with a few employees. Khalid works as an engineer in the electrical plant which took him on after he graduated a couple of years ago, in Karrada, a long journey to work each day. They are somewhere between the traditional and the modern, still farmers but also working outside in professions. The entire area is Shia.
Before we left we had to know whether they were told by Mukhabarat, the security police, what to say to us. “They did not tell us anything. They did not come to us.” There’s no reason, now, to disbelieve him. Yet he is more afraid now that he was before the war, more afraid to talk to foreigners, more afraid to draw attention to himself. Ajama thanked us repeatedly, kept apologising for his fear.
We went looking for the bereaved family of three dead and found the still devastated remnants of the families of seventeen more. Raed worked on a survey of deaths and spoke to a doctor in Nasariya who gave him the details of casualties who came into the hospital but estimated that perhaps a quarter to a third of the dead actually came to the hospital; the rest were simply buried.
The survey was never properly published, thousands of forms still awaiting analysis. Marla, the American woman who set up CIVIC, the organisation which started the survey, is the darling of the US liberal media, utterly unchallenging to the status quo, but always willing to talk about her crusade for compensation for the victims. She talks about how she went door to door asking about casualties and deaths, a version which irritates the people who set up the teams of volunteers who actually did go door to door carrying out the research.
The result of it all has been a paltry $10 million (about 5.5 million pounds) to USAID, the US Agency for International Development, the department responsible for awarding reconstruction contracts for Iraq exclusively to US companies.
It hasn’t reached, and will never reach, Nabil in his uncle’s house, still grieving for his entire family. It will not reach Khalid, widowed within a week of his wedding, Fatima, whose family was broken by the loss of Zahra at the age of nine, nor ease the disability Nada is still suffering with her leg, never mind the psychological pain that hasn’t healed.