Valentines and the Amiriyah Bombing

I always remember Valentines as the day right after the Amiriyah shelter bombing in 1991. More than 400 people, mostly women, children and elderly were cooked to death when the shelter was hit by US ‘smart bombs.’ Husbands and older sons stayed behind to protect their houses from being looted risking the air raids and sending their elder, younger and souses for protection – tragically. This was almost 20 years ago but I remember the stories vividly like I had heard them yesterday.

One of my relatives worked in the army. He was among the team pulling dead people out of the shelter. He didn’t recall seeing any survivors. Because the shelter was ‘bomb-proof’ ironically all its doors were sealed solid when the first missile hit. The second missile penetrated the shelter and the flames burned people alive.

I was with my family in Mousil where we had escaped Baghdad during the 1991 war. My relative came to visit every leave he got from the army. On one of his visits he sat to my aunt’s kitchen table and began to tell us about what he had seen 2 days ago. The things he said were so horrific that they forgot there were children, me and my siblings and cousins, around with mouths gaping and finger tips gone cold with horror. It was not until he had said enough that someone noticed and yelled at us to go play outside. Snaps of what I remember include;

‘We had to be so careful when taking out the bodies. We were moving one charcoaled man/woman we couldn’t tell, very slowly but then the leg came off entirely and I was left with the soft foot and a long bone that came out in my hand clean with no flesh on it.’

‘Most bodied were still burning that we burnt our hands trying to carry them. They were charcoaled on the outside and ruby red under .’

There was one heap we could identify as a mother and a baby. She was curled around the small infant.’

‘There was a man sitting outside the shelter holding a revolver. He was shooting his gun at the ground, crying and yelling I am going to kill them all.’

‘There were many bodies we had to scrape off the walls. It looked like they ran to the ends of the shelter to go further away from the flame then just hugged the walls and burned standing that way.’

‘They were all burned completely until all was charcoal. We couldn’t tell a person from an object from the walls sometimes. It was all one black heap, like they all became infused into one thing, they just melted.’

Those are the images that immediately come to mind.

I strongly believe that life should move on. That the families of those killed in the Amiriyah shelter should be allowed to grief in privet and move on to the best of their capacity. This blog post is not for them. This is a cry for the rest of the world to bring justice to these families. Those responsible should be charged for war crimes and massacre. Iraq and humanity owes it to them to bring a sense of justice in this chaotic world.

here are some links on the Amiriyah Bombing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_massacre

http://www.nodo50.org/csca/english/al-amiriya/al-amiriya_eng.html

Your haunted drama queen,

Happy Valentines.