Gulf war anniversary evokes bitter memories in Iraq

Twelve years ago this week, a small neighbourhood in the winding alleys of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq learned all about "collateral damage".

Safaa lost her father, Marwan lost his education and Sobeiha lost the use of her legs. Dozens of others died, but no one has worked out exactly how many.

As Iraqis reflect on the war which broke the peace of a cold January day in 1991, the United States is threatening a sequel over weapons of mass destruction it says President Saddam Hussein is hiding.

The bad luck of these Mosul residents was to live next door to a primary school in the heart of this city of two million, which will be in the forefront of a US invasion if the Americans and their allies roll in from the north.

The school, now razed and replaced with a car park, was an apparent target, perhaps mistaken for a nearby police station, or perhaps suspected of harbouring more weaponry than children.

By chance, Safaa Hassan, now 17, and most of her family were staying with her grandmother when the Gulf War began in the early hours of January 17, 1991.

"When my dad came back and saw that the house had collapsed he thought our mother was dead inside. Then he had a heart attack and died," she said.

The tragedy left her brother Marwan, then only six years old, in charge of the home. Since then he hasn't been to school, he says, forced to get whatever work he could.

Asked what he would do if the Americans come attacking again, the 18-year-old just smiled and said: "If I was older I'd be able to fight them."

Across the alleyway, bordering a space where Tahira school used to be, an elderly woman called Sobeiha who cannot remember her age wept at the recollection of the midday air raid.

"God save us from America," she wails, rocking back and forth on two useless legs inside a small brick shack. "Are they going to attack us again?"

"Her spinal cord was broken when the roof collapsed so now her legs don't move," Wijdan Taha, who looks after Sobeiha, said. "But her mother died."

Taha was lucky. She had kept her children in a makeshift bunker under her house.

Sixteen people were killed in the large stone house next to Sobeiha, but none of the family is left to tell the tale.

Another neighbour, an Egyptian, lost one of his two children and his pregnant Egyptian wife, Taha said. The child was to be called Saddam, in honour of the Iraqi president, she added.

Further into the labyrinthine streets at some distance from the school a stray missile flattened another house on the same day at the same time, passers-by said.

"An old woman lived there. She died when it collapsed and so did a child on the roof of the house next door," said Mohammad Subhi, 30.

Despite this suffering, Mosul, an ancient Assyrian city which gave its name to muslin cloth during the prosperous medieval Islamic era, was hardly in the frontline during "Operation Desert Storm" - the code name of the US-led attack that liberated Kuwait from seven months of Iraqi occupation.

And distance also saved it from the destruction of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war.

Earlier this month, UN weapons inspectors moved into a hotel in the city, Iraq's third largest, for daily inspections.

But despite the fact that war is in the air again - and that this time it could bring foreign troops into the streets - there is an air of calm in Mosul, one of the most ethnically and religiously mixed places in Iraq.

"The Americans can't take the town because the (Iraqi) army has surrounded it. What can we do but defend it?" said Mohammad Khalil, who works in a shop in Mosul's busy market district.

Residents say they are used to the sound of fighter jets. Although Mosul is outside the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, it falls within a "no-fly" zone set up by the United States and Britain after the 1991 war.

"People here are more sympathetic to the government at the moment, since it allowed the inspectors back in. Salaries have been raised and the streets are cleaner," said Khodr, a local government official. "So it won't be easy for them (Americans) here. People are armed."

- REUTERS

Herald feature: Iraq