Global Policy Forum

At least 14 civilians were killed and 30 injured today after coalition air strikes hit a market in Baghdad, Iraqi officials claimed. Witnesses at the scene reported burned bodies on the streets of the northern residential Shaab district. Television footage showed a large crater in the middle of the road, smouldering and damaged buildings, a child with a head bandage, and bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting in the back of a pick-up truck.

Wrecked cars were strewn across the roads, some still ablaze. The centre of the blast seems to have been a busy shopping street of ground floor shops under blocks of flats. Residents said there were no military targets in the area. Others described hearing a low flying aircraft followed by two loud explosions. Local people claimed "dozens and dozens" were dead while Lieutenant Colonel Hamad Abdullah, head of civil defence for the area, said 14 people were killed and 30 injured when two cruise missiles hit the area. The incident would appear to be the first major case of so-called "collateral damage" involving substantial civilian casualties, which allied chiefs have been trying to avoid. "There is a very angry atmosphere at the moment," said BBC journalist Paul Wood. The footage of the apparent strike on innocent civilians is likely to send waves of outrage around the Arab world.

In London, the Prime Minister's official spokesman said Downing Street was seeking information about the market blast, but at this stage did not know the cause of the explosion. He added: "We have always accepted that there will be some very regrettable civilian casualties." US Central Command in Qatar said it was investigating the reports. The Iraqi authorities were expected to take western journalists to the scene later today. The deaths of innocent civilians are an unavoidable feature of armed conflict throughout history. In the last Gulf War and in Operation Desert Fox in 1998 - a four-day bombing campaign on Iraq following the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors - much was made of the "smart-bomb" technology in hitting specific targets.

But battle damage assessments of Operation Desert Fox showed that 15% of missions had missed their target and fewer than one in four were considered a successful attack where the target was destroyed. Then 10% of weapons were guided, but in the present conflict 90% are reportedly guided either by satellite or laser. On February 13 1991, an allied missile struck an air-raid shelter in Baghdad, killing at least 314 people. Iraqi officials took the BBC's Jeremy Bowen to see the aftermath. While he was accompanied at all times by Iraqi minders, he said the grief and anger shown by the survivors and bereaved was not a propaganda stunt. In the same conflict a stray bomb from an RAF Tornado hit a market near a bridge in Samawa, a city on the Euphrates River in southern Iraq, killing a reported 130 people and wounding 78. The RAF apologised and called the incident a "one-off". But it was just one in a series of "one-offs" that led the Red Crescent charity to estimate that as many as 7,000 civilians had been killed in allied bombing raids.

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