With tears running down his cheeks, a brave nine-year-old Ahmad hugged his young sister. His little brother nervously scratched an orange against his teeth and carressed the crying baby's head.

Holding onto one another in the hallway, the children drew little attention in a hospital overwhelmed with bleeding children, wailing women and moaning elderly people.

The three were orphaned after a bombing outside this town 80 kilometersmiles) south of Baghdad, which a hospital official said killed 33 civilians, most of them women and children, and wounded about 400 others.

The three children's neighbor, 23-year-old Mohammad Karim, explained that when residents "saw the warplanes flying at very low altitude, they rushed out of their homes toward the nearby plantation fields."

"Then it started raining cluster bombs everywhere," he said, his voice rising in anger. "People were being slaughtered like sheep."

Karim, sitting next to the bed of his brother who suffered critical wounds to the throat, said the three children's "father and mother were killed instantly and taken to the hospital".

"When we came back to the neighborhood after the raid, we were completely stunned by the sight of three children terrified to death," he said.

"The eldest boy started screaming: 'Where is my mother, where is my father?'" he said. "But we didn't know what to tell him, so we just carried the three children to the hospital."

The bombing Tuesday was described as "veritable horror" by the spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Baghdad.

"Our four-member team went to Hilla hospital south of Baghdad, and what it saw there was a veritable horror. There were dozens of smashed corpses," Roland Huguenin-Benjamin told AFP.

At the hospital, many children lay wounded under blankets on the floor due to a shortage of beds. In the back yard, elderly men and women sat bearing blood-stained bandages.

Salima Karrar Barhan, 33, was wounded in her arms, legs and head.

She lay on a narrow bed between her nine-year-old son who was wounded in the stomach and her six-year-old daughter who had bandages on her legs, clutching them so they would not fall off.

"Where is my husband? Where is my husband? He needs to take care of the children because I can't take it anymore. Please find him," she said plaintively.

At the scene of the bombing, dozens of what seemed to be parts of cluster bombs equipped with small parachutes were peppered over a large area, an AFP correspondent at the site said.

Iraqi soldiers were seen collecting the debris, which witnesses said coalition warplanes had dropped over the neighborhood. The soldiers poured fuel on the ordnance and set it on fire to destroy it.

Dozens of homes were devastated in the bombing that also killed donkeys, dogs and chickens.

Back in the hospital's yard, a man roamed aimlessly among coffins laid in a circle.

Razek al-Kazem al-Khafaji said he lost his wife, six children, his father, his mother, his three brothers and their wives late Monday when their pickup truck was blown up by a rocket from a US Apache helicopter.

"Should I cry over my children? Should I cry over my wife? Should I cry over my father? Should I cry over my mother?" he repeated as he went from one coffin to another.

Ignoring the crowd around him, he lifted a sheet on one of the coffins and saw the mutilated bodies of three of his young children.

He unveiled another coffin to find a dead child lying next to the remains of an infant, a pacifier still in her mouth.

SPACE.WIRE