Why Us?
By Jamie Wilson
The Guardian
20 August, 2003Inside the Canal hotel the working day was drawing towards its end, but the blue and white UN building was still a hustle and bustle of activity. A briefing about landmines was in full swing in the conference room, while in the corridors and meeting rooms there was the typical UN activity - conversations and jokes in different languages between the dozens of races and nationalities who have rushed to Iraq since the war.
Sergio de Mello, the chief UN envoy in Iraq, was in his large office on the third floor, possibly sitting at his black wooden desk, or maybe on one of the three leather sofas which he preferred for chatting with colleagues and visitors.
None of the 300 UN workers, many of them Iraqi, who were going about the business of trying to bring humanitarian relief from the war were prepared for the fact that they were about to become its latest victims.
It was just after 4.30pm that everything inside the building went black. A video camera at the briefing recorded the sound of a huge explosion, followed by crashing and tinkling glass, and then piercing screams and shouts.
The video camera light peering through the smoke and gloom caught ghostlike figures covered in dust, some bleeding from wounds to the head, trying to discover how to get out.
Mahmoud Shaker, 42, an Iraqi translator, was one of those in the room. The right shoulder of his shirt was spattered with blood from those he had helped to carry outside.
"Everything just went black. Somebody was shouting: 'Everybody stay where you are. Wait for the electricity to come back on'. People were screaming and shouting. We headed for the windows. People were very brave and were helping each other to get out."
Not everybody was so lucky.
The bomber or bombers crashed the truck into the perimeter wall as close as they could get to the left-hand corner of the building. If Mr de Mello was the target they clearly knew what they were doing. The office took the full impact when the bomb, in what is assumed was a suicide attack, was detonated. The explosion was enormous.
The corner of the Canal hotel where Mr de Mello's office had been was now crumpled into the car park, as clouds of smoke and dust wafted across the compound.
The sky-blue UN flag on the roof was still fluttering serenely, but everything below was chaos and destruction.
People on the scene minutes after the bomb went off described a crater 15m in diameter. An 18m (60ft) section of the cinder block wall had been vaporised. Parts of cars were littered across the four-lane road that runs beside the hotel, and next to the crater a Mercedes was in flames.
The Canal hotel, before the war home to the UN weapons inspectors, was un recognisable. All three stories of the corner of the building had fallen into the car park. The internet cafe on the ground floor was destroyed. In the glass fronted cafeteria, renowned among aid workers and journalists for serving some of the best food in Baghdad, tables and glass were blown across the room.
Outside, local people chased a small group of men they claimed had been responsible for the explosion.
As the dust settled some of the UN workers at the compound began to emerge dazed and confused from the wreckage. Covered in dust, some were bleeding from their ears from the concussion caused by the explosion.
As US troops raced to cordon off the scene, a field hospital was set up on a small lawn outside the main entrance.
One man had a yard-long, inch-thick aluminium rod driven into his face just below the right eye. He was able to speak and identified himself as a security consultant for the International Monetary Fund, saying he had just arrived in the country at the weekend.
"I saw many people killed and injured inside the building," said Adnan al-Jabouri, a UN driver.
"My colleague Talal is still under the rubble and he'll die if somebody doesn't help him soon," said Jwan Al-Jaff, a UN travel agent.
The question most seemed to be asking was: Why the UN? Why us?
Walking wounded
The walking wounded were pushed into trucks and driven away as ambulances began to arrive at the scene.As more US troops, in tanks and armoured personnel carriers, sealed off the roads around the hotel, Blackhawk helicopters marked with red crosses began to arrive. At first they tried to land on the road at the front, but there was too much rubble.
American soldiers, stripped down to T-shirts, combed through the rubble. At first it was reported that Mr de Mello, 55, a veteran Brazilian diplomat, was alive. Colleagues, it was said, were trying to give him water. He had called Iraqi emergency services using his mobile phone, another report said.
More than three hours after the explosion the Blackhawks, their rotor blades whipping up clouds of dust as they landed three at a time in rotation, were still ferrying the wounded from the scene to military field hospitals around Baghdad.
Next door to the UN headquarters is the Iraq national spinal injuries unit, many of its patients 73 the victims of the three wars the country has suffered in the past two decades. Some of them were trapped for more than an hour in rubble under the collapsed roof of the hospital, while others, barely dressed, were rolled outside in wheelchairs and left in the stifling sun.
Eventually hospital staff pushed patients in wheelchairs across a bridge over the road, trying to get past crowds of media and locals craning their necks to get a better view of what was happening below.
One UN employee had gone across town to another office and returned to find ambulances speeding by and American soldiers scrambling through the destruction. She sat on the street and wept as she told a soldier that her niece was inside.
"Let me in please. Let me in," she said, waving her UN badge.
"Oh God, why is this happening to us? Oh God, let me in."