Frontline is a presentation of the documentary consortium.
Last week in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein re-emerged, decorating his loyal lieutenants for their
valor in the mother of all battles, and railing against the West for maintaining economic
sanctions against him.
The inquiry team shot these pictures and say the Iraqis allowed them to work freely.
At the same time, Western doctors just back from Iraq reported that the Iraqi people are
suffering terribly in the aftermath of the war.
The result of that is that illness, especially among children, is very, very high, and you're
getting an increased mortality rate like the four-fold figure that we've estimated which
is occurring in Iraq now.
Our argument was not with the people of Iraq, but with this dictator.
Tonight on Frontline, a firsthand report on the devastating effects of the Gulf War on
the people of Iraq.
We have been having a disaster in slow motion over the last four months.
Anywhere from 75,000 to 175,000 children could die due to the public health conditions.
Tonight on Frontline, the war we left behind.
With funding provided by the financial support of viewers like you and by the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, this is Frontline.
Baghdad, on the night of January 17th this year.
The opening minutes of a massive air campaign that would continue for the next six weeks
of the Gulf War.
The intention here in the initial part of the attacks was to impose a strategic and
operational paralysis on Iraq.
And probably the thing that was the most revolutionary was our ability to strike 40 to 50 of Iraq's
key strategic nodes almost simultaneously and within minutes of the time the war began.
What we are looking at here is a map of Baghdad.
This man was the chief theoretician behind the bombing campaign.
He wrote the Bible on strategic air warfare.
Air Force Colonel John Warden's concept was that the road to Kuwait lay through Baghdad,
a strategy to cripple the enemy by destroying key military and economic targets surgically.
Out of this huge city there were only 50 some facilities in the whole area that were struck.
So that if you were sent to Baghdad and dropped down at random and asked to report if it was
a capital that had been at war, your answer would have been, I don't see any evidence.
In a city that for the most part remains intact, we found it easy to pick out Colonel Warden's
strategic nodes.
In Baghdad, eight months after the war, life on the surface is much like any other major
capital.
But the facade is deceiving, just as the telephone tower is a bombed out shell.
In essence, what we were able to accomplish by attacking in and around the Baghdad area
was just the plane to make it impossible for the Iraqi high command to issue any kind of
orders.
We had severed the general ship from the fielded forces.
Were you also trying to, or expecting to have an effect on the high command on Saddam and
his close advisors?
When you bomb something, were you thinking beyond just the physical destruction of that
target as to what effect it might have?
No, because there's just no way to predict that sort of thing.
You don't know for sure who is in any given place at any given time.
You just, you can't control that kind of a thing.
So what you are trying to do with this kind of a warfare is to take away the tools from
the enemy high command, and without the tools, then they are, then they're impotent to affect
the situation.
See anything in the picture?
Yeah, I've got a good map right now, I'm just getting ready to give you a target designation.
One tool was the country's electricity.
On the second night of the war, four F-15Es attacked the largest power plant in southern
Iraq.
Pilot Steve Pingle gave us his own videotape.
Okay, we'll be good to go.
I was the first airplane to attack the power plant just north of Basra.
What's going off behind us?
Roger.
I think our escape will be good, can't we say altitude?
Roger.
We dropped down as we crossed the Iraqi border to low altitude in a string of 16 airplanes.
Well, let's get this over with.
Three dozen, man.
Triple A right below us.
Roger.
Target area.
No problem.
Low shit.
I'm gonna roll it in.
The mission was to try to put the power plant out of commission.
Shoot in the wrong direction, guys.
With the airplanes in our package, we had divided up the area to drop the bombs to be
able to do as much damage as possible.
I know.
It's been a year in Southeast Asia, so I knew what it was like to drop bombs on enemy targets.
It's like riding a bicycle, and you see it once, you tend to remember that sort of thing.
Okay, bombs are gone.
We lost the picture, huh?
Yeah, I'm trying to get it back.
All right.
Would you ever be interested in going on the ground and talking to the guys who describe
it?
What was it like being underneath?
Well, I don't know.
Sometimes you think about that, but no, you know, I wouldn't go to a lot of trouble to
do that because, again, you know, we have a certain mission to do, and ours is to try
and attack the thing.
We went back to the Alhartha plant and other targets around Iraq to see what Colonel Pingle
and the other pilots had never seen from the ground.
The plant was destroyed beyond repair, but as plant engineers confirmed to us, though
it was knocked out of commission by the first raid, the bombers kept coming back.
After that first attack, the plant could not operate again?
There is no possibility to operate the plant because the water treatment plant is completely
destroyed.
So it would have taken months to repair it?
Yeah, yeah.
Not months.
You can't repeat it.
So it would take years to repair it?
Yeah, yeah.
So was it attacked again?
Yeah.
Thirteen times was attacked.
Thirteen times altogether?
Yeah.
You reckon you did a pretty good job on that power station the first night?
Yes.
I found that out subsequently.
In fact, a lot of the details weren't evident until after the war when we flew caps over
Iraq and had a chance to actually fly over the power plant.
At the time we flew over it, we didn't realize that there had been other attacks later on
during the war.
Do you know how many other attacks there were?
I think from what I heard from our intel, it was only a Navy attack.
No, there were twelve more attacks.
Twelve more attacks.
That was the first I'd known that.
Why twelve more times?
A senior Air Force planner explained after the war that the crippling of Iraq's electricity
system, quote, gave us leverage.
Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity, end quote.
You say that you put electrical power in at the strategic center.
Is that right?
Yes, very much so.
Is that as important as anything?
Yes, yes, and the reason why electricity is so enormously important is because virtually
everything that one needs to operate at a strategic level is dependent on electricity.
Taking that away then creates an impairment which is very difficult to grasp.
But the Pentagon has admitted that the Iraqi military was still able to command their forces
on generator power after the electricity was knocked out.
Hitting bridges never completely stopped supplies.
Hitting communications never cut command and control.
But as we found after a month in Iraq, for ordinary Iraqis, the choice of targets was
devastating.
We have been having a disaster in slow motion over the last four months.
Doug Broderick, in charge of the Middle East for the American charity Catholic Relief Services,
is a veteran of disasters.
He served on the Thai-Cambodian border before moving to Baghdad.
Since last spring, he has watched conditions steadily deteriorate.
The bombings knocked out the infrastructure in the country.
The bombings knocked out the electricity.
The bombings knocked out the water supply.
If you don't have electricity for water, you can't pump the water.
You can't use chlorinators.
You don't have pumping station capabilities to get water out into the water supply network,
out to the people.
So nothing works?
So nothing works.
People were so desperate because of the water pressures being so minimal, they would crack
open the pipe, for instance, in the middle of the block in order to extract water.
This caused a great amount of pressure in the whole system, and it also caused sewage
to seep into the water supply system in some areas in the south.
I've walked through a village where there's been three, four inches of sewage on the street,
which is entering into the water supply system.
Sixty percent of the people in the south are drinking contaminated water.
I've seen a case of, for instance, a child, a seven-year-old child, who was thirsty and
took kerosene to drink.
Kerosene?
And he took kerosene, drank the kerosene, and now, when I saw him in the hospital, they
were examining him to see if he had permanent lung damage as a result of the consumption
of kerosene.
How much does a bottle of water cost?
A bottle of water costs three dinars, which is nine dollars.
And the water situation is not getting any better.
It's becoming increasingly worse.
A direct result of the bombing.
Just outside Baghdad, the Rustamiya sewage treatment plant served three million people.
A direct hit cut the main sewage intake, but it was the destruction of the country's power
grid that knocked out this plant's electrical and computer systems permanently.
It has been shut down for eight months.
So what is happening to the sewage now that used to get processed by this plant?
Now we are sending the sewage water to the river.
But don't people use the river for drinking water?
Yes, they use it to drink.
So how much sewage are you putting into the river?
All the water that comes to the plant, they use to send it to the river.
So how much was that in gallons?
A million gallons.
So about fifteen million gallons.
Fifteen million gallons a day?
Hourly.
You're putting fifteen million gallons an hour of raw sewage into the river.
A recent UN report on Iraq stated, quote, the ultimate threat is posed by the large
quantities of sewage from upriver cities that flow untreated into the country's two major
rivers.
Much of the population is now obliged to drink this untreated water straight from the river,
unquote.
The threat is epidemics now spreading out of control.
Doctor, what's wrong with this boy here?
He has typhoid fever, which is the most common infectious disease we face here in the city.
How many cases of typhoid are you seeing?
The figure is unbelievable, really, because daily in the whole province of three thousand
six hundred patients attending health centers, of those three thousand six hundred cases,
two thousands of them complaining of typhoid, and it's a horrible, unbelievable figure.
Two thousand a day?
Two thousand a day, yeah.
What happened when the electricity stopped?
It was a catastrophe, because once the electricity has stopped, the water pump station has stopped,
and the homes were deprived from good water supply, pure water supply, the sewage system
has stopped, the whole atmosphere was polluted, the whole environment was polluted, and that's
why we are getting a lot and a lot of infectious diseases, like typhoid fever, like infectious
hepatitis.
I mean, the electricity is not only light, it's not only light.
Electricity does not need only light.
The children's wards are overflowing.
A Harvard study confirms that typhoid is at epidemic levels, and since the war, child
mortality has tripled.
Pentagon planners assured us that collateral damage to civilians would be minimal, but
strategic targets, like a bridge, were often right next door.
I will tell you something, in this room, in this room, when they have bombed the bridge
nearby the hospital, and they have bombed that bridge twelve times, and this bridge
was just a hundred fifty meters from the hospital, we were all in the basement, and the whole
hospital was shaken, and February was a very cold month, and we have a very big problem
with keeping the babies warm, because, you know, electricity was broken, and there's
no electricity, and it was horrible to keep these babies warm.
Because of the bombing, and because of the emotional trauma, a lot of ladies, they've
got premature contraction of their uterus, and they have got fifteen premature babies
only in February.
Fifteen premature babies.
Six of them died, because we couldn't offer them the facilities to warm them.
I can say that I don't know any Iraqi baby who has invaded Kuwait during the crisis,
so how could the Iraqi babies be punished?
Just as you can precisely target exactly where the bomb is going to fall, you feel nowadays,
can you in the same way figure out what effect on the population, what psychological effect
the destruction of that target is going to have?
Is that part of the equation?
No.
And you just don't have any good way of knowing what the effect on the population is going
to be of something that happens to them indirectly, just beyond our capability to know that kind
of thing.
But the Pentagon's interim report on the war states, quote, it was recognized at the
outset that this campaign would cause some unavoidable hardships for the Iraqi populace.
It was impossible, for example, to destroy the electrical power supply for Iraqi command
and control facilities, yet leave untouched that portion of the electricity supplied to
the general populace, end quote.
For many Iraqis, the impact of the bombing was immediate and direct.
Basra in the south was the most heavily bombed city in the war.
Planners and pilots confirmed to us that unlike Baghdad, unguided bombs were freely used here.
From a pilot standpoint, we just hope that there isn't anybody there.
Our mission is to drop the bombs on those specific targets.
And again, it's unfortunate if somebody happens to be there.
And that's the way we look at it.
And bombs, they don't always hit where you aim, particularly with the, quote, dumb bombs
that we were dropping then.
When we drop laser-guided bombs, the precision munition is a lot higher chance of hitting
exactly what I'm looking at or what I'm aiming at than with just plain dumb bombs, because
there's a lot of factors, once they come off the airplane, that make them not always hit
where the pilot's aiming at.
There were no evident military targets in Al-Hakamiya, a civilian neighborhood in Basra.
But residents cannot believe their homes were deliberately bombed.
When we found some at a family gathering, they told us it must have been a mistake.
Ali Rita, a marine engineer, remembers what happened when the bombs hit at one in the
morning and killed 18 of his neighbors.
How many houses were hit that day?
Well, from that street to there, 48.
Forty-eight houses?
Forty-eight houses, yes.
How long did the bombing last?
About three or four minutes.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
It's continuing the bombing.
It's very tragic.
Oh.
This is a, it's a cluster bomb.
You were here?
Yes.
And, uh, what, this fell on your house or in the garden?
No.
Of the roughly 88,000 tons dropped by coalition air forces during the war, I think no more
than about 7 or 8,000 tons were precision munitions, if that's the right word.
That's right, about 10 percent.
So why did you have to drop the other 80,000 tons?
Um, because you didn't have enough of the precision weapons, not so much enough of the
precision weapons, but you did not have enough of the precision platforms to depend entirely
on the precision weapons.
Now, the thing to keep in mind here is that the non-precision bombs are just exactly that.
They are non-precision.
One almost needs to think of them like the pellets in the shotgun shell that you use
when you're shooting skeet.
There may be 500 tiny pellets in one of these shells.
If, when you are shooting skeet, that five of those pellets hit the clay pigeon, then
you see this as being a great success.
Well, it is a great success, but the other way to look at it is that 99 percent of those
pellets missed their target, which is not relevant.
Colonel Pingle's own tape confirms that bombs sometimes missed.
Okay, impact.
It looked like a little bit short on the right-hand side of the power plant.
We were the first to tell the pilot what he hit.
One of the bombs that first night actually hit their air raid shelter.
Oh, I didn't know that.
And killed seven people.
Now, did you know there was an air raid shelter there?
No.
We attempt to the best of our ability to hit the specific aim points, and the aim points
that we pick are the military significant, you know, the power plant.
We don't go around bombing air raid shelters.
But four weeks into the war, on February 13th, this shelter in the Amaria district of Baghdad
was hit with two laser-guided 2,000-pound bombs.
This time, it was military intelligence that failed.
Over 200 neighborhood women and children were incinerated.
Without any assistance from Iraqi officials, we found some of the very few who got out
alive.
When the first bomb hit, I couldn't believe it.
I told myself it was impossible for them to target women and children.
When the second bomb hit, the electricity went out, and rubble fell all around us.
How many of your children were with you?
Two.
I took them every night after the war started, on January 17th.
Did your children manage to escape with you?
No, I managed to get my son Ahmed out after about an hour, but I couldn't reach my son
Samir.
He was under the bomb.
It was impossible to get him out.
Who came with you to the shelter?
My mother.
Only.
I was sound asleep and didn't see a thing.
Suddenly I jumped at the sound of the explosion and ran to the corridor which leads to the
entrance.
Everything was blacked out.
And when did you realize, after you'd escaped, that your mother was still inside?
I was the first one out.
I didn't see anybody leaving, so I knew my mother was still inside.
One of the gates was open, and I tried to get back in.
The fire was raging, the heat was intense.
I was burned, as you can see, when I tried to get back inside.
The mistake that got a lot of publicity during the war was the Amiriya shelter in Baghdad.
Can you explain to us how that came about?
It was your word that that was a mistake.
That was not a mistake.
That was very deliberately targeted because it was an Iraqi military facility, and it
happened to be a very important one.
Now why that there were civilians in that military facility, we simply do not know.
That there were, it was clear, that we all regretted the loss of life on the civilian
side there.
We felt very bad about it, but it was nevertheless, it was a very important military facility,
and we just plain did not know that there were civilians in there.
We had no way to know that.
We searched through the entire shelter looking for evidence that might support the Pentagon's
claim.
In the basement, we found the original blueprints scorched and waterlogged.
We found no sign of a military command post, but the shelter was sophisticated, equipped
to protect against nuclear and chemical attack.
We then discovered what the Pentagon apparently did not know.
Before the war, this shelter was reserved for the exclusive use of civilian professionals.
They never used it.
Professor Nabil Al-Tawil was one of them.
When the attack started on the 17th of January, they opened this shelter for everybody in
the neighborhood can go there.
So the original idea was to restrict it to key people like yourself.
Yeah, let's say VIPs or the elite people, people with PhDs, different universities and
government establishments.
We've been issued with identity card by the civil defense, which allows us.
For instance, I wrote in my ID card, there is four members in my family.
We can go in.
That was me, my wife, and her parents.
We can go there.
But we didn't make use of it because, as I said, at the beginning of the attack, civil
defense decided that it should be open for everybody to go in.
Do you know why you didn't know civilians in there?
The principle of being able to observe a building 24 hours a day and know exactly who comes
in and goes out, that's just a very difficult thing to do.
They could have easily seen hundreds of women and children going in and out, children with
their colorful clothes going in and out, carrying their food in and out.
This is obviously not a military target.
How many children died?
How many women died?
Thousands more were to die in revolts in the Shia South and the Kurdish North, sparked
by the war.
The U.S. had hoped that if the bombing strategy could not dislodge Saddam Hussein and his
high command, a desperate people would do it for them.
Our presumption had to be that as the Iraqi people saw that the effects of the war were
coming home to them, at least indirectly because of the lack of electricity and so on, that
the people in one way or another would begin to express their dissatisfaction to the regime
to the extent they could.
Iraqis were told that if they overthrew Saddam, the bombing would stop.
There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the
Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator,
to step aside.
In Kirkuk and other cities, the Kurds rose up and briefly took control of northern Iraq
until Saddam's artillery and helicopters moved in.
When you strike such a serious blow at a dictatorship like that, people are going to rise up.
They did rise up.
They took advantage of an opportunity.
And then, of course, since Saddam was able to survive, they paid a terrible price.
There was a sense of bewilderment as to why nothing was happening, why the U.S. and the
other countries were so indifferent to what was going on.
Peter Galbraith is a senior staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He's championed the Kurds since 1988 and was with them in northern Iraq when their revolt
collapsed.
The U.S. had repeatedly warned Saddam that it would intervene if he used air power against
the rebels.
It was an empty threat.
President Bush had issued a call for them to rise up.
They assumed that when he made that call that he meant it, that that meant the United States
would be supportive of their rebellion.
They couldn't understand why the helicopters were continuing to fly.
And then, at this point, the United States and the other countries stood at a complete
arms length as millions of people were made refugees.
It even took an awfully long period of time before the United States was prepared to respond
to the humanitarian crisis that was building up on the Turkish border.
What happened the day they left their village?
The soldiers of Saddam attacked us, we all left our houses, monies, animals, lambs, we
only saved our lives.
Were the soldiers of Saddam bombing the village?
What were they doing to the village?
They were bombing, they were attacking with the helicopters, and so we all escaped.
Had they had any assurances from the U.S. or any of its partners that something would
be done?
There were no direct contacts between the United States administration and the Iraqi
opposition.
I repeatedly was in touch with the State Department and the National Security Council about whether
they wanted to meet with them.
The answer was no, and indeed, one NSCA told me, quote, our policy is to get rid of Saddam,
not his regime.
What on earth did that mean?
I understood it to mean that the United States did not want to see a rebellion by Iraq's
Shia or Kurds succeed.
It wasn't until after the exodus that the U.S. decided to lend a hand escorting the
Kurds back to Iraqi territory.
U.S. aircraft still patrol a thin strip of northern Iraq while Kurdish forces hold the
ground.
They are called the Peshmerga, and some of them have been fighting for a free Kurdistan
for 30 years.
But trapped in the mountains between Iran, Turkey, and Saddam's Iraq, they have ended
up being used by whichever power found it convenient at the time.
Still, their numbers have more than doubled since the uprising, bolstered by former conscripts
from the Iraqi army and recruits among destitute refugees.
Eight separate factions make up the Kurdistan front.
The largest, the Kurdish Democratic Party, took us to this mountain training base on
the Iraq-Iran border.
Do you have many more Peshmerga than you did in March?
I have more than 30,000 Peshmerga like this Peshmerga, now ready.
Ready to fight?
To fight.
General Hamad Afandi told us that overall, the Kurds now have 100,000 men under arms,
and they are training hard.
How do you rate the Kurdish guerrillas, the Peshmerga?
One of the best I've ever seen.
As far as the ability to mount a strike, as far as the ability to disregard casualties,
they're some of the best.
From the time that the U.S. military buildup began in Saudi Arabia, is it fair to say there
was an interest in creating trouble for Saddam in northern Iraq?
No.
Using the Kurds?
Sure.
Absolutely.
Retired Air Force Colonel Jim McDonald says he helped arm the Kurds before and during
the Gulf War.
Officially, the U.S. has always denied such help.
So there was a market for military equipment in Kurdistan from, let's say, the fall of
1990?
Yeah.
Colonel McDonald served as a military attache in the Middle East and in the office of the
Secretary of Defense before going into private business.
In this case, arms.
What kind of equipment were they looking for?
Mostly small arms.
What kind of small arms?
Semi-automatic weapons, personal arms, that type of thing, the ammunition that goes with
them.
But it had to be an American or German?
Not necessarily, not necessarily, because you can go through other markets to meet what
those particular requirements are.
For example, if you wanted Soviet-type of equipment, then you could go through markets
through what was then the Warsaw Pact countries, through friendly countries to get into that
market.
So you were basically getting Soviet-type equipment, which would find its way through
the Turks to the Kurds in Iraq, with the blessing of the United States government?
As far as I knew, yes.
The Bush administration has refused to take any responsibility for the rebellion or its
failure.
During the uprising by the Kurds and the Shiites in southern Iraq, initially the U.S. officially
stated that Saddam could not use his helicopters and his planes.
That policy then changed, and the uprisings were put down.
Why was there a change of policy?
I don't know.
I think all of us were frustrated by that decision, because if you're going to give
an ultimatum, then live up to that ultimatum.
Do not let an essentially defenseless people suffer because you gave up that ultimatum.
The Kurds feel that the history of Kurdish-United States relations has been a history of betrayal,
and that U.S. policy is wavered between being amoral and immoral.
In the 1970s, the United States backed the Kurdish rebellion, provided military assistance
through Iran as a means of keeping the Iraqi regime off balance, but never had the intention
for the Kurdish rebels to succeed, just to continue the fighting.
The Kurds never knew that they were a pawn in this game.
I'm afraid that in the present situation, we really have a repeat of that sorry history.
Kurdish leaders who remember the past, like Massoud Barzani, are cautious about American
patronage.
How a superpower can betray a very poor people and let them down?
I personally have come to the conclusion that we, the Kurds, should never be involved in
any international game or covert action whatsoever.
Everything has to be on the table.
How dependent will you be on the United States to survive as you are now in this part of
Iraq?
I hope that we will reach an acceptable deal.
I have to tell you that up till now, the U.S. and other countries don't have a specific
policy on the Kurds.
I don't have much hopes for outside backing.
I believe that our problem has to be solved internally with the Iraqi government.
This month, the situation has deteriorated.
Skirmishes with the Iraqi army have brought more casualties, more refugees.
Negotiations with Saddam have stalled, and the Kurdish leaders know they cannot match
Saddam's artillery and tanks.
If the worst happens and the negotiations break down, are you ready for war again with
Saddam?
What should we do?
Do you think the Kurds stand a chance of ever achieving any of their aspirations?
No.
The bitter failure of the rebellion has left the Kurds back where they started, inside
Saddam's Iraq.
The army has retreated south under pressure from the U.S., but electricity, food and supplies
come from Baghdad.
For hundreds of thousands of refugees now back from the mountains, supplies are critically
short.
How many patients do you have here every day?
About 500 patients.
500?
Yes.
Every day?
Every day.
Do you have enough medicine?
Yes.
Not enough for them.
What are the main problems that the children are having?
The main problem is malnourishment.
Malnutrition?
Yes, because of lack of milk.
Can they buy milk in the market?
In the market, it's very, very high cost.
For the Kurds, like everyone else in the country, it is the 15th month of sanctions, first imposed
to force Iraq out of Kuwait.
But measures imposed to pressure a dictator are taking an unfortunately harmful toll,
the U.N. reports, on his worst enemies.
How many refugees are in this zone?
It's about 500,000 refugees here.
Indiana dispensary, about 70,000 people.
I deal with them.
You deal with 70,000 people?
Yes.
Dr. Salam Mohammed Sultan runs the clinic in the small town of Diyana, in the far northeast
of Iraq.
He is short of everything he needs, and says that almost none of the aid promised from
the outside has arrived.
How many doctors are there now in this zone, where you've got a problem of roughly half
a million refugees?
About eight doctors.
Eight doctors.
Yes.
Eight doctors for everybody.
Eight doctors, yes.
Eight Kurdish doctors, and from NGOs, two to three.
So just a few foreign doctors, and eight Kurdish doctors.
Have you received much help from the United States?
No.
The most urgent need here is for shelter.
Private aid groups have promised it.
The U.N. has promised it.
People have arrived.
So in Diyana, have a lot of refugees come back to Diyana and are just sleeping wherever
they can?
Yes.
But winter here is very, very cold.
They can't sleep outside.
Where will they go in the cold weather?
They can't go to any place, because there is no place to go.
We found some refugees crowded into schools.
They knew they would soon have to leave.
How many children does she have?
Three children.
How many families are living in all the schools in Diyana?
In Diyana, every school, about 100 families.
100 families.
Yes.
We're going to have to find another place within two weeks.
Yes.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees are now squatting in the rubble of what were once
Kurdish villages.
Any day now, they will face heavy rains, followed by freezing temperatures and snow.
I've heard U.S. officials describe that our goal now is to get the Kurds to go back to
their cities and to their villages.
But the fact is that there are no villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, and there have been no
villages since 1988.
More than 4,000 villages have been destroyed.
This is truly a war-ravaged region.
There is no agriculture.
For many people, there's no place to go home.
But the critical issue is, of course, that there's no protection.
What happens to these villagers who come back to the ruins of their old villages, villages
that have been destroyed in some cases 10, 15 years ago?
What will happen to them this winter?
Some of them are going to receive help from the international community through the UN
shelter program.
Some of them will inevitably have to remain in their tents, especially those that are
camped in the valleys.
And those that are on the mountains and that won't get help will have to leave their tents
on the rubble and for the winter come down to the valley.
In more tents?
In more tents.
Do you regard this crisis as being over?
It isn't over yet.
In a way, it is a part of the Gulf War, and it's not about to be over.
After the bombing campaign and the failed rebellion, the third phase of the war goes
on, economic sanctions.
Iraq is not allowed to export oil to earn cash or to import goods.
The country has been effectively cut off as a means to keep up pressure on Saddam Hussein.
UN sanctions can sign 18 million people to bear that pressure, too.
What has a year of sanctions done to this country?
It has destroyed the agricultural sector.
It has affected the public health and caused a tremendous increase in the child deaths.
The economic sector of the country is finished.
We've never had an emergency or a disaster that affected a population of 18 million people.
Because of sanctions, electricity cannot be fully restored.
For now, two-thirds of the power is back on, but, say engineers, it won't last as the plants
start breaking down.
Can you keep the plant running now without foreign parts?
It's very difficult.
I mean, it depends on the luck, on luck.
Something will happen, break down.
We don't have it.
We will stop.
We take out the unit.
Don't you make the parts yourself?
We'll try very hard.
We try.
We are sure that we will try very hard, but, you know, there are some parts we cannot do.
We are sure.
Fayek Mustafa is the director of the Aldora power plant bombed in the war.
Are you working the machinery harder than you would normally do if you didn't have this
crisis?
Because we have no spares, yes.
Normally we change these parts, but now we have consumed everything.
All power plants, not only us.
They consumed everything.
So you're at the limit?
Of course.
To repair the whole power plant system would be $20 billion minimum to start with.
$20 billion?
$20 billion to repair the whole power supply system.
This would take years.
Power outages are a daily occurrence, and modern services Iraqis used to enjoy are decaying
rapidly.
Without the electricity, which is tied in intrinsically to the health care system, operations have
to be postponed.
Elective surgery is all but out, and that includes cases of breast cancer, cases of
caesarean section.
We're looking at a day-by-day greater public health disaster for the people in Iraq.
On top of that, in hospitals like Karbala General, basic medicine is running out.
Dr. Zuhair Al-Yassi says the effects of war and sanctions have been devastating.
Now you're a surgeon.
Yes.
Do you have anesthetics?
No.
Do you have dressings for the operating room?
Very very little amount.
Do you have gauze?
Very little amount, and that's why we are only working on the emergency situations.
We do operations for the emergency cases only.
We cannot do any other operations.
Do you have oxygen?
No.
Disinfectants?
No.
Antibiotics?
Very little amount, and we are on the brink of losing them, I mean, I'm finished.
Heart drugs?
No.
Insulin?
No.
What about, you've had some rabies cases here recently.
Yeah.
Anything for rabies?
No, believe me, no.
Right now you're getting some supplies from international organizations.
They are very small and limited.
We are using them only for the really needy patients.
Going around the wards, we're only looking at very severe cases, correct?
Correct.
And why do you send the other people home?
We send them because the admission of a patient means that you have to supply them with medicine,
to supply them with fluids, to supply them with food, and we cannot offer them enough
food, and we cannot offer them the drugs needed for admission.
So we admit only the critical people.
If it isn't a severe case, you don't have enough food in this hospital to feed them?
Yes, that's right.
As sanctions were imposed in August 1990, food prices have risen an average of 1,000%.
The government ration system is on the verge of collapse.
The 70% of the food supply Iraq used to buy from abroad is gone.
What is on the market is very expensive.
How much does one chicken cost?
How much for one chicken?
13 dinars for each.
13 dinars for one chicken.
That's $39 for one chicken.
Do you have your shopping bag?
Yes, I have it.
What's in your shopping bag?
Just grapes and some dates.
Grapes and?
Dates.
Grapes and dates?
Yes.
You can't afford eggs?
What?
Can you buy eggs?
No.
It's too expensive for me.
Can you buy meat?
No.
We have no money to buy anything.
We visited the market in Basra with Moyad Saeed from the UN Children's Emergency Fund.
So how many people is UNICEF, for example, having to feed now in Iraq?
We have to feed 700,000.
700,000 people?
Yes.
Well, how many does that leave?
That's not enough.
It's not enough because all of the people are poor.
Most of the people are poor now.
There is not adequate food in the country to meet the food needs of 18 million people.
Local agriculture has all but collapsed.
The harvest was down 75% this year, and because of sanctions, farmers do not have the proper
seeds they need now to plant the next harvest.
They have no insecticides, no pesticides.
The animal vaccine plant was bombed in the war.
I see the next step, you might see people selling off their land, selling off their
houses in desperation to get food, a food supply that is increasingly becoming more
expensive and a food supply that is increasingly becoming more scarce.
Outside a church in Baghdad, they wait for flour, milk, and rice distributed here twice
a week by Catholic relief.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the shortage of food, which the
government can no longer afford to import, will quote, gradually but inexorably cause
massive starvation throughout the country.
I get very concerned because every time I come here, the crowd grows.
I get very concerned because every time I come here, the crowd gets more aggressive
for food.
In this food distribution, we started off with a half truck.
Now we're up to three trucks.
We could be up to 30 trucks, 300 trucks, 3,000 trucks.
The need is going to grow.
There's going to be more and more people outside the gates here clamoring, scrambling for food
allocations.
And it's not just one segment of the population, it's the whole population.
The humanitarian relief supplies, the humanitarian assistance amounts to just a trickle of 20
to 50 days of food for the country.
What happens on day 60, day 70, day 80?
That's when you have the beginning of the famine.
That's when you have more deaths.
Families are totally pawning.
Their carpets, their furniture, their jewelry, their watches, their gold, their silverware,
anything that has any kind of values, their cameras, their videos, their TVs, their radios,
in order to get cash for food.
How much does a can of baby food cost?
A can of baby food would cost 15 dinars for approximately half a kilo, which is $45, which
would be 10 percent of a family's monthly income, just for one can of baby food.
Dr. Ayman Khamas is a resident pediatrician at Basra General Hospital.
Over a third of Iraqi children between the ages of one and two are now malnourished.
You can see this baby is one year old.
How many children are you getting in this hospital with this condition every week?
Every week about 40, 40 to 50.
Forty to 50?
Yes.
Not only inpatient, we have outpatient visitors.
They came just for supplying with milk, with milk formula.
Do you have enough milk to go around for the patients in the hospital and some on the outside?
No, not enough.
But we try to help the patients that most need it, like this one.
This one needs help and treatment, medical treatment and feeding for more than two or
three months regularly to get again better and recovered.
How many children have died in this hospital in the past few months?
I don't know exactly the number, but I think it is a large number because of complications
of malnutrition, loss of immunity, most of them, and they got the septicemia and super
added infection, mostly pneumonia or gastroenteritis with severe dehydration and shock, most of
them died.
What's going to happen in the next few months now if sanctions aren't lifted, if the same
supply of food continues?
Larger number of baby will die.
Big problem to us, of course.
How many hours do you spend in the hospital every day now?
Most of the time, most of the time, just a few hours for my lunch, my dinner and my sleep.
I think more than 18 hours.
I know it's difficult to try and look at figures for the numbers of children who would possibly
die as a result of all of this over the next year, but can you make a guess?
I would put a figure of anywhere from 75,000 to 175,000 children could die as a result
of what is happening right now in Iraq due to the public health conditions.
Sanctions fall under the authority of the UN Security Council, which has devoted far
more attention to Saddam's failure to disclose his nuclear and chemical weapons programs
than the conditions of people in Iraq.
The agenda is adopted.
Last July, a special UN team urgently recommended that Iraq be allowed to sell $3 billion worth
of oil to buy food and seeds.
The Security Council went on to authorize Iraq to spend less than a third of what its
own UN officials recommended, a reduced sum which an internal UN report called substantially
less than the bare minimum requirement.
The money must be spent under strict conditions which the Iraqi government has so far refused
to accept.
The president justifies sanctions on the grounds that the pressure will drive the Iraqis to
get rid of Saddam, but senior US government officials told us in a background briefing
that on the contrary, a popular uprising against Saddam, quote, is the least likely alternative.
Our argument has never been with the people of Iraq.
It was and is with a brutal dictator whose arrogance dishonors the Iraqi people.
We must keep the United Nations sanctions in place as long as he remains in power.
This is not to say that we should punish the Iraqi people.
Any type of UN plan to provide supplies for Iraq through the sale of Iraqi oil is only
for food and medicines, basic humanitarian needs.
This does not count, for instance, repairing any water plants or repairing any electricity
plants to any substantial degree of working order.
So it doesn't solve the problem?
No, it doesn't solve the problem.
President Bush told us, and I think you'll remember this, he said, we are not at war
with the people of Iraq.
I don't know.
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Next time on Frontline, boxing promoter Don King.
Don's hair, his jewelry, his lingo, it's all an act.
It's too confused.
It's too obscure.
But essentially, he's a con man.
It's the con man as buffoon.
So I don't have no use for you, Jack Newfield.
Reporter Jack Newfield investigates the dark side of Don King, his criminal past, and his
handling of young fighters in Don King Unauthorized.
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