Iraq - The Canal Hotel 20 Years Later - a Memoir: Tom McDermott

It’s one of those memories you never lose, seared deep in the soul. It came back with full force when I opened the news feed this morning, and read that this Saturday, 19 August, will mark 20 years since that truck bomb went off at the UN’s headquarters in Baghdad in the Canal Hotel.

The bombing came during my time as RD in MENA.  I was not in Baghdad that day.  I was home in Amman, when Naheed Aziz, the Deputy RD phoned to give me the first news.  We didn't know much beyond that a bomb had gone off. 

Only later did we learn that 22 people had died that day, 20 of them UN staff. Another 150 were wounded. Among the dead was Sergio de Mello, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Special Envoy for Iraq. 

 More important for us in UNICEF was that the dead included Chris Klein-Beekman, SPO and OIC at that moment in UNICEF Iraq.

The bomb went off at around 4:45 PM, just after the official working hours and so at a time when many local staff were heading home. The building, however, was busy with multiple meetings. Chris was OIC that day, and had gone to the Canal to represent UNICEF at a heads of agency meeting with Ramiro Lopes da Silva, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator. 

 In another part of the building Martin Berber, then head of the Mine Action Service, was holding a press conference. Sergio had a meeting underway in his office, immediately over the spot where the truck bomb parked.   This BBC video records the actual scene in the press conference at the moment the bomb went off and following.  Watch it, if you can.  For me it still brings tears, particularly the last frames as staff who got out, tried desperately to get back in to rescue colleagues who did not make it out.

Carel de Rooy, the UNICEF Representative, was out of the country. Like me, Carel headed back as quickly as he could find flights. I arrived in the late morning after the bombing and went first to the UNICEF office, located in another part of the city. Everyone was clearly in shock. I had visited Iraq four or five times, both before and after the US invasion, and I knew our staff were generally unflappable under pressure. This visit was very different. No one knew what to say and simply moved in a daze.

Chris

Chris Klein-Beekman

Sadly, I did not know Chris well. We had met of course several times in the office, but my travels around the country and meetings with officials in Baghdad had always been with Carel. I knew Chris only as a bright competent SPO.

Two young doctors who worked as our health programme officers accompanied me to the Canal Hotel. We wandered through the parking lot, now empty of the dead and the survivors, but still filled with the military tents and blankets that had been hastily assembled as a triage and first aid area. With tears the doctors told me how they had searched for Chris, and finally found him lying in the open on one of the triage blankets. He was not among those considered likely to survive, so he was left there on the open tarmac. Yet he was still alive when they found him. They loaded him in the car and drove from clinic to clinic, trying to find blood. Finally they reached the hospital and the transfusion set and blood they needed, but it was too late. Chris died a short time later.

'Covering our behinds'   

The following morning I represented UNICEF at the UN security team meeting at a hotel downtown. Most of the discussion was ‘backside covering’.  "We told them a hundred times...."  "No one could have predicted...."  

In fact, what no one seemed prepared to talk about was  ‘what to do next’ or  how to keep our people safe.  

I remember looking out of the meeting room through a long set of plate glass windows at the traffic going past just outside and wondering about how easy it would be to open fire or lob a grenade through those windows. No one did so, however, and the meeting ended without any discussion of practical steps to take.  Least of all, did anyone want to mention the 'E word' - evacuate this enormous mission before more bombs could go off.  Move to safer buildings and stop co-locating with the US military.  

As it happened, just a month later another car bomb did go off, again just outside the Canal Hotel.  It killed an Iraqi policeman and injured many civilians, including  UN staff. Only after that second bomb did the UN finally start planning a rapid draw-down of its staff, taking out over 600 internationals in the following days.

Sergio

I knew Sergio de Mello fairly well and had spent time with him in Bosnia and Croatia.  Like most people around him I could see that Sergio was on a fast track to become Secretary-General someday. He combined tact with toughness and a remarkable sense of how local politics played into international crises.  He knew how to manage individual personalities and egos. I remember spending a couple of hours walking with him around the military airfield outside Zagreb while he talked of how hard it had been to convince the leader of a small Serb enclave to give up his community's armed struggle.  Convincing the man to stand down had been critical for a wider peace deal.  Sergio eventually convinced him that he had played his role in history, and now was the time to step back.  As Sergio put it, "he was a spent force and knew it, but someone had to massage his ego before he would let go."  

Sergio's office was under this giant piece of concrete

When the truck bomb went off under his office, Sergio had been meeting Gil Loescher, a British human rights and refugee advocate. Both men were trapped under falling columns. Somehow Sergio managed to reach his phone and call for help. There was a small US Army unit in another part of the building. At enormous risk to themselves, two army sergeants crawled through the rubble of the building and eventually reached them. They spent three hours struggling to free Sergio and Loescher.  With no equipment at hand, night coming on,  and both victims close to death, the soldiers finally used a pen knife and a rusty saw to amputate Laescher’s legs and pull him out. For Sergio, however, it was too late. He had lost too much blood.

Abu Musad al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader,  later claimed that Sergio was targeted specifically because of the role he had played in the peace agreement and independence of East Timor. This, of course, was a ‘soundbite’ rationalization and far from the truth. The big build up of the UN in Iraq after the US invasion was seen by al Qaeda, as well as many Iraqis, as a form of support for the US occupation of Iraq.  The build up had come, despite the fact that the UN had never approved or supported the invasion. Bombing of the UN mission in Baghdad should have come as a surprise to no one.

Marc Powe

Our global security chief, Marc Powe arrived on my second day.  In fact, Mark had always been there when we needed him. He had ‘been there’ for us throughout the Bosnian war and every other emergency. Whether by phone or in person Marc was someone able to calm any situation, and offer practical helpful advice.

Leaving Baghdad  

On my fifth and final day Carel, Marc and I went to the military side of Baghdad airport to 'receive' the first set of the deceased on behalf of the UN.  The bodies had been prepared for transport to New York at a US army morgue.  The ceremony was thus a moving but odd sort of handing over from the US to the UN of the deceased.  It was a somber and impressive ceremony with a convoy of perhaps 40 army vehicles bringing the caskets down a runway and then turning in formation as they crossed the airfield and drew up around the military transport plane.  

 

Carel and I were to accompany the caskets of Sergio, Chris and four others on the flight to Amman, where they would be transported to other flights to New York.  Marc stayed on to help our office and the UN security team try to pull things together.  

US army personnel prepared each casket

Each casket was draped with a UN flag.   A military honour guard carried the caskets to the aircraft and loaded them one by one. 

 Marc was at our side throughout. He shook me out of my daze, saying, “You need to go now, shake hands and thank personally every one of those soldiers. They just paid our dead and the UN a great honour.” Carel and I did so, of course, and I was so grateful to Marc that he had reminded me of this small but important courtesy. I wondered later what those young men thought of the strange world in which they found themselves carrying caskets draped with UN flags.  

The flight itself was a strange experience - only Carel and I sitting silently in a cargo aircraft amid the six caskets, unable to find something to say, wondering what would come next. 

Amman

At Amman airport we found a large UN delegation, led by Mark Malloch Brown, waiting, as our plane pulled up before them and opened its rear ramp.  Carel and I were unsure what to do, so we just walked down the ramp and over to join the delegation. Naturally, no one seemed to know what to say to us.  Many felt they needed to offer condolences to someone, anyone, even us, even when we said we weren’t at the Canal that day. 

One by one the caskets came down, later to be loaded on another aircraft for the flight to NY.   There was a brief ceremony before Carel and I were shuffled into a room to meet a line of counselors anxious to tell us about our traumas.  There would soon be many of the actual survivors of the Canal arriving in coming days, so Carel and I were perhaps their first test cases.  If so, we were  probably their most difficult patients.  It was no good saying that we weren’t actually at the Canal that day. They still wanted to tell us about our reactions, our dreams, our likely outbursts. What we really wanted was a chance to go somewhere quiet to shower and unwind.

For me this meant to go home to my family. So, I did, brushing off all attempts to counsel me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, even my wife and son about what I had seen, heard and felt in those five days in Baghdad.

Of course though, the counselors were right. There was trauma later. Different perhaps from the ways the counselors predicted, and certainly different from what the actual bombing victims suffered - but trauma nonetheless. It came in bits and pieces, confused at times with experiences I passed through in Bosnia and Somalia. The bits would never form into a clear set of memories or ideas. If they took any form at all, it was just be a sense of enormous and unnecessary loss.

20 years later - Why?

So, 20 years later and again  I ask myself  - Why?  Why did the UN put so many people into such enormous risk at a time of such clear danger?  UNICEF and other UN agencies had operated successfully during the time of Saddam's rule, before the Gulf War and after, during sanctions, and after, during the invasion and after.  What did a huge UN political mission add?  

Why did all these good people need to die?  

Note: Most survivors of the Canal went on to have good lives and careers, many in the UN.  Even Gil Loescher, who survived that brutal amputation of both his legs, went on to a bright career travelling the world, speaking and writing as one of the world's foremost experts on refugees.  He passed away in 2020 at age 75.  

Interested to read the stories of more of the UN staff who survived the blast in the Canal Hotel that day?  Click here for the memories they share.