Politics Overshadow Horror of Iraqi Bomb Victims

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 16 — The horror that dropped down 12 years ago on the Amiriya neighborhood of Baghdad has now become two stories. The first is of real and deep suffering: on Feb. 13, 1991, two American missiles cut cleanly through a bomb shelter there and killed perhaps 408 people, most of them women and children who had been sleeping.

It was the largest loss of civilian life in the Persian Gulf war.

The second story played itself out again today at a ceremony at the site marking the bombing's anniversary: how Iraq, like many nations, channels its suffering into politics — in its case, to prove to the rest of the world that it has been a victim of American aggression and, soon, might be again.

"Now they are planning to wage a new war that will be even more horrible," Saleh Gafuri Saad, 51, an air traffic controller who is one of the few to survive the bombing, told a crowd at the shelter today. "Now they are using the war on terrorism as a pretext, and are using the question of disarming Iraq as a pretext, to cover up what they have done."

At the time in 1991, American officials said they did not know that civilians were in the bunker, which intelligence indicated was a military command-and-control center shielding top officials, perhaps even President Saddam Hussein himself. The United States has thus held Mr. Hussein responsible for the deaths.

Still, with a new war possibly weeks or less away, the bombing stands as a reminder of the risks of civilian casualties even with such accurate firepower: Mr. Saad lost his wife, his daughter and four of his five sons to the two rockets — one that punched a hole in the shelter's ceiling, the other that slid precisely through the same hole.

And, as with civilian casualties from American bombs in Kosovo and Afghanistan, it is also a reminder of how those casualties can work against support for war and the Americans waging it. Iraq clearly understands this and has long turned the Amiriya shelter into exhibit No. 1 of what it says is unjust treatment since 1991, a mandatory stop for diplomats, journalists and peace delegations traveling through Baghdad.

"Who are the terrorists?" read a banner in English at the bunker today. "Martyrs of Al Amiriya or the murderers in Washington?"