BAGHDAD, Aug 19: One man was carried away on a stretcher, a long metal rod stuck in his face. Another walked away from the carnage completely covered in blood and still holding his briefcase.
But others were not so lucky when the suspected suicide truck bomb ripped through the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday.
American soldiers, stripped down to T-shirts, combed through the rubble for victims still trapped inside as black smoke drifted skywards and helicopters hovered overhead.
Hundreds of people were winding up the day’s work when the bomb tore into the building, collapsing part of the roof.
“We were inside and suddenly there was a huge explosion. The whole building shook. There are still many people inside,” said Fouad Victor, a UN worker.
The explosion also destroyed part of a spinal cord clinic next door to the UN headquarters.
Some of the 73 patients were trapped for more than an hour in rubble under the collapsed roof while others, barely dressed, were rolled outside in wheelchairs and left in the stifling sun.
The UN uses the canal hotel in east central Baghdad as the headquarters for a wide number of its agencies, employing hundreds of staff.
It was the base for weapons inspectors during the hunt for Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction. After the occupation began, the UN headquarters focused mostly on humanitarian aid for Iraq.
But on Tuesday it was caught up in the violence rattling Iraq every day.
Hysterical Iraqis tried to get past US soldiers to find the fate of relatives trapped inside the building, now an ugly shell of twisted metal and flattened ceilings and walls.
One UN employee had gone across town to another office and returned to find ambulances speeding by and American soldiers scrambling through the destruction.
She sat on the street and wept as she told a soldier that her niece was inside.
“Let me in please. Let me in,” she said, waving her UN badge. “Oh God why is this happening to us. Oh God let me in.”
When the truck smashed into the building, a news conference was being held inside on mines and unexploded ordnance.
Grant Hodgson, a journalist attending the conference, said the lights went out after a sudden huge blast. Smoke filled the rooms and nobody could see as they tried to run away. Outside at the scene of the blast he saw severed limbs scattered across a wide area and a three-foot deep crater.
“I saw legs and arms, charred remains...there were at least three dead right there,” he said moments afterwards.
One man, a gatekeeper at the UN building, said he was standing nearby when the blast occurred. His face drained and his hands covered in blood after trying to help the wounded, he said he had done everything he could but it wasn’t enough.
“The vacuum from the blast was so very, very strong,” said 29-year-old Uday Ahad. “There were many injured, both Iraqis and foreigners. I tried to help the wounded, but there was nothing we could do about the dead.”—Reuters