Baghdad Journal

At the U.N. II

There are about 15 camera tripods set up in a long row at the edge of the drive the journalists have taken over, maybe 100 meters or so from the Canal itself. The front of the blue and white four story building had collapsed. IN the driveway, there were maybe 100 or so of us rushing like eddies in a swirling river, quickly amassing around anyone who might have some information and then rushing off again. I don't know what the collective noun for journalists is but in this instance it should be a multi-eyed beast, perhaps a"shoggoth," to borrow a term from H.P. Lovecraft, who was describing a shapeless horror "much vaster than any subway train with a myriad of temporary eyes forming and unforming." That would work. And what's more this "shoggoth" was hungry.

A young Army officer stopped momentarily to speak, he was immediately surrounded, even though he had nothing to say, except "We'll let you know." Humvees blocked off the road to the Canal, perpendicular to the driveway we were in. A large black soldier wearing gogglelike glasses told us to keep back. He was trying to talk to the lady in the cream colored outfit, who had fainted and lay limp on the ground, her face covered with dirt, bits of brush and streaks of mascara. Fire engines roared down the road to the Canal. Huge black medical military helicopters were landing behind us, kicking up thick a thick soup of dust, rocks and weeds. People coughed. Old Iraqi men in wheelchairs were on the other side of the road. Had they been wheeled out to watch the show? I wondered. Then I saw some of them were shaking uncontrolably, some had blood on their dishdashas. They had been injured in the blast somehow but it was difficult to tell what was due to their original spinal injury and what was due to the explosion. Soon enough they were engulfed by reporters. I cheated and recorded someone's translator saying that Ali Hassan, the craggy faced man, sitting stiffly in his wheelchair below us, his limbs contorted and bloody, was having lunch with his fellow patients at the spinal cord treatment center next to the Canal where U.N. headquarters was and suddenly the roof fell in. The old men in wheelchairs were quickly abandoned by the crowds when soldiers started bringing the victims in stretchers. They were trying to get these people, by the looks of them European U.N. workers with nasty head injuries, to the helicopters. I couldn't believe it but the soldiers couldn't get through for a minute or two, blocked by the "shoggoth."
It was sickening. No one would move -- or maybe they couldn't move, such was the press of press people.
In the middle of all this were your typical overcurious Iraqi youth, teens who hounded you for cigarettes. Some of the journalists were interviewing them, although the ones who surrounded me were asking all the questions. Where you from? CNN? America, good. I finally asked them about the Canal. No, they hadn't seen the blast. They didn't even give it a moment's notice.
Suddenly a huge hand clasped my shoulder. I turned to find Zaid, our buddy from Iraq Today, a bearlike Iraqi guy who graduated from Baghdad U. He was distraught, there was rage in his wide dark amber eyes. "Can you believe this shit? I can't fucking believe it," he said as we walked around the driveway aimlessly following the thick flow of people. "I can't fucking believe it. I want to kill someone. I need to kill someone for this, man." Coming from Zaid, or "Beast" as his friends call him, it was no idle threat. He repeated this at least three times. "I know a fedayeen guy in my neighborhood and believe me, if I see him tonight, he's a dead man." We walked to the gate of the spinal cord injury clinic. The gate was blocked. So was the road to the Canal.
We see a dark blue U.N. vehicle with orange lettering trying to get past the crowd, back down the road. Inside we see the people inside leaning against the windows, not able to sit up under their own power, their eyes, heads, arms are wrapped in gauze. The car horn is blasting away as one man, an Iraqi, tries to stick his head into the cabin and talk to the victims. I'm not sure if he's a journalist or not but finally the car races off and he falls back.
One tall British guy, a cameraman, has a nosebleed. No, not from the blast, from the sun, he says, chuckling. He seems to know Zaid. "Let's get the Iraq Today take on this disaster," the bloody nosed Brit says, turning the camera on Zaid, who rolls his eyes at me. "I think it's fucked," is all Zaid says and then moves on.
Soon there are loudspeakers ordering us out of the driveway. A humvee, acting as a snowplow, pushes us back onto the main road and across, to the suspect minefield. Doctors, their shirts covered in blood, appear looking a little dazed. The masses surround them. We have seen 15 casualties thus far with our own eyes. They say there are many more, mostly from the broken glass of the windows.
Some family members show up, anxious for word of their relatives inside. The bloody shirted doctors are quickly dropped in favor of the weeping Iraqi mother. She turns away as I take her picture. "No pictures!" Zaid who was talking to her, screams. For a second I think he'll forgo doing his Fedayeen neighbor and kill me instead.
I then see Hassan, Zaid's boss, interviewing witnesses in Arabic, his shirt damp with sweat. He says it was a suicide bomb in a cement truck. The U.N.'s own vehicle. No word yet on deaths. He decides to go to the hospitals and check. We cross the pedestrian bridge, and walk down the highway road where the Reuters guys parked. All the apartment windows we pass have been blown out. BBC announces later that windows within a 2 kilometer radius were broken and I believe it. Hassan, another Iraqi Today reporter and I hail a taxi and ride to the Kindi Hospital where many of the victims were taken. Zaid takes a different taxi to another hospital.
In the car, Hassan calls his mom and reassures her he is OK. There was a press conference on the food for oil program at the time of the blast and journalists are among the casualties. I remember a redhaired woman with an ABC badge around her neck weeping under a tree back at the driveway. I now realize her colleague was probably inside.
At the hospital I see Haider from Reuters. He tells me there is no doubt the U.N. envoy is dead. He just got off the phone with a source in the Pentagon he says and it's true. Anyway, he wouldn't have been taken to this dreadful place. There is an Iraqi man on a gurney sitting outside. His open wounds bleed freely onto the cot. Photographers lean over him and shoot him as he groans incoherently. Of course to Haider this is nothing. "You obviously weren't here for the war," he says, grinning. "There were people outside lying on the ground, in the courtyard, line after line of them stretching out to the road."
I go with Hassan inside to the ward. There is a mustached man, an Iraqi, lying in a bed, his head bandaged, wheezing that sounds like a high pitched girl's protests. Obviously something has punctured his lungs. His friend lying on the bed with him, hugging him, holds an oxygen mask to his face and tries to get him to breathe. It doesn't sound like anything is going in, just the high pitched wheezing.
His eyes are glazing. He is looking at me, it seems, but I don't think he is seeing me, or Hassan or the doctors standing around his cot. I have the sinking feeling that this man is now dying. He is in pain, no doubt, as his uneven breathing weakens. His friend whispers gently in his ear and rocks him back and forth. In the corner, Hassan is talking to a large Bosnian guy lying face down in the last cot. His bare back is covered with little bloody cuts. The Bosnian -- Drako, he says his name is -- was hit by thousands of shards of glass but was able to walk out on his own power. He was lucky he says. Blood drips from his forearm onto the floor. A doctor appears and pushes us away. "He is tired. Let him rest."
We go over to the morgue at the back of the hospital. It's really just a small concrete outbuilding with two concrete slabs in it. Two Iraqi men who died in transit lie peacefully on the slabs, their faces uncovered. "They look OK," somebody says. Indeed, I can see nothing that looks fatal on their bodies, just some drying blood on their dusty hands. But there they are motionless on the slab. I linger for awhile to take it in, and yes, to take photos. The reality behind the numbers game. Twenty dead in U.N. Compound blast. Here are two of them. As we leave, the other, more seasoned journalists slap me on the back as if I just lost my virginity. In a way, I guess I did. "You should see some of the things I've seen," says Hassan. Then a look of surprise and maybe pain flashes across his face as he remembers something: "Or maybe you shouldn't."