Photostory: From Al-Amiriyyah, Baghdad to Amiriyyah, south Beirut

Mayssoun Sukarieh writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon, 23 August 2006

Amiriyyah is a name that takes us to the first Gulf War, specifically to 13 February 1991, when the United States Air Force committed a massacre in the air raid shelter of Al-Amiriyyah in North Baghdad. The shelter was hit by two bunker busters, missiles tried for the first time on Al Amiriyyah, and which left 403 Iraqis dead, 142 of them children under the age of ten. The first of the two penetrating missiles made a hole in the roof in its only vulnerable point, the ventilation system, the exact location of which provided to the US by the Finnish construction company that had built the shelter years before. A few minutes later, another smart missile got in through the hole opened by the first, producing a fireball that incinerated those inside, "leaving like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki only a silhouette of many of them engraved on the ceiling and walls," as one observer put it (...) Fifteen years passed between 13 February 2006, the day of the massacre of Al-Amiriyyah shelter in Baghdad, and 13 August 2006. After more than fifteen years, The Amiriyyah building in the southern part of Beirut was hit by a bunker buster tried first in Iraq, but this time it was used by the Israeli Air Force, during a war that was it initially claimed was meant to liberate two Israeli soldiers abducted by Hizbullah but actually set rebuilt Lebanon back fifty years...

continua / continued