Wretched images of war

25 Oct, 2001 10:56 AM3 mins to read

By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

QUETTA - Sami Ullah was asleep when it happened, and so his friends and neighbours had to tell him about the bomb that struck his house and what it did to him and his family.

How the American planes, which had been over earlier in the evening, had returned after everyone went to bed and how, instead of the Taleban base 3.2km away, they dropped their bombs on a residential area of the town of Tarin Kot.

Sami Ullah's own injuries are obvious enough even now - deep cuts caused by the collapsing house and the fragment of something in his belly that might be bomb shrapnel. One of his cousins was also pulled breathing out of the rubble, but no one else was. In the eleven hours between the explosion and the moment when he finally regained consciousness, Sami Ullah's wife, his four children, his parents, and five of his brothers and sisters had been lifted dead from the rubble of their home and buried.

What do you say to a stranger who tells you that he has just lost every member of his immediate family? All you can decently do is ask questions.

Sami Ullah, who is not familiar with the phrase "collatoral damage" does not have an answer.

In the nineteen days of the bombing campaign, many terrible things have been reported, but the scenes at the Al-Khidmat Al-Hajeri Hospital, where Sami Ullah lay last night, are the most pathetic that I have seen. In the female ward lay a woman named Dery Gul, about 30 years old, with her 10-year-old daughter Najimu, and a 1-year-old baby named Hameed Ullah. The little girls have bruised and cut faces; the cheek of the baby is cut neatly in a T shape, as if by a knife. But to understand how lucky they were you only have to look at their mother.

Her face is half covered with bandages, and her arm is wrapped in a thick plaster. "The bomb burned her eyes," says the female doctor. "The whole right side of her body is burned." The reason Dery Gul is so battered and her daughters so lightly injured, they say, is because she cradled the little girls in her arms.

From the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the injured people were carried late on Wednesday, the town of Tarin Kot is just a dot in the map of Afghanistan, traversed by a single road. Even if it amounts to no more than a few thousand mud houses with a few administrative buildings it is a provincial capital. Yes, the people in the hospital said, there were Taleban there; but, no, they were kilometres away from Sami Ullah, Dery Gul, the little girls and their dead.

- INDEPENDENT

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