Eyewitness: Baghdad's victims

Eyewitness: Baghdad's victims

By Paul Wood BBC correspondent in Baghdad

The skies over Baghdad are a dark gun metal grey - the Iraqi forces having lit oil fires all around the capital in the hope that the haze will confuse incoming missiles and bombers.

A doctor shields a wounded boy from the media

People are out on the streets today [Sunday] although with daylight bombing for the first time yesterday, the atmosphere is a little more tense.

There is no doubt that the battle is closing in on the Iraqi capital.

Yesterday morning the Iraqi authorities took a group of journalists to one of the main teaching hospitals in Baghdad to show us civilians they said had been injured in the overnight air raids.

The figure of 207 civilian casualties has been issued by the ministry of information. At one teaching hospital, we were told more than 100 casualties had been brought in overnight.

Real suffering

Five-year-old Ahmed Raleb Ali is heavily bandaged and clearly in pain.

Cameras click away as his father tries to comfort him.

Yes, this is what the Iraqis want us to see. But the suffering here is no less real for that.

A few beds away, completely motionless, is a little girl called Hasim, who is also five. Doctor Jamil al-Bayarti operated on her last night.

"She had injury to the spinal cord," he said. She will be a cripple in the future."

I spoke to another doctor at the hospital who said he thought that about 85% of the more than 100 casualties at that hospital overnight had been civilians.

The other 15%, he said he didn't know how to describe them, and didn't want to go any further.

Earlier, journalists were taken to a bomb-damaged park in one part of the capital.

This Iraqi father says he lost his home in the Baghdad raids

This was the first stop on a government-organised tour to demonstrate the Iraqi contention that only civilian targets were hit in the overnight bombing raids.

This place was, we're told, a tourist facility. They say it was a wedding hall with no military connections whatsoever.

We're shown around by the man with perhaps the most hopeless job in Iraq at the moment - the director of the National Tourist Authority.

"You see there is no military positions here," he said. "It's only a touristic place, nothing else."

With only 200 injured last night [Friday] that is perhaps evidence of the careful targeting the Americans are claiming.

But there is no doubting too there were civilian casualties. Probably no war, even one this modern, is possible without them.