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Robert Fisk: Something terrible happened on Highway
8...
by Robert Fisk, DissidentVoice.org Friday April 11,
2003 at 09:33 PM
...
'We're Here to Fight the Regime, Not Civilians, But I
Had to Save My Men'
by Robert Fisk
in Doura, Baghdad
Dissident Voice
April 11, 2003
Something terrible happened on Highway 8. Some say a
hundred civilians died there. Others believe that only
40 or 50 men, women and children were cut to pieces by
American tank fire when members of the 3rd Infantry
Division's Task Force 315 were ambushed by the
Republican Guard.
Many of their corpses still lie rotting in their
incinerated cars, a young woman, burnt naked, slumped
face down over the rear seat on the Hillah flyover
bridge next to half of a male corpse that is hanging
out of the driver's door. Blankets cover a pile of
civilian dead, including a cremated child, a few
metres away. A red car, shot in half by an American
tank shell, lies on its side with the lower half of a
human leg, still in a black shoe, beside the left
front wheel.
No one disputes that the American troops were ambushed
here or that the battle only ended late on Wednesday
afternoon. On the flyover, I found a dead Iraqi
Republican Guard in uniform, his blood draining into
the gutter, one foot over the other, shot in the head.
A hundred metres away lay a car with an elderly
civilian man dead under the chassis. Two fuel trucks
one of them still burning lay in a field. An
incinerated passenger bus stood beside the motorway.
Hundreds of Iraqis stared at the corpses in horror,
most of them holding handkerchiefs to their faces and
swatting the flies that moved between the living and
the dead.
Captain Dan Hubbard, commanding the 315th's Bravo
Company whose 10 tanks and four Bradley Fighting
Vehicles hold the flyover bridge, described to me how
his men came under fire "from 360 degrees" with
rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 rifles at 7am when
civilian traffic was moving along the motorway.
"We're here to fight the Iraqi regime, not the
civilians," he said. "There were cars on the road when
we were ambushed and we fired over their heads two or
three times to get them to stop. Ninety per cent of
the vehicles turned away after a warning shot." Here
the captain paused for a moment. "A lot of things go
on in people's heads at such times," he said. "A lot
of people speed up ... I had to protect my men. We
tried our very best to minimise any kind of injuries
and death to civilians. I have got to protect my
soldiers because we don't know if it's a car-load of
explosives or RPGs [rocket- propelled grenades]. We'll
have the cars removed. The bodies will be taken care
of."
Captain Hubbard was a thoughtful man, a 34-year-old
from Tennessee who named his tank Rhonda Denise after
his wife, who is "the toughest woman I've ever met"
though what she would make of the civilian horror on
Highway 8 doesn't bear thinking about.
Clearly the Iraqi Republican Guard also have a
responsibility for this carnage since they started
their ambush knowing full well that civilians would be
on the motorway.
Two American soldiers were killed in the battle and up
to 30 wounded. Six US vehicles were destroyed,
including two tanks. Many families had come to find
their dead relatives and bury them but I counted at
least 16 civilian bodies and parts of bodies still
on the highway, several of them women.
And of course, this killing field raised a now
familiar question. Americans fired tank shells at
civilian motorists. Still their bodies lay beside the
road with the dead soldier and still no one had
buried them. Sure, the Americans tried not to kill
civilians. But all would have been alive today had
President George Bush not ordered his army to invade
their country.
Robert Fisk is an award winning foreign correspondent
for The Independent (UK), where this article first
appeared. He is the author of Pity Thy Nation: The
Abduction of Lebanon (The Nation Books, 2002 edition).
Posted with authors permission.
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