[Peace-discuss] Realities of Fallujah

[Lisa Chason]

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org 


Fallujah and the Reality of War 


by Rahul Mahajan


 


The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of
the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to
implementing “democracy” in Iraq. These are lies. 

I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you
a word picture of what such an assault means. 

Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an
agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been
known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City
of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90’s, when Saddam wanted his name to
be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused. 

U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for
the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light
provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics.
The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine,
and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged
the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing
and the threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick
people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial
instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began
allowing everyone to leave – except for what they called “military age
males,” men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from
leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of
course, if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, there
can be no better sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in
fact, your war is on the people, not on their oppressors,, not a war of
liberation. 

The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of
the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main
bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to
treat patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they
could carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one
I stayed at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four
beds, and no operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a
soft-drink vending machine. Another clinic, I’m told, had been an auto
repair shop. This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented
in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention. 

In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in
the background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the
mujaheddin’s hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have
to stop paying attention to it – and yet, of course, you never quite
stop. Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I’m often transported
instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah. 

In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and
2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can
demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had
snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series
of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the
no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately,
usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I
observed in a few hours, only five were “military-age males.” I saw old
women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the
doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save
him. 

One thing that snipers were very discriminating about – every single
ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear
evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out
to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this
fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to
believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujaheddin.
Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by
the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. Bush courageously
protected us from during the Vietnam war era) and Brownsville ambulances
been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at
their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later,
our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by
the U.S. military. 

The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed
directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news
reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to ¾ were noncombatants. 

But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever you like
about the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas
in Fallujah, but the reports don’t tell you what that means. You read
about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs
are very accurate – when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of
the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they
hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however,
the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb
shakes the whole neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A
town under bombardment is a town in constant fear. 

You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should
remember those numbers; those numbers are important. But equally
important is to remember that those numbers lie – in a war zone,
everyone is wounded. 

The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the
resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to “win,”
the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within
horror and terror, there are degrees, and we – and the people of
Fallujah – ain’t seen nothin’ yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new
mandate – the world has been delivered into his hands. 

There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time;
but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all
the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the
horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that
we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf was
similarly attacked; will we meet it this time? 

Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes
(http://www.empirenotes.org), with regularly updated commentary on U.S.
foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq, and the state of the American
Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was in Fallujah during
the siege in April. His most recent book is "Full Spectrum Dominance:
U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond." He can be reached at
rahul at empirenotes.org <mailto:rahul at empirenotes.org%20> .

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20041107/de34adf8/attachment-0001.html