Sand snarls Baghdad
Associated PressPublished August 9, 2005
BAGHDAD - Enveloping the capital in an eerie orange glow, a blinding sandstorm Monday reduced visibility in Baghdad to a few feet - slowing traffic to a crawl, canceling a key meeting on the Iraqi constitution and sending hundreds of people to the hospital with breathing problems.
Though sandstorms are common in Iraq's desert terrain, especially during the summer, the one that arrived overnight was the worst in two years, residents said.
"Baghdad looks miserable today," resident Ahmed Malik said. "Shops are closed as if there is no life in the city, as if a nuclear bomb attacked it. It's completely abandoned."
The storm's fury forced Iraq's political leaders to postpone talks aimed at breaking an impasse over drafting the country's new constitution by next Monday's deadline.
An estimated 300 people, many of them asthma sufferers, crowded into Yarmouk Hospital complaining of respiratory problems, said Dr. Muhannad Jawad. Hallways quickly filled with patients, many of them very young or very old.
The last time a sandstorm of this magnitude was reported was during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in spring 2003, when the military march to Baghdad was delayed for several days.
Elsewhere, U.S. Marines discovered a car bomb factory Monday in a western Iraqi town near where 20 members of the American unit were killed last week, the U.S. military said.
Six vehicles rigged with explosives were found in the hideout in the northern part of Haqlaniyah, one of a cluster of towns in western Anbar province long believed to be a stronghold of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters.
U.S. and Iraqi forces also found five roadside bombs Monday on a road in Haqlaniyah. All were detonated in place.
Saddam Hussein's family, meanwhile, said it has dissolved his Jordan-based legal team and appointed Iraqi lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi as the "one and sole legal counsel."