Kuwait Diary

Kuwait Diary -- March 23 rd, 2003

Day 4 of the 2’nd Gulf War
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It started as a relatively quiet day in Kuwait. The air raid sirens screamed their presense only once and no missiles came our way today. It seemed like the calm before a storm. I drove to work in traffic which was quite light. The banks were open and the stock exchange was expected to reopen today. I switched on the car radio. Linda Lu on the FM Breakfast show was talking about taking a holiday. Perhaps a year off, she fantasized. Mazen Ansari, was talking about news gatheing and civil defence measures broadcast in 6 different languages on the FM channels which normally broadcast western popular music, at other, more normal times. I was half expecting him to talk about his pet subject, the new international golf course coming up on the way to Wafra. I got the feeling that people were hoping without hope, to desperately return to some semblence of normality in their personal lives.

But, after the heavy pounding of yesterday and watching balls of fire racing across the skies, many of the expatriates from India, the Phillipines and neighboring Arab countries like Lebanon and Syria, made the tough decision to return to the safety of their own countries. The airport was open and the national carriers were doing a great job. This war has affected everyone’s lives and livelihood. For the thousands of people, who are neither interested in Saddam, nor Bush, Blair and any blinking regime change, lives and families have been torn apart. For them there are no sympathies, they are simply irrelevant lives in the chessboard of international power equations.

War

Operation “ Shock and Awe” carried on with the air assault on Baghdad. The city continued to undergo a relentless pounding of Iraqi command and control targets and military assets designed to make the elite republican guards surrender. Citizens continued to lead surreal lives. Iraqi television continued to run programes of patriotic songs. There were background images of Saddam Hussein riding a white Arab horse with a golden sword in his hand leading his people forward. Citizens continued to gather in evening dens to smoke the Shisha and discuss the war.

The media was full of discussions on the latest hitech equipment that is being used in this war. It seemed that all the arms salesmen had welcomed the opportunity to flaunt their deadly hardware to an international audience, among them more terrorists, dictators and despots, who would gladly tax their citizens to buy arms for some future plans for violent decision making. It indeed looked like a trade fair of international arms dealers.

Precision equipment has the nasty habbit of ‘taking off’ with a mind of its own. Two US Tomahawk cruise missiles were misfired on unpopulated Turkish territory. The first missile came down around 15.30 GMT in open country about one kilometre from the village of Ozveren, leaving a one-metre deep hole, said the governor of Sanliurfa province, which is around 100 km from the Syrian border. The second missile fell some three hours later near Viransehir, about 200 km from where the first impacted, according to Turkish news agency Anatolia. Iran also reported that US cruise missiles had landed in its territory. However they later retracted their statement saying that these had been Iraqi missiles.

Both sides urged their countrymen to listen to ‘official’ news. And official news always gives out news that people ‘should be’ hearing. Thus, Mr Rumsfeld briefed the world that war was progressing exactly as per plans, that ‘remarkable’ progress was being made by the divisions moving through the western desert at remarkable speeds. We were all living in a perfect world, with perfect equipment, moving to the concluding point with incredible speed, like playing a computer game with the Big Blue. What if some people refused to be shocked and awed?

Down in the South of Iraq just over the border with Kuwait, fierce and ‘unexpected’ fire fighting raged on. Basra and Umm Qasr were still not fully under coalition control, the Shatt Al Arab waterway had been mined and fierce fighting raged in the perimeters of Basra. The incredible speed of the western advance met with fierce resistance along the Euphrates and lives were being lost on both sides. Welcome to the stark realities of a realtime non-virtual war.

“We don’t want to be drawn into urban warfare in Basra,” said a coalition soldier interviewed on the battlefield by an ‘embedded reporter’. But this was exactly what seems to be the Iraqi plan. Unless the Iraqi soldiers are ‘shocked and awed’ and tamely surrender outside Baghdad, urban warfare it is going to be in Baghdad. Coalition forces would like the Iraqis to come outside Baghdad and either surrender or face coalition guns. Will this happen? Only time will tell. If it doesn’t, then we may see a civilian disaster on a scale not seen since the pounding of Berlin by Allied troops during WW2. Today, old Berliners relived horrific memories and wept.

To troops fighting in Southern Iraq, the enemy seems not to be very obliging and may point to the way of things to come elsewhere. Much to the indignation of coalition forces, Iraqis have started to use guerilla tactics last seen by US forces only in Vietnam. A group of Iraqi fighters who appeared to surrender, suddenly opened fire inflicting heavy casualties. Many had taken off their military uniforms and mingled with the civilian population. Anger, indignation….casualties, more anger. Temporarily it seems that the speed of advance has met with some turbulence. There is loss of life on both sides and there are claims and counter claims. With the horrorific pictures of charred and carbonized Iraqi soldiers and dead American and British troops, I am left with the image of the Navy chaplain on a US gunship giving a sermon about a ‘just war’.

Elsewhere in the affairs of man....

War is after all the ultimate hypocricy. Early on, from day one we have been routinely witnessing images on Fox, CNN and BBC of captured Iraqi soldiers taken prisoners of war. Today, for the first time, Iraq showed images of captured US soldiers bringing sharp criticism from Defense secretary Rumsfeld, who said that it was disgusting and against the Geneva convention. However, TV stations across the world defied Mr Rumsfeld. Many European television stations broadcast images of four men and a woman that Iraq said were American prisoners of war. Editorial staff defended their decision to air the pictures, saying that earlier footage showing Iraqi soldiers captured by US forces had not been criticized.

"The responsibility for the Geneva Convention is a state's responsibility, it's not a journalist's responsibility. Concerning the journalists it's a question of ethics," said Red Cross spokeswoman Nada Doumani.
Britain's Sky News owned by Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch, was the first to show the Iraqi television pictures of the visibly afraid soldiers.

"We have guidelines, we are trying in most cases not to show faces, to show long shots but basically not to identify. We are not using close-ups material," a Sky spokesman said.
Switzerland's TSR decided to show the controversial clips but held back certain sequences which it deemed to be humiliating for the prisoners. The footage represented the "reality of war," the station said.When TSR broadcast on Friday pictures of Iraqi prisoners of war captured by coalition forces that did not lead to a debate, said editor Andre Crettenand, who added that you can't broadcast images of war without showing injuries and death. This came just after US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had said the pictures, initially communicated around the world by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera station, were obviously part of Iraqi propaganda.
"It's something that the United States does not do. Needless to say, television networks that carry such pictures, I would say are doing something that's unfortunate," Rumsfeld had told CNN.

In Paris, news chief at France's TF1 Pascal Pinning said that their Washington correspondent would launch a program on the prisoners by showing short clips of them with their faces blanked out.
German television, both state-owned and independent, showed various pictures of the American prisoners being interrogated as well as the injured and the bodies. The chief editor of the independent N24, Prosieben, Kabel1 and Sat1 stations said he had put the pictures out "as soon as they arrived" and noted that Rumsfeld had said nothing about pictures of captured Iraqis.
In Belgium, the head of the public-owned RTBF said that a piece was being put together on the prisoners and that their faces would be shown. Some of the most shocking images would not be broadcast, but RTBF did not see why it couldn't broadcast pictures of prisoners.
The main Dutch commercial channel RTL4 news has already shown the pictures of the US prisoners and NOS state television plans to air them. Sweden's SVT said it would use the material and its main concern was for Iraqi prisoners who may have to return to Iraq and face the consequences of speaking to television.

In Spain, both TVE state television and the independent Telecinco have said they will show the images of the prisoners because of the news interest surrounding them. All three of Portugal's free-to-air television networks (SIC,TVI and state television RTP) led their main evening newscasts with images of both the US prisoners of war being interviewed by Iraqi troops and the images of dead US soldiers.
Before airing the footage SIC had warned that the images were of "great violence" and not appropriate for more sensitive viewers while TVI said the images were bound to divide the US even further over the war on Iraq.


And there are always civilians caught in the carnage. Safwan, Southern Iraq.

In the fight for Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, US forces came under artillery and machine-gun fire as they seized an airport and bridge. Reporters attempting to reach Umm al Qasr or Basra ran into firefights and returned to Safwan, the first Iraqi settlement north of the Kuwait border, where area residents were seeking medical care and other help.

There were civilians dead from helicopter gunship fire. ‘‘He was such a good son, my only boy, Khamat, always taking care of me,’’ said Fizah Abuaid Thekyal, 74, pounding his chest at the gates of the Safwan mosque as his son’s body was being brought in from the pickup truck. ‘‘We had a white flag on the house. I don’t understand. I want to see him. I want to see my son.’’ Imam Abu Ahmed emerged from inside the mosque and led Thekyal into a small room behind the main hall where his 35-year-old son’s body was arranged on a stone slab. The figure lay face up, a portion of his intestines exposed, his right hand mangled and separated from the arm. A dozen shrapnel wounds cut gashes in his legs. An assistant prepared a white shroud.

Several Safwan villagers had assembled in the dusty streets expressed emotions ranging from bewilderment to anger at the level of damage they say they’ve suffered as the world’s largest military force stormed past their homes. Gen Tommy Franks, reiterated America’s determination to avoid civilian casualties. Despite such assurances, the conflict in southern Iraq clearly has been messier than anticipated.

At the village clinic, 20-year-old student Abbas Fadel lay stomach-down on a bed without sheets, with gunshot wounds in his back. His sweaty skin stuck to a flowered plastic covering as flies circled overhead. Many villagers expressed anger not only at the casualties and destruction but also at the disruption of basic human needs, saying they were led to believe humanitarian aid would quickly follow the military strike.
‘‘People need food and water,’’ said Mazen Abdullah, a volunteer at the Safwan Centre for Health. ‘‘The ambulance can’t even pick people up because of all the soldiers. We need doctors here. People are burned, there are shrapnel wounds. All we have here is the most basic first aid.’’

In Kuwait, the Al Jahra hospital was being readied to receive Iraqi patients from across the border.