http://www.irak.be/ned/index.htm

Diary from Baghdad, April 3, 8pm
Dr. Geert Van Moorter through satellite telephone

About the horrors of war, 100 km south of Baghdad
 http://www.irak.be/ned/missies/medicalMissionColetteGeert/report_04_04_2003.htm

Bert de Belder

“I have two awful stories to tellâ€, Geert immediately starts when I get him on the line. “Today we drove to Hilla, a small town near Babylon that was heavily bombed yesterday. One poor district was hit by 20 to 25 bombs. The hospital of Hilla received in the next half an hour 150 seriously injured patients. Dr. Mahmoud Al-Mukhtar said that the wounds were caused by clusterbombs. These are bombs that explode into many small bombs that again explode individually and cause enormous damage. Clusterbombs are banned by the International Laws on War, but Bush completely disregards these! In the hospital I have seen very many abrading situations. A family of eleven persons, of whom six are dead… A father who is left with one child; his wife and two sons are dead… Small children with amputated limbs…â€
“My second story is even more horribleâ€, warns Geert. “About a bus with civilians that was fired upon. Not the one in Najaf, which reached the news everywhere, but a case that according to me has not yet been covered by western media. Three days ago, In Al Sqifal, near Hilla, a passenger bus was fired upon from an American checkpoint, with ghastly results. According to witnesses the bus stopped on time and had, on orders of the American Military, turned back. Dr. Saad El-Fadoui, a 52 years old surgeon who still has studied in Scotland, was immediately on the place of incident from the hospital in Hilla. When he told me what he had seen there, he again became very emotional, three days after it had happened. ‘The bodies were al carbonized, terribly mutilated, torn into pieces, he sighs. ‘In and around the bus I saw dismembered heads, brains and intestines,….’ One wonders what a criminal weapon of massdestruction could have caused these horrors. Nobody had heard the sound of an explosion; on the bodies no traces of shrapnel were found. A journalist spoke of a heat-weapon with liquid cupper or something like that…. Can the Americans be really that cruel? Dr. Saad El-Fadoui asked us repeatedly to do everything to help stop this horrible war of aggression.
Geert understands me poorly when I say something, the line is not always clear. “We are momentarily without electricityâ€, he explains. “Large blocks in Baghdad are without electricity, last night the bombardment was very severe. Colette (Geert’s college-doctor Dr. Collete Moulaert) saw from her hotel room, just behind the mosque in this neighborhood, two enormous fireballs coming down. I think that these are containerbombs of about 7-8 tons each that cause enormous vibrations. “I am shivering of the coldâ€, Collete said, but this was the vibration caused by the bomb explosion.
“You should not belief everything what CNN and BBC are showing, Geert informs us. “That we were able to travel today up to Hilla (near Babylon, south of Kerbala) with a large group ‘human shields’, 100 km south-west of Baghdad, proves convincingly that the Iraqi capital is not being completely surrounded and besieged. Along the way we hardly saw Iraqi troop movements. On the 100 km route we didn’t pass any Iraqi checkpoint, and hardly saw signs of war. There were groups of scattered houses, trees, even children playing with paper kites…. One time we were told to take a side road because a colon of 20 to 30 Iraqi tanks had to pass. This again disproves the charges that the Iraqi army is using civilians as shield for military operations: our civilian vehicle was first sent safely to another road before the Iraqi army passed. On our way back the Americans and British were bombing the area. For our safety we had to take a new another road, but this was also nearly hit by a bomb, followed by a tick plume of smoke. This was frightening for a while, because we were not safely in our hotel, but in the open air.