A Visit to a Bombed Village.

• Author: FINK, ZACHARY
• Position: A village near Najaf, Iraq

What the U.S. War in Iraq Looks Like Up Close

In July, I traveled to Iraq with members of Voices in The Wilderness, a nonprofit anti-war group. The group has been to the country twenty-five times since 1996 to deliver food and medicine to the Iraqi people, though this was my first time. Whenever Voices in The Wilderness goes to Iraq, it is openly violating U.S. law, which prohibits unauthorized transactions in Iraq. I was part of an eight-person delegation. I carried a small digital camera but did not identify myself as a journalist to the Iraqi government.

While we were there, several towns in the southern part of the country were attacked by U.S. warplanes. According to the Pentagon, U.S. and British warplanes have struck Iraq more than 130 times since the first of the year. In each strike, many bombs are dropped.

We arrived in Najaf just a few days after a July 19 bombing raid. Najaf is a city of approximately 300,000 people and is two hours south of Baghdad. The official Iraqi news agency claimed that seventeen people were killed. The people we spoke to on the ground said fourteen people had been killed and eighteen injured.

The first bomb landed in the middle of a small village outside the city, they told us. On one side of the road were houses and stores; on the other side were garages and repair shops for automobiles. The bomb had left a crater in the road, and bulldozers were preparing to pave over it when we arrived. Eyewitnesses described the attack as a large explosion followed by several smaller ones.

The people in the village were poor. Many wore ragged clothes. When we left our air-conditioned van and walked out into the oppressive heat, villagers swarmed around us. They tugged on our sleeves and spoke frantically in Arabic. They pointed to the crater, then pointed to the sky. They tried to pull us toward some of the houses away from the road, but our group leader told us to proceed with caution. People formed tight circles around me as I took pictures with my camera. Witnesses showed us marks on a garage wall where bomb fragments had landed. Pieces of shrapnel with razor-sharp edges were strewn about the ground. Our guide from the humanitarian organization Red Crescent was eager to move on.

A second bomb had struck about fifty yards away from a grain processing plant. We were taken inside a dormitory for the factory workers.

Every window we saw in the building had been shattered from the explosion. Broken glass crunched under...