AS THE new recruits mingled outside the army office waiting to report for duty, there was only one subject on everybody’s lips: the massive car bomb the day before at a police station outside Baghdad.

“We were all talking about it and saying how we could be attacked in the same way just for being here,” said Fadil Abbas, 26, one of the 200 would-be soldiers who had turned up to be sent for their first day’s training at a camp further north.

“Everyone there realised this could be very dangerous. We were begging them to let us inside the gates, but they refused.”

Dejected, the recruits formed three nervous but orderly queues as their names were read out and they were led forward one by one for their security checks.

It did not take long for their worst fears to be realised. As they waited patiently in line, buffeted by wind and driving rain, a white Oldsmobile pulled up alongside the queue and, without warning, exploded. The car, packed with explosives, artillery shells and shrapnel, was designed to cause the maximum damage. It did exactly that, cutting through the defenceless crowd outside the protective sandbags and leaving almost as many dead as wounded.

“I heard the blast and was thrown to the ground,” Ghassan Samir, 32, another survivor, said. “My eyes were tightly closed, but I could feel the heat and fire around me. People were screaming all around me, crying for help.”

Ambulances rushed the wounded to hospitals across town while the dead were taken to the nearby Karkh hospital. Inside the morgue, workers stacked the bodies up on top of each other, wrapped up in bloodsoaked sheets. The air hung heavy with the smell of burnt flesh. More badly burnt bodies lay outside the courtyard, the rain bouncing off the plastic sheets shrouding them.

Relatives thronged the hospital gates calling out the names of their missing loved ones to officials. “I have lost my husband,” a young woman in a billowing black abeya sobbed as she clung to the gates, supported by her mother. “He went there to join the army this morning. He hasn’t come home.”

For the second time in as many days, young men seeking no more than to earn a living became the target of the relentless campaign against “collaborators” working with the Americans.

Unnerved as they were by news of the bombing of the police recruits the day before, the would-be soldiers could not afford to be put off. Most decided to enlist only after months of unemployment and hardship. Many had belonged to the previous Iraqi Army, dissolved by the United States, and had been out of work since the war ended ten months ago. Others were taking one of the few job opportunities open to them.

“I needed a job badly to feed my family so I took the risk,” Mr Abbas said, lying in a hospital bed with shrapnel wounds to his neck and head. “I knew how dangerous it was, but I didn’t have a choice.”

He signed up to join the new army after failing to find a job as a medical technician after his graduation last year. His father had died two years earlier, leaving him as the eldest with the responsibility of providing for his mother and eight siblings.

Cash-strapped hospitals were not hiring, but the police and army were, fuelled by the cash pouring in from the Americans. Whatever the danger, the prospect of a guaranteed £120 monthly salary proved too tempting to resist. “I need that money and there are no other jobs. When I am better, I will join again,” he said.

Doctors said privately, however, that there was no prospect of that happening. Although he survived the blast, the shrapnel lodged in his vertebrae is almost certain to cause paralysis in the coming days. They had not yet had the heart to tell him.

Mr Samir, a career soldier in the former army, vowed to go back to work once his broken arm and leg had healed, but for different reasons. “It is a matter of principle,” he said. “I want the Americans to leave. If Iraqis do not join the army, we will never get rid of them.”

As American officials came out to confront the media, they were faced with furious crowds of survivors demanding to know where coalition forces had been when the bomb went off and why they had been left out on the street unprotected.

“They should have let us in the building, not left us exposed out there,” Hussein Zaiyr, 20, said. “This attack will put people off enlisting because they can see the Americans do not support them. They do not value our lives, only their own.”

• Washington: Osama bin Laden’s former chauffeur is a prisoner at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, his American lawyer said. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 34-year-old Yemeni, worked in Afghanistan until October 2001.
  
  INQUIRY INTO DEATH

  AN INVESTIGATION into the death of an Iraqi prisoner in British military custody is focusing on one soldier (Michael Evans writes).

  Members of The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in southern Iraq have been questioned by the Army’s special investigations branch.

  The Iraqi who died was in a group of seven staff arrested at a hotel in Basra during a search for weapons last September. Two other Iraqis sustained injuries and were given hospital treatment.
  
  DEBATE
  Is Iraq ungovernable? Send your e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk

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