Iraq: A Descent
Into Civil War?
By Luke Harding
15 September, 2004
The Guardian
Lying
amid the debris strewn near Al-Karkh police station was the photo of
a young man in a blue T-shirt. The passport snap had been part of his
application to join Iraq's police force.
Yesterday, however,
he and dozens of other recruits queueing outside the station in central
Baghdad were blown to pieces by a car bomb. Near the photo, someone
had heaped the shoes of the dead and injured into a neat pile.
The destruction
from the suspected suicide blast which killed 47 people and injured
114 was everywhere: bits of metal, glass, a broken billiard table, a
dead bird and pools of blood.
There was nothing
left of the recruit in the photo.
"The bomb went
off at 10am. A lot of people were queueing up to join the police,"
said Allah Hamas, 31, who owns Allah's Famous Falafel Stand, next to
the police station.
"I handed a
customer a sandwich. Suddenly there was an explosion and a piece of
metal ripped off the top of his head.
"After that
I ran out to help. We covered the dead with blankets. I saw at least
30 bodies. Thirteen of them were burnt completely. Some people were
scattered into pieces. We found them among their files and photos."
It was the deadliest
single incident in the Iraqi capital for six months, but there was nothing
unique about the explosion; it took place a few hundred metres from
Haifa Street, a well-known centre of resistance to the American occupation
and the scene of heavy fighting on Sunday. It was embarrassingly close
to the green zone and the US embassy.
But it reveals a grim truth about the nature of Iraq's evolving insurgency:
Iraqis are killing Iraqis.
In recent months,
and especially since the handover of "power" to the unelected
interim government, Iraq's resistance has concentrated its efforts on
killing those who collaborate with the Americans - the police officers,
would-be police officers, translators, governors and government officials.
It is beginning
to look like, and feel like, civil war.
In another incident
yesterday, gunmen ambushed a minibus full of policeman in Baquba, north-west
of Baghdad, killing 11 of them and a civilian. They were on their way
home to their base.
In Ramadi, clashes
between US troops and insurgents left eight dead and 18 wounded.
Responsibility for
the attacks in Baghdad and Baquba was claimed yesterday by Tawhid and
Jihad, Iraq's shadowy and fastest-growing militant group, which is allegedly
linked to the Jordanian al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In reality, though,
the real identities of the insurgents remain opaque. They undoubtedly
include a handful of foreign fighters, but the majority are Iraqi nationalists
violently opposed to the continuing occupation of their country.
"What happened
here has really got nothing to do with Islam," said Rafid Ahmed,
whose shop in Al-Karkh was destroyed.
Mr Ahmed said his
two neighbours in the next-door barber's shop were killed. He survived
only because he opened up late.
"Why are these
people targeting Iraqi police recruits? They just want to get a salary
because they are unemployed," he said. "The people who did
this are terrorists."
What would he do
now? "Wait and see," he said. "This store provided an
income for a whole family."
In the row of ruined
neighbouring shops there were bloodstains on the ceilings. A few metres
away, beyond a pavement strewn with rubble and bits of tree, the explosion
had dug a large crater. The blackened engine of the car had landed 30
metres away.
Mingled with the
smell of incinerated metal was something else: burnt flesh.
Another witness,
Raad Tawfiq, 40, contradicted the claims of Tawhid and Jihad. "It
wasn't a suicide bomb," he said. "They blew the car up by
remote control. People in the restaurant spotted them leaving, but it
was too late.
"This was a
massacre," he said.
In the run-up to
the January elections, Iraq's pro-US interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi,
faces some stark choices. He and the US military can try to reoccupy
the towns they have abandoned, or accept that there is little prospect
of the polls taking place in much of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.
Some Sunni groups
have dismissed the elections as a "fake", and no one quite
knows whether the insurgency will fizzle out after January or, as seems
more likely, become more intense.
The interim president,
Ghazi al-Yawar, said yesterday that the elections should go ahead. "Unless
the UN says it is impossible to hold it, we're going to hold it at that
time," he said.
As we drove away
from Haifa Street yesterday, gunfire rang out from the nearby houses.
Two green US helicopters circled menacingly. At the weekend a helicopter
opened fire on unarmed demonstrators dancing round a burning Bradley
armoured vehicle. Thirteen were killed, including a TV journalist working
for the Arab station Al-Arabiya.
Those wounded in
Baghdad yesterday were being treated in Al-Karkh hospital, a short walk
from the market where the bomb exploded. American tanks and armoured
vehicles had parked nearby, before moving off and leaving behind whirling
clouds of dust.
Mr Hamas, the falafel
shop owner, said he only survived yesterday by the grace of God. But
he added: "I'm dead. I already feel I'm dead."