The family had gone underground on a freezing winter night, halfway through Operation Desert Storm. They thought that they would be safe from the rockets and missiles that were raining down on their city.

Instead two American smart bombs found the ventilation system of their shelter. It had been built during the Iran-Iraq War and because it was so well-equipped and sturdy — with beds, cooking facilities, showers and a small hospital — people thought it indestructible. As the flames spread, however, al-Amiriya became an oven. More than 400 people, mainly women, children and the elderly, burnt to death.

Hana is buried near the shelter, in a graveyard of the victims. If you walk inside the broken concrete building, you still see the dark shadows against the walls where their bodies were incinerated; the crater where the bombs exploded. The United States said later it believed that al-Amiriya was a command-and-control centre.

“I am sure everyone who enters here feels it is a cemetery,” says Intesar Ahmed, who manages the shelter, which is now a national monument. “You can feel the dead.”

As another war approaches, Iraqis gathered yesterday to open a museum to honour the dead of al-Amiriya. Hana’s mother, Suad, 63, face crinkled with grief, came back to the shelter to sit under an Arabian-style tent and watch a ceremony to commemorate the victims. Alongside her were other families and the Iraqi top brass, including Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Vice-President.

On one plush sofa was Dr Huda Ammash, the woman with the highest political position in Iraq, in olive military dress, headscarf and black suede platform boots. Behind her, in white plastic chairs sat an exhausted and ragged collection of British human shields who had arrived late on Saturday night in red double-decker buses.

President Saddam Hussein was not there, but a telegram from the participants and victims’ families was sent to his palace. Schoolchildren sang; a marching band blew trumpets; an orchestra played solemnly.

In the al-Amiriya neighbourhood, which borders the shelter, no one has forgotten that night because nearly everyone has someone who died in the shelter. In some cases, entire families were killed. They remember the morning after the bombs, when people picked through fields of blackened corpses, searching for their relatives. “It was difficult because many of the victims had no faces,” Intesar Ahmed says.

Rahim Batawi lost his wife, two sons and two daughters. He was inside the shelter, trying to sleep when the bomb exploded. He remembers brightness, fire, smoke and then blackness as his body was hurled outside the door.

His bones were broken. He woke in hospital where a relative told him that he was the only one to live in his immediate family.

“I wanted to die, too,” he says, staring at a photograph of his lost children. “I could not see how I could possibly go forward with my life.”

A dozen years after their deaths, it is painful for Rahim to believe that America may launch another war, that the bombs will come again. For years, he has tortured himself, believing that his children would be alive if he had not brought them to the shelter.

“They are still with me,” he says. “Every day they sit at the table with me and eat. They are still here.”

Now many Iraqis believe that the bombs will return. Most of them, however, say they will never again go underground in the city’s 34 shelters: the memory of al-Amiriya is too fresh. “How can we ever feel safe again?” Rahim says.

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