Iraqi women and children standing on the debris of a destroyed house, observe a street in Baghdad's Karrada district hit during the Dec. 17 attack. (Reuters)

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 18, 1998; Page A1

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 17 – It seemed a day like any other. Fountains flowed, schools were in session and the electricity stayed on. With sundown came the usual procession of Thursday night wedding caravans, winding through streets with car horns blaring.

Then, around 10 p.m., the second wave of missile strikes crashed into Baghdad.

Brilliant red tracer rounds from Iraqi antiaircraft batteries lit the sky over this 700-year-old capital, followed by a series of concussive blasts. A few minutes later, a large explosion shook the information ministry, which is situated in an area of drab apartment houses and monolithic public buildings near the Tigris River and serves as the base for scores of foreign journalists.

On the second night of the U.S. and British air campaign against Iraq, missiles began striking in and around this sprawling, palm-studded capital of broad boulevards, blue-domed mosques and vast government buildings that house the security and intelligence apparatus of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The explosions continued until about 10:30 p.m.

Iraqi officials said late tonight that one hospital had been lightly damaged in the raid. Reporters who toured the facility, a teaching hospital, in the company of a government escort were shown a man whose leg had just been amputated, purportedly after he was injured by an explosion. [Another series of strikes and antiaircraft fire erupted in the capital at 4 a.m. Friday, the Associated Press reported.]

Tonight's air raid came at the end of what had seemed a relatively normal day in the capital, despite missile strikes the night before on the city's outskirts.

Traffic along main city thoroughfares was lighter than usual for a weekend night – Friday is the Muslim day of rest – although by nightfall carloads of newlyweds rode honking through the city, seemingly oblivious to the threat of renewed airstrikes. Air raid sirens howled several times during the day.

Until the start of tonight's raids, damage to the city had been light. None of the major landmarks, government buildings or communications towers in the center of town had sustained any obvious damage. Electrical facilities, roads and bridges, which were heavily targeted in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, appeared to be untouched. Shops and businesses were open as usual. The sculptured flag at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier remained lit.

Iraqi officials said they did not have precise information on casualties from the attack, which began here in early morning darkness after the United States and Britain concluded that Iraq was not living up to its obligations to open records and facilities to U.N. weapons inspectors. Late tonight, a Health Ministry official estimated the number of civilian dead at 25.

Little information has been available on the extent of damage in southern Iraq or outside Baghdad. Nor was there much to see in the capital itself. Government officials escorted foreign reporters to Karada Street, where they showed them a large hole in the pavement purportedly made by a missile. They also took them to a house whose windows had been blown out and whose doors had been damaged by an explosion.

The damage in both places seemed surprisingly modest, but residents along Karada Street and the owner of the house at the other site said that bombs of some sort had fallen in their neighborhoods.

"What did I do to America?" asked the owner, Jassim Zuweiby, lying in a bed at Yarmouk Hospital in west Baghdad with a bandage on his head. The blast seriously injured one of his four children, Zuweiby said.

"During eight years we have given everything to UNSCOM," Zuweiby said, referring to the U.N. commission charged with dismantling Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. "Ask Saddam Hussein to take revenge for me. I hate the government of the United States."

Iraqi officials reported late this afternoon that an airstrike had destroyed a rice warehouse in Saddam Hussein's home city of Tikrit, and that a stray missile targeted at the southern city of Basra had exploded just across the border in Iran.

At a news conference tonight, Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf echoed the sentiments of the wounded man in Yarmouk Hospital, contending that the U.S. response was far out of proportion to the problems that had developed between Iraq and the weapons inspectors.

Since Iraq readmitted the U.N. inspectors to the country after a similar crisis last month, "They operated 427 inspections to 427 sites," Sahhaf said. "There was non-cooperation in five cases." Noting that the U.N. inspectors had sought to visit Iraqi facilities on a Friday, when Iraqis do not work, Sahhaf said sarcastically, "Because we are not working on a Friday, we deserve bombardment."

Calling President Clinton a "corrupt, dissolute and spasmodic ruler," Sahhaf mockingly listed the sites targeted during the first wave of the campaign. They included, he said, the home of Saddam Hussein's daughter Hala – she and her family were not injured – as well as several buildings that Sahhaf said were already under strict U.N. monitoring.

Ali Gazala, acting director of Yarmouk Hospital, said 14 people were killed and 35 wounded in areas near his hospital. One of the dead, he said, was a 13-year-old boy hit by shrapnel while sitting on his front stoop. Residents of the Al Jihad neighborhood, where the boy is said to have died, said they were unaware that an explosion had occurred in their area.

"The casualty room was full and there was a lot of blood," Gazala said.

On Karada Street, city workers were still attempting to cap a gushing water pipe late this afternoon so they could drain and begin repairing a deep crater in the road, which serves one of Baghdad's more prosperous neighborhoods.

On a mound of mud beside it, residents gathered to watch the show. Ali Jooad surveyed the work from the center of what used to be his house. An aging structure, it collapsed after the blast, although neighboring buildings did not appear to have been damaged. A cigarette vendor, a security guard and a third person were slightly injured in the blast, residents said.

"Down America," said Ammar Meki, 16, the only one among several dozen Iraqis to utter an other-than-welcoming word to two American journalists at the scene. "Clinton does not like the Iraqi nation."