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.

الاثنين، 27 يوليو 2009

(Umm Ghada at the Amiriya Bunker)

Art and Power
The reasons for the familiar view that art is largely irrelevant to everyday life and politics deserve scrutiny–Murray Edelman
by Robert Minhinnick
(Umm Ghada at the Amiriya Bunker)
It is years later now
but time can also run backwards.
Still she squats in candlelight,
Umm Ghada in the caravan,
or in 125 degrees Fahrenheit,
a cockroach ticking on her divan.
At night
they come out of the bunker,
the children, the old people,
but all a fog of flesh.
one body with four hundred souls
is exposed in a photographic flash.
They pick the wedding rings and wisdom teeth
from crematorium ash.
Who was it dreamed a stealth bomber?
Stealth steals.
Think of a smart bomb.
Not so smart.
Where the missiles entered Amiriya
daylight was star-shaped in the sarcophagus,
the concrete blasted back,
all the bodies foaming like phosphorus
in a bunker in Iraq.
The old women
took off their shoes
to welcome the fire that jumped into their mouths.
How quickly the children
found themselves unborn.
Yes, stealth steals.
But still Umm Ghadaguards.
Umm Ghada
who goads God
with her grief
and the ghosts she carries,
Umm Ghada my guide
in the charnel house corridors.
What is she but a woman
in desert black.
Yet no desert was ever so black
as the sackcloth that Umm Ghada owns.
Not the Syrian desert’s
Bedouin black, its cairns
of cold stones.
• The Amiriya bunker in Baghdad was destroyed by the USAF on 13 February 1991. More than 400 civilians wer killed. Umm Ghada, lost manymembers of her family in the destruction, became a guide at Amiriya, living on the site. I met her there in September 1998. Her whereabouts today are unknown.

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