Thanks for the report both - although it was hard to read it must have been unbearable to witness. Hope you are both well.
Andy.

 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4777

The Independent (London) December 30, 2003
by Robert Fisk

OCCUPIERS DAMNED WHEN THE INNOCENT DIE

Cigarette sellers don't have names. They said he was called Fouad but even
the shopkeeper whose nephew drove the wounded, screaming man to hospital
didn't know his family name.

There was just a pile of crushed Marlboro boxes and a lot of blood that
had poured from his half-severed arm when the bomb went off in the middle
of Karradah. It was aimed at the Americans of course, and, as so often
happens, the Iraqis paid the price. None more so than the man in black
trousers and white shirt who was torn apart by the explosion and whose
crushed body was dragged off on a wooden cart. Another day in the life and
death of Baghdad. As always, there were the odd little ironies of
violence. The dead man - and nobody in Karradah knew him because he had
arrived in a taxi - was on his way to the local bank to change currencies,
from the old dinar notes with Saddam's face on them to the new dinars with
the ancient Iraqi mathematician Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haitham in place of the
captured dictator.

In one sense, therefore, the dead man had been making his way from "old
Iraq" to "new Iraq" when he died. A cafe owner called Anwar al-Shaaban -
the living always have names - thought the man might have been called
Ahmed.

Then there was Yassir Adel. He was a 12-year-old schoolboy and he was
taking his two brothers to school when the bomb exploded in the centre of
the crowded highway. "The American patrol had just gone past and one of
their vehicles was blasted over the road," he told me with a maturity
beyond his years. "It's like that here these days - every day."

I recognised the grocery store on the corner. In the last days of the
Anglo-American invasion in April, I had bought my eggs and water here and
I remember hiding with the owner behind his counter when an American jet
flew low down the street and bombed a building at the far end.

Yesterday - eight months later - his eggs were a grey-yellow sludge, the
plastic water bottles flooding the shop, the owner muttering to himself as
he knocked the splinters from his window frame.

A group of US troops and members of the new, hooded "Iraqi Civil Defence
Force" - a militia in all but name - turned up afterwards in those
all-too-vulnerable Humvees. Their comrades had been the target and within
an hour they were handing out coloured pamphlets - produced for just such
an occasion by the occupation authorities - which some of the shopkeepers,
sweeping their shattered glass into the street, threw into the gutters in
anger.

One showed a group of children, with the legend: "The terrorists and
troublemakers are putting bombs on both sides of the roads and highways
and they don't care about who gets hurt ... You, the citizens of Iraq,
hold the key to stopping this violence against your people." But to people
blasted by just such a bomb, this was a heavy sell. "The terrorists wish
to make anyone a victim - women, children, mothers, fathers," the leaflet
said. "These terrorists care about nothing except fear and darkness. Their
aim is to destroy your new freedom and your self-government [sic] ... Tell
the police and coalition forces about any information you have."

It was a bad time to ask the people of Karradah to be collaborators. The
insurgents -- who are cutting down young American lives

every day -- do not care if Iraqis die in the attacks, but everyone knows
that the Americans are the targets - which the leaflets failed to mention.
And indeed, the explosives were hidden in the centre of the highway. There
had been a gap in the concrete central reservation for cars to turn left
onto the street from a side road. Someone had re-sealed the gap with
stones and placed the bomb beneath them. When the first American patrol
passed, that same someone had set off the bomb - and missed the soldiers.
Did he see the man with the dinars crossing the highway in his black
trousers and white shirt? Did he see Fouad the cigarette salesman with his
Marlboros? No doubt he did.

But one young man walked up to me and blamed the Americans. "At least
under Saddam there was security - now we are afraid to go to work," he
shouted. "At least under Saddam, the innocent didn't suffer."

I disputed this. He knew this was a lie. But another, older, educated man
arrived. "We were better off under Saddam," he said. "No, we were not
free, but you have brought us anarchy." Even the old Shia lady in black,
buying lemons from the stall on the other side of the street cursed the
Americans.

It was the same old story of every foreign occupier: damned if you do and
damned if you don't - especially when the innocent die.

=====================

 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4772

KARBALA BOMBINGS

UK Independent (London) December 29, 2003
by Robert Fisk

A severed arm with a hand still attached to it lay a few metres from the
broken gates of the mayor's office in Karbala yesterday, a piece of
humanity every bit as bloody as the story of the seventh-century Shia
martyr Hussein, the golden dome of whose shrine could be seen through the
smog to the east.

They said the arm belonged to a police major - one of 11 cops killed in
the four ferocious attacks on Saturday in this most holy of cities - but
others claimed it belonged to the man who drove the truck-bomb right up to
the gates.

In the parking lot outside, stunned Polish and Bulgarian troops, many of
them in the clapped-out Russian vehicles that Saddam's own army used until
its demise eight months ago, looked at the scene with a strange mixture of
awe and contempt. Four Bulgarians were killed a mile away when another man
drove an oil tanker right up to their camouflaged headquarters.

When I approached one Bulgarian officer a few metres from the 20-foot hole
that the bomb had blasted in the road, he turned away in tears.

In all, 19 men were killed in the Karbala massacre: 11 policemen, five
Bulgarian soldiers, two Thai soldiers and a civilian - one of the highest
death tolls for suicide bombings in Iraq since the country was "liberated"
last April. The government of Bulgaria - part of the "New Europe" of the
United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld - was one of President
George Bush's most enthusiastic supporters during the invasion.

Beside Karbala University, where the Bulgarians maintained a battalion
headquarters, the scene was of equal devastation. The tanker had been
driven across a playing field towards the three-storey building and the
soldiers on guard had opened fire before he reached the inside perimeter
wire.

Bushra Jaafar, 19, was in biology class on the campus at 12.30pm when she
heard the first shots being fired at the truck. "Professor Hussein told us
all to get away from the windows because he guessed what was happening,"
she said at her slum home yesterday. "Then there was a huge explosion and
all the glass came in."

Part of the tanker was blasted half a mile from the attack, high into the
air, to land in Bushra's own backyard. Her father, Nuri, a 54-year old
veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, said the other explosions followed within
minutes. This was exemplary timing - four separate suicide attacks in only
minutes - and the defenders were woefully unprepared.

The Bulgarians had smothered their headquarters in camouflage netting,
just as the Soviet army had once taught them to do, but had not secured
the football pitch. The bomber had reached the barbed wire at the main
gate when he blew up his truck and part of the outer walls had come
cascading into the forecourt.

Bulgarian troops, under Polish command in this central sector of Iraq's
occupation force, could be seen wandering along the broken roof and
through the piles of rubble outside, kicking the wire that had proved so
useless, clambering over the new collapsed mobile phone tower whose iron
supports had been sheered away by the blast.

Students in the university had been cut by thousands of splinters of glass
- altogether, 126 were wounded and one civilian was killed - but members
of Iraq's new American-paid police force were, as usual, the principal
victims.

Imad Naghim, a 30-year old police recruit, had been sitting opposite the
mayor's office in a car with four of his comrades when the bomber arrived.
He had spent almost 24 hours in surgery and was in the emergency recovery
room at the Hussein Hospital yesterday when he opened his eyes in front of
us and waved with a bloody hand and mouthed the words Salaam Aleikum -
peace be upon you - at us. His forehead, jaw, body and thighs were encased
in plaster and his face was pitted with dozens of tiny red impact points.

"One of his comrades in the car also survived," his uncle Adnan told us
quietly. "The other two men in the car were killed instantly. He was very
lucky." Imad did not know how lucky he was. Two of his friends were
already buried. But how come the truck had reached the gate of the mayor's
office? There are concrete chicanes and a roadblock outside manned by
American troops of the 101st Airborne Division and more Iraqi policemen.

A senior police officer, senior enough to wear a black leather jacket and
jeans rather than a uniform, emerged to tell us that the bomber had
followed a convoy into the street outside, had simply "tailed" the rear
vehicle past the American-Iraqi checkpoint and reached the gate where he
immolated himself in a clap of sound and brown smoke that blasted police
and civilian cars around the parking lot like toys. An Iraqi police
colonel was in the convoy. So how had the bomber known the convoy was
coming?

No one in Karbala yesterday mentioned what so many Western security men in
Baghdad have long suspected: that the insurgents, the rebels fighting the
occupation armies and their Iraqi security men, must have their spies
inside the new police force. How else did the bomber know that he had to
wait for the convoy to arrive? There was to be an address by the colonel,
the head of the traffic police department in Karbala, and every cop must
have known of the meeting. The other three suicide-bombers had presumably
been instructed to stage their attacks at the same moment. That is
planning beyond what we have previously imagined in Iraq.

Bushra Jaafar and her college friends had been worried ever since the
soldiers set up their base next to the university campus. "We knew they
would be a target - the teachers all knew, which was why Professor Hussein
understood what the shooting meant." Yet Bushra - a symbol of the best
kind of "New Iraq" - was angry when she was told there would be no more
classes for a week. "I am ready to go back to my university now," she
said.

Across Karbala yesterday, the Bulgarians mounted some half-hearted
checkpoints around the city, as if those who had sent the bombers to their
targets would cruise the streets 24 hours later. In the great shrine of
Hussein, the martyr cut to pieces in 686AD, thousands of pilgrims, most of
them Iranian, poured through the golden doors as if the Iraqi insurgency
was in another century. Almost every major Iraqi city has now been
assaulted by suicide bombers. Only Basra has been spared - so far.

And the British are in Basra.

I give thanks for the bravery of the soldiers of all nations who despite cowardly and dreadfull attacks like this continue to guarantee the liberation and freedom of the Iraqi people.

With extremist Islamic elements combining with Fasict pro Saddam loyalists to try and return Iraq to its brutal past we owe a debt of gratitude to these military men and women.
Thank you for writting this report and showing us what we owe our soldiers.

hope you folks are ok - met you at the big green gathering. stay safe! and thanks for being a witness.