- A severed arm with a hand still attached to it lay a
few metres from the broken gates of the mayor's office in Karbala yesterday,
a piece of humanity every bit as bloody as the story of the seventh-century
Shia martyr Hussein, the golden dome of whose shrine could be seen through
the smog to the east.
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- They said the arm belonged to a police major - one of
11 cops killed in the four ferocious attacks on Saturday in this most holy
of cities - but others claimed it belonged to the man who drove the truck-bomb
right up to the gates.
-
- In the parking lot outside, stunned Polish and Bulgarian
troops, many of them in the clapped-out Russian vehicles that Saddam's
own army used until its demise eight months ago, looked at the scene with
a strange mixture of awe and contempt. Four Bulgarians were killed a mile
away when another man drove an oil tanker right up to their camouflaged
headquarters.
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- When I approached one Bulgarian officer a few metres
from the 20-foot hole that the bomb had blasted in the road, he turned
away in tears.
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- In all, 19 men were killed in the Karbala massacre: 11
policemen, five Bulgarian soldiers, two Thai soldiers and a civilian -
one of the highest death tolls for suicide bombings in Iraq since the country
was "liberated" last April. The government of Bulgaria - part
of the "New Europe" of the United States Defence Secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld - was one of President George Bush's most enthusiastic supporters
during the invasion.
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- Beside Karbala University, where the Bulgarians maintained
a battalion headquarters, the scene was of equal devastation. The tanker
had been driven across a playing field towards the three-storey building
and the soldiers on guard had opened fire before he reached the inside
perimeter wire.
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- Bushra Jaafar, 19, was in biology class on the campus
at 12.30pm when she heard the first shots being fired at the truck. "Professor
Hussein told us all to get away from the windows because he guessed what
was happening," she said at her slum home yesterday. "Then there
was a huge explosion and all the glass came in."
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- Part of the tanker was blasted half a mile from the attack,
high into the air, to land in Bushra's own backyard. Her father, Nuri,
a 54-year old veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, said the other explosions followed
within minutes. This was exemplary timing - four separate suicide attacks
in only minutes - and the defenders were woefully unprepared.
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- The Bulgarians had smothered their headquarters in camouflage
netting, just as the Soviet army had once taught them to do, but had not
secured the football pitch. The bomber had reached the barbed wire at the
main gate when he blew up his truck and part of the outer walls had come
cascading into the forecourt.
-
- Bulgarian troops, under Polish command in this central
sector of Iraq's occupation force, could be seen wandering along the broken
roof and through the piles of rubble outside, kicking the wire that had
proved so useless, clambering over the new collapsed mobile phone tower
whose iron supports had been sheered away by the blast.
-
- Students in the university had been cut by thousands
of splinters of glass - altogether, 126 were wounded and one civilian was
killed - but members of Iraq's new American-paid police force were, as
usual, the principal victims.
-
- Imad Naghim, a 30-year old police recruit, had been sitting
opposite the mayor's office in a car with four of his comrades when the
bomber arrived. He had spent almost 24 hours in surgery and was in the
emergency recovery room at the Hussein Hospital yesterday when he opened
his eyes in front of us and waved with a bloody hand and mouthed the words
Salaam Aleikum - peace be upon you - at us. His forehead, jaw, body and
thighs were encased in plaster and his face was pitted with dozens of tiny
red impact points.
-
- "One of his comrades in the car also survived,"
his uncle Adnan told us quietly. "The other two men in the car were
killed instantly. He was very lucky." Imad did not know how lucky
he was. Two of his friends were already buried. But how come the truck
had reached the gate of the mayor's office? There are concrete chicanes
and a roadblock outside manned by American troops of the 101st Airborne
Division and more Iraqi policemen.
-
- A senior police officer, senior enough to wear a black
leather jacket and jeans rather than a uniform, emerged to tell us that
the bomber had followed a convoy into the street outside, had simply "tailed"
the rear vehicle past the American-Iraqi checkpoint and reached the gate
where he immolated himself in a clap of sound and brown smoke that blasted
police and civilian cars around the parking lot like toys. An Iraqi police
colonel was in the convoy. So how had the bomber known the convoy was coming?
-
- No one in Karbala yesterday mentioned what so many Western
security men in Baghdad have long suspected: that the insurgents, the rebels
fighting the occupation armies and their Iraqi security men, must have
their spies inside the new police force. How else did the bomber know that
he had to wait for the convoy to arrive? There was to be an address by
the colonel, the head of the traffic police department in Karbala, and
every cop must have known of the meeting. The other three suicide-bombers
had presumably been instructed to stage their attacks at the same moment.
That is planning beyond what we have previously imagined in Iraq.
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- Bushra Jaafar and her college friends had been worried
ever since the soldiers set up their base next to the university campus.
"We knew they would be a target - the teachers all knew, which was
why Professor Hussein understood what the shooting meant." Yet Bushra
- a symbol of the best kind of "New Iraq" - was angry when she
was told there would be no more classes for a week. "I am ready to
go back to my university now," she said.
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- Across Karbala yesterday, the Bulgarians mounted some
half-hearted checkpoints around the city, as if those who had sent the
bombers to their targets would cruise the streets 24 hours later. In the
great shrine of Hussein, the martyr cut to pieces in 686AD, thousands of
pilgrims, most of them Iranian, poured through the golden doors as if the
Iraqi insurgency was in another century. Almost every major Iraqi city
has now been assaulted by suicide bombers. Only Basra has been spared -
so far.
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- And the British are in Basra.
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