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On this day in 1991, the U.S. bombed the Amiriya civilian air raid shelter in Iraq, which was sheltering a thousand sleeping civilians, massacring 408 Iraqi civilians (261 women and 52 children).
At 4am on Feb. 13, two US F-117s dropped 2 laser-guided “smart bombs” on the shelter. The 1st, pierced the fortified concrete wall of the shelter, jamming its thick steel doors & trapping everyone inside. The 2nd bomb followed through first hole & exploded deep inside the shelter
The youngest victim was seven days old. Most of the victims were incinerated by the heat of the explosion. The bodies taken out by rescue workers later were charred, unrecognizable, and some were still smoldering. The smell of burned flesh stayed in the neighborhood for days.
A BBC journalist reported that “I saw one man, incoherent with grief, fall to the ground and bury his face in the earth. Eleven members of his family had been in the shelter.”
Omar Adnan, 17 yr-old, told reporters his three sisters, his mother and his father had been all been killed. "I was sleeping and suddenly I felt heat and the blanket was burning. I turned to try to touch my mother who was next to me but grabbed nothing but a piece of flesh."
The bombing was, at the time, the single most lethal incident for civilians in modern air warfare. Human Rights Watch and The Geneva International Centre for Justice have both labeled the incident a war crime. https://www.gicj.org/positions-opinons/gicj-positions-and-opinions/1521-no-justice-for-victims-of-al-amiriyah
The Pentagon lied, saying al-Amiriya shelter was a military command center, but foreign journalists who visited the site right after the bombing found no indication whatsoever that the place was anything but a civilian shelter.
Human Rights Watch reported in 1991, "It is now well established, through interviews with neighborhood residents, that the Amiriya structure was plainly marked as a public shelter and was used throughout the air war by large numbers of civilians"
Seven Iraqi families who lost loved ones in the attack launched a lawsuit in Belgium against George H. W. Bush, Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney, Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, General Norman Schwarzkopf for the bombing in 2003, calling it a war crime, but the case was dismissed.
