Air Attack Caught Iraqis on Bridge : Casualties: Authorities at Nasiriyah say the span’s destruction caused the highest civilian toll of the war.

The 600-yard-long bridge across the Euphrates was crowded last Monday when the bombs fell at 3 p.m. on Nasiriyah, eyewitnesses say.

Dr. Rabi Faroon, the British-trained director of the Saddam Hospital in the southeastern Iraqi city, was standing with his son less than a mile from the Nasir Bridge when, he recalled later, “Suddenly I saw it hit by multiple explosions.”

He estimated that there were at least 400 people on the bridge when the bombers struck.

Another witness, former soldier Mohammed Khadem, said the bridge had been closed to vehicles and was full of people going home from work or the market. It was unusually crowded that afternoon because a footbridge normally used by pedestrians had been destroyed in an earlier raid.

Baghdad Radio has said that 150 civilians, including 35 children, have been killed in raids on Nasiriyah this week. Local authorities say the Monday attack, part of the allied air offensive against Iraqi communications, caused more civilian casualties than any other incident in the Gulf War.

They said 47 civilians were killed and 102 injured in the attack that destroyed the Nasir Bridge. But Dr. Faroon said he believes that the number of fatalities from the incident will rise, since many victims fell into the Euphrates and were carried downstream.

Wounded survivors, now in Faroon’s 400-bed hospital, generally say the disaster happened too quickly to remember many details.

Quaser Said, a 13-year-old whose left leg was amputated, said: “We were trying to cross the bridge. My uncle and aunt were with me. One disappeared and the other has an injured arm.”

Doctors said they had not told him that his uncle, Baquer Said, had died.

Hospital authorities said they could not show the bodies of those killed on the bridge, in order to confirm the dead, because they had been handed over to their families for burial.

The bridge is a steel structure painted green, spanning the river where it is about 400 yards wide but extending well beyond the banks on either side. Four of its spans were hit by bombs, one of which badly damaged a pier towards the eastern end of the structure, leaving the stump of concrete rising above the water. Two spans on either side of the stump were dropped into the river.

The pulverized masonry of the pier, with steel reinforcement bars sticking out at odd angles, indicates an explosion of a violence that would have given people on that part of the bridge little chance of survival.

On the approach road to the bridge are smears of what appear to be blood and, at one point, a discarded sandal. Then, just as the first span should start across the Euphrates, it slopes gently down into the water like a shipyard slip.

On Thursday, the area was deserted except for a small group of boys who scattered when they heard the sound of jets overhead. A rickety pontoon bridge a few hundred yards downriver is now the only link between the two halves of Nasiriyah. At about the same time of day as the Nasir Bridge was hit, the pontoon was crowded with people crossing on foot.

In the distance, a plume of dark smoke was rising from a gas station and, to the south, there was the continual crackle of antiaircraft fire.

The Nasir Bridge was not the only target in Nasiriyah, 200 miles southeast of Baghdad. The large Expressway Bridge, a concrete structure, had also lost a complete span. Some bombs had missed the end of it and demolished several residences, but neighbors said no one was home at the time.

At the entrances to the city lay the wreckage of two buses, a private car and a taxi that had just been strafed. There were large pockmarks in the road, the size of soup bowls, possibly from cannon fire. Some casualties were being carried away.

An hour later, at the Saddam Hospital, doctors were treating six people wounded in the incident. A small boy, Ahmed Kassim, aged 10, wearing a red sweater, lay dead on a stretcher. He had been hit in the head by shrapnel. In another part of the hospital his sister, Sawsan Kassim, aged 11, was nursing her bandaged left arm.

In the capital, Baghdad, the damage is not everywhere immediately evident. News reports may give the impression that the city is a sea of ruin, but in fact you have to search out buildings that have been hit. This is, after all, a city with 4 million inhabitants, 15.6 miles across.

The number of buildings knocked down in the first days of the war was impressive, but by the third week, the greater number still standing makes a deeper impression. Where there are ruins, however, they are often spectacular. At the south end of Sadoon, beside the Dar es Salaam Hotel, two large buildings have been completely gutted.

Most of the shops are shut in Karada, Masbah and Al Mansur, all well-off neighborhoods, but the Shurjah Souk, a vast warren of markets near the city center, has come into its own. There, hawkers and owners of small booths, taking advantage of the regular shops being closed, are selling everything from packets of Italian spaghetti to hurricane lamps.

Hawkers on the pavement do a good business selling wicks for kerosene lamps, although this may be affected by the Oil Ministry’s halting the sale of all petroleum products this week.

Residents are returning to Baghdad after the exodus prompted by the first days of fierce bombing in mid-January, but the question is whether anybody will be moving at all in the future. Iraq has about 800,000 cars and 350,000 privately owned trucks. But even before the sale of petroleum product ended, foreign journalists saw lines of 300 cars or more at every service station--in Baghdad, Ramadi, Diwaniya, Hilla and Najaf--waiting for a ration of 30 liters (about 8 gallons) for every 15 days.

In Iraqi country towns, a gig drawn by a horse may occasionally be seen. But with the Dhora refinery taking repeated hits, gasoline will be short--and therefore unavailable to civilians--for a long time to come.

Yet the popular mood is one of confidence about the land battle to come, whatever the odds and however predictable the final outcome.

This article was reviewed by Iraqi censors.