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March 31, 2003
We won't see this
It would seem that al Jazeera's English language site is a victim of war as it has been made inaccessible to english readers. So we have to turn elsewhere.
Robert Fisk in Baghdad has seen an al-Jazeera videotape of recent events in Basra that was driven up to Baghdad on the open road from Basra. It is important because there are no western journalists in Basra and the western media turnd down the images offered to them from al Jazeera.
Fisk describes what he see thus:
'Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, a small Iraqi girl victim of an Anglo American air strike is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a terribly wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress.
An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq's second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape filmed over the past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad is raw, painful, devastating.
It is also proof that Basra reportedly "captured'' and "secured'' by British troops last week is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein's forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck.'
If you can't trust seeing through Fisk's eyes, then these photos indicate the damage being wrought by precision bombing. Fisk describes the kind of bombs being used by the US. And some of todays cartoons from the Arab press. A extensive list of cartoons from March in the Arab Press.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 31, 2003 02:34 PM