Nails in the Wall

….coalition superiority was overwhelming but the airmen were running out of targets… Late in, er, January we came to the lower part of the list…it wasn’t high priority…a bunker in the Al Fridas area of Baghdad… This was a two weapon salvo… This is not a video game… You could see where the blast and the fire had been and they were pulling bodies out... the bunker was a public air raid shelter… on top of the water there was about an inch of scum…. of flesh, of boiled flesh, of burnt flesh… Thе bunker that was attacked last night was a military target… "I losе my wife and my children…is that fair?… nobody ask….nobody says something…to stop this massacre….?" ….When the missile fell on the upper floor, the doors were closed because of pressure of the bombing… the people had no way to go out… two cold water containers as well as two boilers exploded… as in the upper floor people were burnt to death… here on the lower floor people died in very high degree of boiling water… Here you can see the water level which flooded the lower floor… on the walls you can see the remains of hair, of human flesh and some parts of the body…. …Just imagine the feeling of the people who were boiled to death… Each day at four o’clock they had to close the doors so that no more people would be accepted….so at least there was one thousand and two hundred people there…. ….The Al Ferdo bunker hit gave us a major public relations and political problem. I mean it stopped everything we were doing for about a day and a half…. We wondered momentarily if in fact there was some sort of a propaganda ploy…. The guy in the States told him, "Are you sure that these bodies came from this bunker or were they gathered from other places to be put here so that you would film them…?" People told us that the British and the Americans were savages, animals and criminals… this man said that eleven of his family were in the shelter…. People stopped using the shelters after what happened to Amiriyah….because what’s the use…? It is a demonstration in Iraq to an awful lot of Iraqis as to how vulnerable they really are… Did that incident have any effect on the conduct of the war...? At the risk of sounding heartless, no