Lara Marlowe on the already infamous "highway of death" in Baghdad following the arrival of the US 3rd Infantry Division.
Some two dozen carbonised vehicles, including a bus, litter the motorway interchange 5km south of Baghdad. I saw at least 10 decomposing bodies there yesterday, 24 hours after the battle in which they were trapped ended.
Iraqis said relatives had removed many of the bodies already, and 30 to 40 is a reasonable estimate for the number of motorists and passengers who died there, many of them civilians.
Just beyond two burning Iraqi petrol tankers, and Abrams tanks on the watch for gunmen hiding in the Daura grain silos, you find the first civilian victim of the battle for the south Baghdad interchange.
His charred, rotting body is crouched sideways in the front seat of a wrecked white Mercedes. A little farther on a blackened body, ballooned to several times its normal size with the summer heat, spills out from a mauve Mustang, possibly the victim of an airstrike that provided cover for the 3rd Infantry Division's advance.
A column of Humvee jeeps, one with the name Rough Riders painted on its window, drives by, but no one seems to notice the bodies strewn along the highway.
"The Red Crescent has been contacted. They will take care of them," a US officer told me a few minutes later.
The bodies have already been there for up to four days. To the right of the road someone has mercifully thrown blankets over four corpses, but the black stain of their blood extends from under the blankets, which are swarming with flies. The outline of a child's body lying face down can be clearly made out.
One red car had been nearly vapourised; only the rear fifth of it was left. Half of a leg, with a shoe on it, was all that remained of its occupant. The form of a naked woman - her clothes were burned off - lay face down in a destroyed pick-up.
The woman's body looked the consistencey of charcoal, but was better preserved than what could barely be recognised as a man beside her.
As you walk up the incline, where a fork in the motorway merges into the road to Karrada, the US army has made a barricade of concertina barbed wire and three wrecked Iraqi cars, one of them an orange and white taxi.
Just beyond the barbed wire, on the bridge parapet, lies a dead Iraqi soldier, in uniform, his face mangled and a river of dried blood flowing from his lower face and neck into the gutter.
Several US tanks and armoured personnel carriers are parked on top of the fly-over. US soldiers force Iraqi men to lift their shirts, lower their trousers and turn around, one at a time, at a distance of 10 metres, before allowing them to cross to the Saidiyah-Baya neighbourhood on the other side of the highway.
This is the method used by Israelis to discourage Palestinian suicide bombers, but is certain to be experienced as a humiliation in this Arab country.
Capt Dan Hubbard of Bravo Company, 464 Armour, Infantry Task Force 315, climbed down from his Abrams tank in the centre of the fly-over, to explain how the Daura highway came to resemble a scene from hell.
His unit had travelled up Highway 8 from the south on the morning of April 6th.
"We reached the overpass, and we received fire from 360 degrees around. It was RPGs (rocked-propelled grenades) and AK-47s (assault rifles), between 7 and 7.30 in the morning."
The troops had been fired on during most of their journey from Kuwait, Capt Hubbard said. "But the biggest concentration started when we got here and stopped. It was an amateur type of ambush - the Iraqis were trying to hit targets of opportunities. They had no real positions."
Most of the men firing RPGs were in fox-holes in a sloping, landscaped inlet in the motorway. "We fought solid for two days, though the fighting calmed down after dark," Capt Hubbard added.
"The civilians were caught at the very beginning. When we seized this interchange, we had to stop the traffic to hold the ground. We're here to fight the Iraqi regime, not civilians. Warning shots were fired.
"Ninety per cent of the vehicles turned around when we fired over their heads. But in these situations, a lot of things go through people's heads. A lot of them speed up."
Craig White, an embedded journalist with NBC News who witnessed the battle gave a similar explanation.
"Most of these vehicles were shot driving towards the Americans. I'm sure there are innocent people here. But one of the insidious things about RPGs is that if you don't get them in time, they get you."
Yet Capt Hubbard's tank, named after his wife Rhonda Denise, was hit five times by RPGs and was barely dented. It took more than an RPG to destroy an Abrams, he said.
Capt Hubbard sounded sorry for the charred bodies up and down the highway, most of them killed by fire from the 10 Abrams tanks and four Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. But at the end of the day, American lives were more important.
"I've got to protect my soldiers, because we don't know if it's a car laden with explosives or RPGs. We put signs up in Arabic to warn people that this is a coalition forces area. We'll move the cars eventually, and the bodies will be taken care of."
The dead Iraqi soldier still lying on the parapet was killed in different circumstances. "There was a motorcycle coming towards us at dusk, with two guys with AK-47s on their backs. So I shot them," Capt Hubbard said.
"I went over the next morning and found that the driver was still alive. I'd hit him in the knees. We laid him on top of the tank and gave him water and took him to the medics. He was a Republican Guard in uniform."