US mowing civilian cars down on the highways; Journalist and his family among the victims

Abu Dhabi TV's Hamid bereaved after bombing
Dubai |By Neena Gopal | 08-04-2003

The bombing of innocent civilians in Iraq was brought home with chilling effect last week when Abu Dhabi television's most famous face in Iraq nearly broke down. Live.

Shakir Hamid, paterfamilias to the Abu Dhabi television team in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, who has brought the war on Iraq into millions of viewers' living rooms, found that the war had hit closer to home than he could have ever imagined.

The fierce, relentless bombing by U.S. forces of the southern city of Nassiriya on which he was reporting had claimed three precious victims - Shakir's older brother Jawad and two of his brother's children, Hamid, 13, and 12-year-old Khulood. Shakir's sister-in-law was critically injured.

The couple's five other children who were in the car with them escaped but with their father dead, their mother's life hanging by a thread and their elder siblings gone, their fate must have been preying on Shakir's mind as he went live that night.

Jawad, 45, a virtual cripple from an earlier car accident and in need of constant medical care, had decided the night before that he and his family could not survive another night of U.S. bombing in their hometown of Nassiriya.

He and several other members of the family as well as close friends decided they would head out of Nassiriya for the town further south to the safe haven of Souk Al Shuyoukh.

Unfortunately, with the information blackout under which most Iraqis live, the older Hamid, who ran a second hand car business, had no idea that U.S. forces, sweeping north from Kuwait had control of that very highway that Monday night.

Or, that facing stiff resistance from Iraqi irregulars in Shuyoukh, the edgy Americans were shooting at everything on the stretch of road between the southern town and Nassiriya, where the Americans had been bogged down by President Saddam Hussain's elite Iraqi Republican Guard as they attempted the move north, from Basra.

Jawad and his family, part of a huge convoy of cars carrying other civilians from Nassiriya were mowed down by the U.S. soldiers as they approached Souk Al Shuyoukh.

"My brother and my nephew and niece died on the spot," said a tearful Imad, Shakir's younger brother and also a television journalist who arrived in Dubai from Baghdad a day before the war began.

He told Gulf News that his friends here had seen an ashen faced Shakir on television recount the story of the massacre, and did not have the heart to tell him (Imad) of his grievous loss at once.

"I tried to call my brother as soon as I found out, but it was virtually impossible to get through, so I had to settle for news of my older brother's death by watching the story being told by another brother on television," said Imad, who finally managed to get through to Baghdad the next day.

He found that Shakir knew little except what he was told by bitter and frightened survivors of that blitz. Their father, who suffered a recent heart attack and is recovering has not been told.

"He has now gone to take care of things in Nassiriya," Imad said of Shakir, who won fame in this region first as Al Jazeera's correspondent in Baghdad and now as Abu Dhabi television's main man in Iraq.

Shakir has turned the camera on the plight of hundreds of nameless Iraqis, maimed and brutalised by a war in which they are no more than hapless pawns, as he had done when he covered the earlier Gulf wars.

This particular list of dead and injured, however, is unlikely to be forgotten or forgiven.