Original post for this day can be found HERE.
After the initial bombing of Baghdad it seems other governorates were now getting bombed. And we started seeing the first images of casualties. I specifically remember the images aired by al-Jazeera filmed in a hospital in Basra. I couldn’t find the footage online but a Robert Fisk article from the time describes some footage he has seen from Basra by al-Jazeera at the same time, it sounds like an unedited version of what was aired.
Raw, devastating realities that expose the truth about Basra [The Independent]
A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A little girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl’s guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery.
I am glad they didn’t’ air what he describes in his article.
In my diary from that day I also talk about the leaflet drops being made by us planes flying over Baghdad.
First an explanation. The website I mention had a free image hosting service which I was able to access, the Iraqi state’s firewall somehow missed that one. I used it to upload the occasional photo. I was hotlinking to the images from my blog and this overwhelmed his servers and cost him a lot of money. I stopped posting photos until I found somewhere else to host my photos.
Now with the magic of Flickr I can finally upload the first two leaflets dropped on the civlian and military population in Baghdad and other cities.
Coalition dropped leaflets, 2003
[click on image to see other side]
The first leaflet I’ve found is presumably intended for the Iraqi army.
Picture side: “We can see everything. Don’t use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons”
Text side: “Don’t try to use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. The coalition has high-tech satellites that can see the preparation and transport of such weapons. Unit commanders who do not comply will be punished.”
[click on image to see larger version]
The second is an announcement about a radio station the coalition has set up.
Both sides: “Infromation Radio. Daily from 6pm to 11pm.” Followed by the frequencies they were supposedly broadcasting on. It took a couple of days before we could get that station. The frequencies were later handed over to the Iraqi Media Net.
Salam Pax 
March 23, 2009 at 7:02 pm |
I remember the original post. What can I say? You do too. Strange feeling. I know it’s not the same strange feeling, and yet . . . .
I just wanted to comment on my bogglement at the flyer. “We can see everything. Don’t use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons” I mean, Christ in a pancake hat. Who comes up with this stuff? What goes in the psych warfare divisions of the US military? (Or, as they probably call it, Mood Security, or some such.) Does somebody really think that random people picking this stuff up are going to say,
“Oh dear. I guess I better not lob any gas canisters if someone tells me to.”
Does somebody really think that the officers who do make the decisions are going to say, “D’oh! I didn’t realize they had satellites. Back to the drawing board!”
The sheer, pure IDIOCY of it all.
The Tibetans are said to have only one word for both ignorance and evil.
March 26, 2009 at 4:41 am |
[…] Pax, who started the Iraq blogging phenomenon looks back six years to the beginning of the war. In a series of posts, Salam reveals previously unpublished notes from the days he did not have […]