Children's slaughter sparks Baghdad bloodlust

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James Hider, Baghdad
27mar07

SELIM AMER'S wife had been badgering him to take her out of the house. She had not been out since giving birth three months, ago and was getting restless.

He knew the streets of Amel, in southwest Baghdad, were dangerous. But at the weekend he finally relented and walked his wife to the local market to buy ice cream and do some shopping. He took his brother as an extra precaution.
What they witnessed on the way was worse than they could have imagined -- even after four years of war -- and would rip apart their mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhood in a frenzy of hatred and bloodlust.

Near the shops, a group of children -- Sunni and Shia -- were playing football on an empty site. As Mr Amer, his wife and brother walked past, two cars pulled up. Four or five men in tracksuits got out and opened their car boots. They pulled out belt-fed BKC machineguns, a weapon known in Iraq as "the harvester" for its ability to kill many people quickly.

"We heard the shooting of the machineguns. It was so loud and continuous we thought they were targeting us," the 28-year-old Shia man said, his eyes red and brimming with pain.

But they were not the targets. "I started looking, and they were shooting the kids," he said. "Eight of the kids already fell on the ground. The guys kept shooting, they just wanted to make sure everyone was dead."

More than a month after the new US-Iraqi security crackdown was launched in Baghdad, those who want to sow chaos and civil war are adopting horrific tactics to ensure stability does not prevail. In Amel, they achieved that goal with stunning effect.

"I saw something I'll never forget. I saw people ... they just went crazy," Mr Amer said.

As the killers drove away, local men rushed home to fetch their guns. But instead of trying to catch the gunmen or help their victims, the Sunnis began shooting at Shia houses and the Shi'ites began firing on Sunnis.

"It was so horrible -- you saw neighbours who'd been sitting outside together starting to shoot at each other," Mr Amer said.

One mother kept running up and down her staircase, looking for her son, even though she knew he was dead.

As the neighbours blasted away at each other, no one dared to venture out to help the children bleeding on the rough pitch for two hours, until people started to run out of ammunition. It was only when the firing subsided that the nine small bodies were picked up and taken to the mortuary of Yarmouk hospital.

In the Interior Ministry's daily report, they were merely listed as nine children killed in random attacks -- a statistic lost in a day of bombings in which almost 50 people died nationwide.

"If they'd picked up the kids right away some of them might have survived," Mr Amer said. "Not one of them even dared to get their kids -- they were moved more to get revenge. This is the problem with this country, there's no security plan or reconciliation plan that will stop revenge. This country will not survive."

Mr Amer, an educated and articulate young man who has worked as a translator and reporter for a number of Western organisations, said he could understand the homicidal rage that possessed a bereaved parent.

"If someone killed my son, I don't know what I'd do, but I'd kill more people," he said. He now regrets having had a child in such hard times, and even getting married. "It's too much responsibility on my shoulders," he said.

The constant killing is eroding his moderate view of the world. Two months ago he hated the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia responsible for many of the death squads chasing Sunnis from mixed areas of the capital.

They murdered one of his friends just because he was a Sunni who had friends from both communities, and then threatened to burn down the houses of his Shia friends.

But with the sectarian divide growing despite the US military's security plan, Mr Amer now looks to the Mahdi Army to protect him and his fellow Shi'ites.

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