Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians
From the Canadian Press.

Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw “incredible” levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad.
Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad.
“There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla,” Huguenin said in a interview by satellite telephone.
“We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening.”
Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village of Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy fighting between American troops and Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the result of “bombs, projectiles.”
“At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at that place . . . but it was definitely a different pattern from what we had seen in Basra or Baghdad.
“There will be investigations I am sure.”
Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the flow of wounded, said Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100 wounded a day.
Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered superficial shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he said.
But the pattern in Hilla was completely different.
“In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror.”
At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two days, he said — far beyond its capacity.
“Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had to manage, that was all.”
The city is no longer accessible, he added…
The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling for donations to help cope. The Red Cross Web site is: www.redcross.ca

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Canadian Press
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