ملجأ العامرية Amriya Shelter

ملجأ العامرية أو الفردوس أو رقم خمسة وعشرين هو ملجأ من القصف جوي بحي العامرية، بغداد، العراق، قصف أثناء حرب الخليج الثانية. فقد ادت احدى الغارات الاميركية يوم 13 فبراير 1991 على بغداد بواسطة طائرتان من نوع أف-117 تحمل قنابل ذكية إلى تدمير ملجأ مما ادى لمقتل أكثر من 400 مدني عراقي من نساء واطفال. وقد بررت قوات التحالف هذا القصف بانه كان يستهدف مراكز قيادية عراقية لكن اثبتت الاحداث ان تدمير الملجا كان متعمدا خاصة وان الطائرات الاميركية ظلت تحوم فوقه لمدة يومين
The Amiriyah shelter or Al-Firdos bunker was an air-raid shelter ("Public Shelter No. 25") in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, Iraq. The shelter was used in the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War by hundreds of civilians. It was destroyed by the USAF with two laser-guided "smart bombs" on 13 February 1991 during the Gulf War, killing more than 408 civilians.

السبت، 24 يناير 2009

The Battle for Hearts and Minds


The Amiriyah shelter in a middle class Baghdad neighborhood
After several weeks of air war, the emphasis declined on attacking Baghdad and leadership sites. Saddam Hussein was still very much alive and the unanticipated mission of preventing Scud missile attacks on Israel forced a rewriting of the script. Other priorities also intruded on the leadership focus, such as new intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction .
The Amiriyah shelter, known as the Al Firdos C3 bunker to U.S. war planners, was added to the target list in early February as a newly activated Iraqi command shelter. Signals traffic and daytime satellite photography of limousines and trucks parked outside suggested "leadership" activity.

Looking out the roof of the darkened Amiriyah shelter.

The shelter was bombed in the early morning hours of Feb. 13. A pair of stealth fighters expertly dropped two 2,000-lb. laser-guided bombs on the hardened shelter, piercing the concrete steel reinforced roof.
Unexpectedly hundreds of Iraqi civilians, possibly the families of elite government and intelligence personnel, were using the shelter as a refuge to escape nighttime bombing. About 400 Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, died in the attack. Another 200 were injured severely. U.S. intelligence never detected the civilian presence and still believes the shelter was used (at least during the day) by Iraq's intelligence agencies as a back-up communications post.
U.S. leaders scrambled to explain the attack. Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell conferred and the air war planning office in Riyadh was ordered to get approval
for any subsequent downtown targets selected for attack.

In September 1991 I had occasion to visit a twin of the Al Firdos bunker, another Baghdad civil defense shelter that was on the target list but went unbombed after the Amiriyah disaster. It appeared to be a typical civil defense facility, built to NATO specifications and filled with bunk beds and pool tables, hardened in anticipation of an Israeli or Iranian attack on the capital.

The interior of the unbombed twin to the Amiriyah shelter

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