[Peace-discuss] Who knows?--The Horror of Fallujah

[Morton K.Brussel]

[This piece is from Asia Times. Somewhat different from what the news 
services and The NYT is reporting. mkb]


THE ROVING EYE
Masters of war
By Pepe Escobar

  In "Masters of War", Bob Dylan sang, "Hide behind desks" but "we can 
see through your masks". Now, applying their version of grassroots 
democracy, the US has declared that Fallujah has been "liberated". But 
the virtual ghost town is celebrating with no cries of joy - with no 
cries at all: only with the stench of tons of explosives, and the 
stench of decomposing bodies.

Baghdad sources close to the resistance tell Asia Times Online that in 
essence the Americans control only northern Fallujah and the main 
boulevards; the resistance controls the narrow alleys, and the southern 
part of the city. At night, anyone is a target - either to the 
resistance or to American snipers. What the resistance is stressing is 
the Mesopotamian version of a rapper in urban black America: "The man 
control the day; we control the night."

  A hard rain's gonna fall
  What the US has achieved with Fallujah reduced to a pile of rubble and 
hundreds of thousands of new refugees is unprecedented Sunni anger. A 
slow stream of residents who managed to escape from Fallujah to Baghdad 
tell of women and children killed by shrapnel or hit by US bombs. 
According to trader Aamir Yusouf, who remains in town after smuggling 
his family out, "there will be nothing left of Fallujah by the time 
they finish".

  Baghdad is swirling with rumors and conspiracy theories and many 
people do not know the extent of the horror in Fallujah - some blame 
the Arab media for talking obsessively about Yasser Arafat and 
forgetting about Iraq. Baghdad airport remains closed. A lot of anger 
exploded at last Friday's prayers. At the al-Jilani mosque, Sheikh 
Mahmoud al-Isawi said that "the start of this war during the holiest 
nights of the month of Ramadan proves how much they hate Islam and 
Muslims". At the Umm al-Qura mosque, the headquarters of the powerful 
Association of Muslim Scholars, Sheikh Mohammed Bashar al-Faidi told a 
crowd of thousands that "all of Iraq will turn in the next few days 
into one Fallujah whether America likes it or not", adding that any 
election under the occupation would be illegitimate.

  Mosul remains under control of the resistance, which is protecting 
banks, shops, hospitals, schools and fire stations from looters. The US 
base in Mosul - a former Saddam Hussein presidential palace - was 
looted this weekend by local citizens, not by the resistance. Now, 
apart from the Sunni triangle, even the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf is 
also under martial law.

An assistant cleric to Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi, the head of the 
Fallujah mujahideen shura (council) that controlled the city before 
Operation Phantom Fury, said that "maybe [the Americans] will take it 
[Fallujah]. But it is not the end. There are 18 provinces in Iraq and 
the resistance will continue to grow tougher ... America has taken its 
last breath." This is something that will never be reported in 
mainstream US media - which keeps hammering the "humanitarian" approach 
of the US onslaught. And it won't be reported in the Iraqi press 
either, because under martial law everybody has to parrot the interim 
government's position - this operation is a major success - or else go 
to jail.

  There were unconfirmed reports last week that al-Janabi was killed 
by US bombing, but the shura's cleric insisted that "the sheikh is 
still in Fallujah leading the resistance".

Qasim Dawud, interim Premier Iyad Allawi's version of US National 
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, said for his part that more than 
1,000 "Saddamists and terrorists" had been killed, and 200 captured. Of 
those 200 only 14 are believed to be "foreign fighters", most of them 
Iranians. The notion that Shi'ite Iranians would be defending Sunni 
Fallujah is ludicrous - one more crude neo-conservative plot to 
implicate Tehran. Later Allawi talked of 400 captured - and a 
non-specified number of foreigners being mostly Syrians, Saudis, 
Afghans and Moroccans. As for the elusive, perhaps non-existent, Abu 
Musab al-Zarqawi, the alleged main reason for the US razing Fallujah, 
Dawud said "he has escaped".

  Dawud said that only "malignant pockets" remain in Fallujah. That's 
not what the resistance and independent observers are saying. Abu Saad 
al-Dlimi, the spokesman of the Fallujah mujahideen shura, told 
al-Jazeera that "US forces are still outside the [northwestern] Julan 
neighborhood. US forces were not able to gain one meter of this 
district." Haza al-Afify, an Iraqi journalist inside Fallujah, 
confirmed to al-Jazeera that "fighting is also raging in the southern 
and southeastern neighborhoods, particularly al-Shuhada and the 
industrial quarter". Al-Afify added that "if these neighborhoods are 
mere pockets, Fallujah will be harboring so many pockets".

Al-Dlimi insisted that "if the US forces mean by calling the 
neighborhoods of al-Askari, al-Shuhada, al-Sina'i, al-Jughayfi, 
al-Wihdah and al-Jumhuriyah ... pockets [of resistance] which they do 
not control thus far, I tell you that Fallujah consists only of all 
these neighborhoods". The resistance story contradicts the United 
States' spin. Al-Dlimi said no more than 100 "martyrs" were killed: 
with most victims "defenseless civilians, including those who were run 
over by the US forces' tanks".

The US won't be pleased by his suggestion that "if [the Americans] say 
they have wrapped up operations in Fallujah, we are telling them to 
allow all satellite networks to enter the city ... so the world can see 
what is really happening in the streets of Fallujah".

  On Saturday the Iraqi Red Crescent sent seven trucks and ambulances, 
53 volunteers and three doctors to Fallujah to distribute food, 
blankets, water-purification tablets and medicine to hundreds if not 
thousands of families caught in the crossfire. But the US has prevented 
them from entering the city: the Red Crescent was held at Fallujah's 
general hospital, "captured" by the Americans early last week, on the 
left bank of the Euphrates River. Abu Fahd, one of the volunteers, said 
that "none of the injured residents is being allowed to come to the 
hospital, while those outside are not allowed to go into town".

  The Iraqi Red Crescent knows as much as anyone in contact with 
Fallujah that the city has no medicine, no ambulances, no shelters, no 
power, no water, practically no food, and that the wounded are left to 
die while the streets are already littered with the dead. But although 
the Americans now insist they control 80% of the city, they have 
blocked the Iraqi Red Crescent because for them there are no Iraqi 
civilians trapped inside. The Iraqi resistance is a shadow army: the US 
military machine bombs it to oblivion, but rarely sees it. The 
thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire in Fallujah are also 
invisible - but they have even been denied their existence.

  The horror faced by Fallujah's civilians has hardly begun to emerge, 
although precision-strike democracy has started to be denounced by some 
who managed to escape Fallujah in these past few days.

Blood on the tracks
Not only "invisible" civilians are dead and buried in Fallujah - but 
the Geneva Convention as well. "Capturing" a major hospital and turning 
it into a military target; preventing civilians and noncombatants from 
escaping from, and forcefully returning them to, a war zone: these are 
war crimes, according, among others, to James Ross, senior legal 
advisor to Human Rights Watch.

Add to these rules of engagement the bombing of three small clinics - 
in one of them the medical staff and the patients were killed; 
highly-trained American snipers "shooting anything that moves", 
according to eyewitness accounts in Fallujah to families and friends in 
Baghdad; entire Fallujah neighborhoods reduced to rubble by at least 
two weeks of air strikes - killing residents even before Operation 
Phantom Fury began; the bombing of the only telecom center linking 
Fallujah to the rest of the world; and the scandal of water to Tall 
Afar, Samarra and Fallujah being cut off during US attacks in the past 
two months, affecting up to 750,000 civilians - a case fully documented 
by the Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq and a serious contravention of 
international humanitarian law.

  The .50-caliber machine-gun has became a free-for-all (its use on 
human targets is specifically forbidden by the Geneva Convention). Most 
private cars in Fallujah have been destroyed (they could be used for 
suicide bombings). And ambulances have been grounded.

  Tangled up in war
Dr Zafir al-Ani, an Iraqi political scientist, in an extensive 
interview with al-Jazeera, has laid out the extent of Sunni anger: 
"There is now a general Iraqi agreement that resistance is the only way 
... I say that the Iraqi government is pushing towards a real civil war 
in Iraq against the Sunni and the pan-Arab current ... There are many 
exclamation marks lingering over the stance of the authority of holy 
Najaf regarding what is happening in Iraq, at a time when the 
Association of Muslim Scholars - and everyone remembers this - 
condemned and renounced what happened to our brethren in Najaf, Karbala 
and Sadr City. This authority is now also trying to quell the Shi'ite 
pan-Arab current. Ayatollah al-Hasani was detained because he called 
for boycotting the elections [in January]. There have also been 
preparations for some time to oppress the [Muqtada] al-Sadr current and 
to contain dealings with the government through a few known parties. 
The Iraqi government is oppressing the Shi'ite pan-Arab current and the 
national Sunni current."

  (Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please 
contact content at atimes.com for info7rmation on our sales and 
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