The Battle for Fallujah Begins
Screams Will Not Be Heard
The Colonial Precedent
Chaos, Murder and Mayhem
Fallujah and the Reality of War
Terrorists in Falluja
The Impact of the Occupation on Health and Human Rights in Iraq
Letter from Fallujah to UN Secretary General
News In Brief
Humanitarian crisis in Falluja
Wives gagged
The US military is carrying out its deadly assault as part of its attempt to wipe out the growing resistance to the US occupation, despite its claim that it is to prepare for elections in January. The US-installed Iraqi interim government under Iyad Allawi has maintained that it has given authority to the US military to wrest control of Fallujah from resistance fighters before the elections.
The US and British governments, along with the US-installed Iraqi interim government, rejected an appeal made by Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN, who warned that attacking Falluja would jeopardise the January elections.
Throughout much of Iraq, US troops are unable to control streets, roads, towns and cities. They are also facing the fact that the resistance has effectively infiltrated the Iraqi security forces they are training. According to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, more than 900 policemen have been killed in the past year. On Sunday, Allawi had declared a state of emergency for 60 days. Sweeping powers have been introduced to enable search, arrest and internment, curfews, powers to ban demonstrations, close down trade unions and other organisations, tap phones, intercept mail and freeze assets and/or close down organisations and businesses suspected of supporting the resistance.
In the assault on Fallujah, more than 4,000 US Marines and soldiers are involved, kicking off a massive assault dubbed Operation Phantom Fury. The prelude to the assault on the Askari neighbourhood was a brutal air and artillery bombardment of the city, with US strike jets dropping bombs around the clock and big guns pounding the city every few minutes with high-explosive shells.
Prime Minister Tony Blair has declared coalition forces had to "hold firm, be resolute and see this through" as the murderous attacks were launched. Downing Street said that Tony Blair was "fully aware" of Iyad Allawi's "decision" to begin the onslaught, led by the US Marines and backed up by soldiers of the Black Watch. Tony Blair told MPs: "Let us be very clear about the fundamental importance to Britain's security of what the Black Watch and the British armed forces in the south of Iraq are doing."
Reports say that US forces were unable to establish themselves east of the Euphrates. They were taken aback by the ferocity of the resistance which scored hits on two tanks on the northwest of Fallujah, knocked out seven oil tankers on the east side and brought down an unmanned spy plane over the centre of the city, sending flames and black smoke billowing skywards.
As thunderous explosions rained down, the mosques rallied the people of Fallujah. One report tells of an imam broadcasting: "God is greatest, oh martyrs. Rise up mujahideen." Fallujah's Shura Mujahideen Council called for international intervention to halt the assault. It also called on the resistance fighters in other Iraqi cities to come to Fallujah's aid. The Muslim Clerics Association is reported to have issued a statement: "We call on the Iraqi forces, the National Guard and others who are mostly Muslims ... to beware of making the grave mistake of invading Iraqi cities under the banner of forces who respect no religion or human rights."
In many parts of the world, emergency demonstrations were held last night to condemn the US-British assault. In Britain, an emergency picket was held outside Downing Street. Other pickets were held, such as in Newcastle where people gathered at the Monument to protest. Further pickets and demonstrations are being planned across the country on Wednesday evening as the assault on Fallujah intensifies.
By Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian , November 8, 2004
With fitting irony, one of the camps used by the US marines waiting for the assault on Falluja was formerly a Ba'ath party retreat occasionally used by Saddam Hussein's sons. Dreamland, as it was known, has an island in the middle of an artificial lake fringed by palms.
Now the camp's dream-like unreality is distorting every news report filed on the preparations for the onslaught on Falluja. We don't know, and won't know, anything about what happens in the next few days except for what the US military authorities choose to let us know. It's long since been too dangerous for journalists to move around unless they are embedded with the US forces. There is almost no contact left with civilians still in Falluja, the only information is from those who have left.
This is how the fantasy runs: a city the size of Brighton is now only ever referred to as a "militants' stronghold" or "insurgents' redoubt". The city is being "softened up" with precision attacks from the air. Pacifying Falluja has become the key to stabilising the country ahead of the January elections. The "final assault" is imminent, in which the foreigners who have infiltrated the almost deserted Iraqi city with their extremist Islam will be "cleared", "rooted out" or "crushed". Or, as one marine put it: "We will win the hearts and minds of Falluja by ridding the city of insurgents. We're doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy."
These are the questionable assumptions and make-believe which are now all that the embedded journalists with the US forces know to report. Every night, the tone gets a little more breathless and excited as the propaganda operation to gear the troops up for battle co-opts the reporters into its collective psychology.
There's a repulsive asymmetry of war here: not the much remarked upon asymmetry of the few thousand insurgents holed up in Falluja vastly outnumbered by the US, but the asymmetry of information. In an age of instant communication, we will have to wait months, if not years, to hear of what happens inside Falluja in the next few days. The media representation of this war will be from a distance: shots of the city skyline illuminated by the flashes of bomb blasts, the dull crump of explosions. What will be left to our imagination is the terror of children crouching behind mud walls; the agony of those crushed under falling masonry; the frantic efforts to save lives in makeshift operating theatres with no electricity and few supplies. We will be the ones left to fill in the blanks, drawing on the reporting of past wars inflicted on cities such as Sarajevo and Grozny.
The silence from Falluja marks a new and agonising departure in the shape of 21st-century war. The horrifying shift in the last century was how, increasingly, war was waged against civilians: their proportion of the death toll rose from 50% to 90%. It prompted the development of a form of war-reporting, exemplified by Bosnia, which was not about the technology and hardware, but about human suffering, and which fuelled public outrage. No longer. The reporting of Falluja has lapsed back into the military machismo of an earlier age. This war against the defenceless will go unreported.
The reality is that a city can never be adequately described as a "militants' stronghold". It's a label designed to stiffen the heart of a soldier, but it is blinding us, the democracies that have inflicted this war, to the consequences of our actions. Falluja is still home to thousands of civilians. The numbers who have fled the prospective assault vary, but there could be 100,000 or more still in their homes. Typically, as in any war, those who don't get out of the way are a mixture of the most vulnerable – the elderly, the poor, the sick; the unlucky, who left it too late to get away; and the insanely brave, such as medical staff.
Nor does it seem possible that reporters still use the terms "softening up" or "precision" bombing. They achieve neither softening nor precision, as Falluja well knew long before George W Bush arrived in the White House. In the first Gulf war, an RAF laser-guided bomb intended for the city's bridge went astray and landed in a crowded market, killing up to 150. Last year, the killing of 15 civilians shortly after the US arrived in the city ensured that Falluja became a case study in how to win a war but lose the occupation. A catalogue of catastrophic blunders has transformed a relatively calm city with a strongly pro-US mayor into a battleground.
One last piece of fantasy is that there is unlikely to be anything "final" about this assault. Already military analysts acknowledge that a US victory in Falluja could have little effect on the spreading incidence of violence across Iraq. What the insurgents have already shown is that they are highly decentralised, and yet the quick copying of terrorist techniques indicates some degree of cooperation. Hopes of a peace seem remote; the future looks set for a chronic, intermittent civil war. By the time the bulldozers have ploughed their way through the centre of Falluja, attention could have shifted to another "final assault" on another "militant stronghold", as another city of homes, shops and children's playgrounds morphs into a battleground.
The recent comment of one Falluja resident is strikingly poignant: "Why," she asked wearily, "don't they go and fight in a desert away from houses and people?" Why indeed? Twentieth-century warfare ensured a remarkable historical inversion. Once the city had been the place of safety to retreat to in a time of war, the place of civilisation against the barbarian wilderness; but the invention of aerial bombardment turned the city into a target, a place of terror.
What is so disturbing is that much of the violence meted out to cities in the past 60-odd years has rarely had a strategic purpose – for example, the infamous bombing of Dresden. Nor is it effective in undermining morale or motivation; while the violence destroys physical and economic capital, it usually generates social capital – for example, the Blitz spirit or the solidarity of New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11 – and in Chechnya served only to establish a precarious peace in a destroyed Grozny and fuel a desperate, violent resistance.
Assaults on cities serve symbolic purposes: they are set showpieces to demonstrate resolve and inculcate fear. To that end, large numbers of casualties are required: they are not an accidental byproduct but the aim. That was the thinking behind 9/11, and Falluja risks becoming a horrible mirror-image of that atrocity. Only by the shores of that dusty lake in Dreamland would it be possible to believe that the ruination of this city will do anything to enhance the legitimacy of the US occupation and of the Iraqi government it appointed.
By Mark Curtis, The Guardian , October 26, 2004
The redeployment of British forces in Iraq to support a US assault on Falluja marks another stage in a creeping return to the colonial era, when popular revolts against occupation were routinely suppressed by overwhelming force. These past episodes, revealed in declassified British government files, provide numerous parallels with Iraq, and suggest a pattern of future blunders and atrocities. Those in Britain who like to regard more recent military interventions as humanitarian might dwell on those parallels as the latest phase of the Iraq war unfolds.
British ministers' claim to be defending civilisation against barbarity in Iraq finds a powerful echo in 1950s Kenya, when Britain sought to smash an uprising against colonial rule. Yet, while the British media and political class expressed horror at the tactics of the Mau Mau, the worst abuses were committed by the occupiers. The colonial police used methods like slicing off ears, flogging until death and pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight.
British forces killed around 10,000 Kenyans during the Mau Mau campaign, compared with the 600 deaths among the colonial forces and European civilians. Some British battalions kept scoreboards recording kills, and gave £5 rewards for the first sub-unit to kill an insurgent, whose hands were often chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. "Free fire zones" were set up, where any African could be shot on sight.
As opposition to British rule intensified, brutal "resettlement" operations, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands, forced around 90,000 into detention camps. In this 1950s version of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, forced labour and beatings were systematic and disease rampant. Former camp officers described "short rations, overwork, brutality and flogging" and "Japanese methods of torture".
Guerrillas resisting British rule were routinely designated "terrorists", as now in Iraq. Britain never admitted that it was opposing a popular, nationalist rebellion in Kenya. Similarly, leftwing Malayan insurgents fighting British rule in the 1950s had strong popular support among the Chinese community but were officially called "terrorists". In secret, however, Foreign Office correspondence described the war as being fought "in defence of [the] rubber industry", then controlled by British and European companies.
But under the banner of fighting communism, British forces were given free rein in Malaya. Collective punishments were inflicted on villages for aiding insurgents. A shoot-to-kill policy was promoted, tens of thousands of people were removed into "new villages" and used as cheap labour, and British soldiers had themselves photographed holding guerrillas' decapitated heads. The idea that the revolt was ended through "winning hearts and minds" is a myth; it was crushed by overwhelming force, such as massive aerial bombing.
The brutality needed to be kept secret, a key theme in suppressing revolts. After Britain intervened to crush a rebellion in Oman in 1957, an internal Foreign Office minute stated that "we want to avoid the RAF killing Arabs if possible, especially as there will be newspaper correspondents on the spot". The British army commander in Oman later noted that "great pains were taken throughout the Command to keep all operational actions out of the press".
The reason for this was that Britain committed numerous war crimes in Oman, including the systematic bombing of civilian targets such as water supplies and farms. These attacks "would deter dissident villages from gathering their crops" and ensure "denial of water", officials stated in private. Bombing was intended to "show the population the power of weapons at our disposal" and to convince them that "resistance will be fruitless and lead only to hardship".
Britain was defending an extremely repressive regime where smoking in public, playing football and talking to anyone for more than 15 minutes were banned. Yet Harold Macmillan told President Kennedy in a 1957 telegram that "we believe that the sultan is a true friend to the west and is doing his best for his people".
As Blair and Bush claim to support democracy in Iraq, it is as well to remember that London and Washington have almost always opposed popular, democratic forces in the Middle East, preferring strong regimes capable of bringing "order".
Britain's stance on the US war in Vietnam offers other useful lessons. Just as Tony Blair poses as providing a brake on US tactics in Iraq, Harold Wilson claimed to do the same over Vietnam. Yet Britain secretly backed the US in every stage of military escalation.
In July 1965, when the US doubled its ground troop numbers in Vietnam, Wilson privately reassured President Johnson of his support for US policies "in the interests of peace and stability".
The Wilson-Johnson correspondence highlights a shocking level of connivance between No 10 and the White House to deceive the public. When the US first bombed Hanoi and Haiphong in June 1966, Wilson issued a statement disassociating the government from the bombing. Yet this statement had been passed to the US for approval while Wilson assured Johnson that "I cannot see that there is any change in your basic position that I could urge on you." The myth in Iraq that Britain is not complicit in US brutalities has its precedent in Vietnam. Declassified files show that, in 1962, Britain covertly sent an SAS team to south Vietnam under "temporary civilian status", to help train soldiers of the dictatorial regime of President Diem. Britain secretly provided arms and intelligence support to the US to improve US bombing.
Moreover, brutal US "counter-insurgency" programmes were based on prototypes developed by British advisers. Britain's "Delta Plan" for the south Vietnamese regime, described by the Foreign Office as intended "to dominate, control and win over the population" in rural areas, became the US "strategic hamlets" programme, which forced millions of Vietnamese peasants into fortified villages that resembled concentration camps.
As in Iraq, the publicly proclaimed search for peace was largely a charade. A senior Foreign Office official wrote in 1965: "The government are fighting a continuous rearguard action to preserve British diplomatic support for American policy in Vietnam. They can only get away with this by constantly emphasising that our objective, and that of the Americans, is a negotiated settlement".
These episodes highlight the gulf between what ministers have told the public and what they have understood to be the case in private. The declassified secret files point to some harsh truths about current policy in Iraq: that the war is not about what our leaders say it is (democracy), is not primarily against who they say it is (terrorists) and is not being conducted for whom they say it is (Iraqis).
Iraqis are in practice regarded as "unpeople" whose deaths matter little in the pursuit of western power; the major block on committing atrocities is the fear of being exposed and ministers will do all they can to cover them up. The public is the major threat to their strategy, which explains why they resort to public deception campaigns. If, as must be expected, atrocities now multiply in Iraq – with Britain complicit – we cannot claim we were not warned.
· Mark Curtis' new book, Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses, is published this month by Vintage.
Haifa Zangana, The Guardian , October 25, 2004
The kidnapping of Margaret Hassan is shocking but not surprising. We have come to accept that the same thing might happen to any of our family or friends. In fact, it already has happened to my dearest friend Nada.
Last month, her nephew Baree Ibrahim, an engineer, was kidnapped. I remember Baree very well from the mid-70s. Here is his aunt's account of what happened:
"Dear Haifa,
"My nephew Baree was picked up on September 25 and no ransom was asked. Actually the kidnappers didn't contact his family, and this led us to believe that they mistook him for someone else as he looked so European. He was beheaded on Saturday October 2.
"I had a phone call from his brother to tell me to tune to al-Jazeera. I saw on TV, Baree talking with mute sound and the writing at the bottom of the screen saying that Iraqi engineer Baree Nafee Dawood Ibrahim was beheaded by 'Jamaa ansar assunna' and the detail of the beheading procedure can be seen on one of the Islamic sites. I called my sister immediately. She was unable to answer the phone. They couldn't mourn him traditionally because the body was not found. A couple of days later his brother was in Baghdad. He and his cousins went every day to the hospital's mortuary to look for Baree's body but they couldn't find him. They even went to look for his body in side streets but to no avail.
"My sister and her immediate family are all now in Amman, Jordan and my other brother and sisters and their children are preparing to leave Iraq for Syria. At the moment there are about 2 million Iraqi in Jordan and the same in Syria and Lebanon. Some 200,000 Christian Iraqis have fled the country in the last couple of months. This is the freedom and democracy promised to the Iraqis. Nada."
This is the daily reality in the new Iraq, especially in Baghdad. An average of 100 Iraqis are killed every day. Kidnapping for profit or revenge is widespread. Young girls are sold to neighbouring countries for prostitution.
Madeline Hadi, a nine-year-old girl, was kidnapped from her father's car in the al-Doura district of Baghdad. Zinah Falih Hassan, a student in al-Warkaa secondary school, also in Baghdad, was kidnapped on her way back from school. Asma, a young engineer, was abducted in Baghdad. She was shopping with her mother, sister and male relative when six armed men kidnapped her. She was repeatedly raped.
Mahnaz Bassam and Raad Ali Abdul Aziz were kidnapped last month along with two Italian aid workers and subsequently released. Unlike the Italians, the two Iraqis did not receive media attention in the west. No one prayed for them.
And aid workers are not the only victims – 250 university professors and scientists have been killed in the past year, according to the Union of University Lecturers, and more than 1,000 academics have left the country
Iraqi journalists are also frequently harassed, threatened and attacked by occupying troops. This year, 12 of the 14 journalists killed were Iraqi, and six Iraqi media workers were also killed. Many journalists have also fled the country.
More than 100 Iraqi doctors and consultants have been killed or kidnapped in the past year. A spokesperson for the Iraqi Medical Society described the kidnappings as "intimidating and forcing them to leave the country". The latest victim was Dr Turki Jabar al Saadi, chair of the Iraqi veterinary society. He was shot in the head on October 21. None of these killings has been investigated. These atrocities go unrecorded. The dead are unnamed.
There are indeed reasons for all this chaos, murder and mayhem. Those reasons lie in the nature of invasion, war and, most crucially of all, occupation.
The US-led occupation forces presented themselves as champions of liberation, freedom and democracy. What they have achieved is chaos, collective punishment, assassinations, abuse and torture of prisoners, and destruction of the country's infrastructure.
The "sovereign" interim government has, like the Iraqi Governing Council before it, proved to be the fig leaf shielding the occupying forces from Iraqis' frustration and outrage.
Powerless, and with no credibility among Iraqi people, the interim government's failure is disastrous. In addition to the lack of security, there is not the slightest improvement in electricity supply, the availability of clean water, employment, or health and education services. Fighting between occupying troops and various Iraqi groups has become widespread in more than 12 cities.
Without the consent of the Iraqi people, Ayad Allawi and President Ghazi al-Yawer declared that it was the wish of the populace that the occupying troops remain. They also stood aside while F16s and helicopter gunships showered densely populated areas in Sadr city, Falluja, Samraa, Najaf, Kut, Kufa, Tel Afar and elsewhere. The resistance in Falluja is now so persistent that Iraq's director of national intelligence admitted: "We could take the city, but we would have to kill everyone in it." British troops are going to be deployed to achieve this.
In his last monthly press conference before the invasion of Iraq on February 18 2003, Tony Blair said that removing President Saddam will "save a lot of lives" as well as removing the chemical and biological weapons." The people who will celebrate the most will be the people of Iraq, he continued.
We are not celebrating. Death is covering us like fine dust. Four-fifths of Iraqi people demand the immediate withdrawal of occupying forces from Iraq. Margaret Hassan is one of them. Will Tony Blair listen this time?
· Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi-born novelist
By Rahul Mahajan, November 6, 2004
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.
US 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. Non-combatants and families with sick people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, US forces began allowing everyone to leave – except for what they called "military age males", men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping non-combatants 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 neighbourhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no operating theatre; 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 that 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 US 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 3/4 were non-combatants.
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 metres, i.e., they hit within 10 metres of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 metres; every single bomb shakes the whole neighbourhood, 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 organised; to "win", the US 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 US 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: US Power in Iraq and Beyond
by Nermeen Al-Mufti, Al-Ahram, October 22, 2004
Relatives of Ateka Abdel Hamid, 24, did not know that this seven-month pregnant woman was a terrorist until the day she died. As the family collected the mutilated bodies of Ateka and her family, a United States spokesman boasted that the "multinational forces" killed a number of terrorists and Al-Zarqawi supporters during an offensive in Falluja. The terrorists, it turned out, were Ateka, her three-year-old son Omar, her husband Tamer and six other members of her family.
Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Hamid, Ateka's brother, said that the only survivor of his sister's family was her nine month-old daughter, whose picture has already been flashed across television screens worldwide. Ateka and her children had fled their home in the military district in Falluja to her parents' house. On the day she died, her mother-in- law had taken her home to the "relatively-safe" Al- Jumhuriya district. At midnight, US planes bombed the area and Ateka, her family and her husband's family were killed. Ateka's parents did not know of the tragedy until the morning of the next day. Relatives buried the nine bodies. Like many others in Falluja, their former home was now but a smouldering shell. This is a charred testimony to dashed hope – Ateka and her family did not reach safety.
Today, Abdul-Rahman is taking his family to Al- Taji, a neighbourhood of Baghdad where they have a relative. It is not an entirely safe area but it beats Falluja. Falluja inhabitants have been running away since mid-April 2003, when the first US attacks were mounted against the city. The Iraqi government has even asked the inhabitants of Falluja to evacuate the city, and yet US forces have laid siege to it, cutting it off from the highway – the only route linking Falluja to other Iraqi cities.
Despite the government instruction to leave, the people of Falluja are finding it hard to do so. There are also those who cannot leave the city, those who are not fortunate enough to have relatives to house them elsewhere. They have stayed, alongside those who simply won't leave their homes.
Falluja was once called the city of minarets. It once echoed the Euphrates in its beauty and calm. It had plentiful water and lush greenery. It was a summer resort for Iraqis. People went there for leisure, for a swim at the nearby Habbaniya lake, for a kebab meal. The Abu Hussein restaurant was one of Falluja's best Kebab houses. But US forces, acting on an Iraqi intelligence tip, decided that Abu Hussein was a terrorist den. They destroyed the establishment, killing its two guards. The bodies of the guards were never found, only the traces of blood.
On both sides of the highway scenes of destruction abound. Mansions and tiny houses have become equal – all were destroyed. Sometimes curiosity would bring a visitor, an adult or a child who used to know the owners, to stare at the rubble. The air is thick with tragedy. I wonder, with a lump in my throat, where are the Arab brothers? Where are the Muslim kinfolk? Where is the civilised world? What do they make of the orgy of blood in Iraq? Today, I know how the Palestinians feel, when they are slaughtered while the Arabs and the world look the other way.
Are there Arab fighters in Falluja? "Some Arab brothers were among us, but when the shelling intensified, we asked them to leave and they did," says Ahmed Al-Deleimi. He added, "Why has America given itself the right to call on UK and Australian and other armies for help and we don't have the same right? We can't call on others for help."
Kamel Mohamed, who was getting ready to leave Falluja, said that he had heard that there were Arab fighters in the city, but he never saw any of them. Then he had heard that they had left. "Regardless of the motives of those fighters, they have provided a pretext for the city to be slaughtered, exactly as the mass destruction weapons gimmick provided a pretext for Iraq to be slaughtered. It is our right to resist and it is the opponent's right to be honest, but is there such a thing as an honest occupier?"
The suffering spreads along with the destruction. This is the second Ramadan under occupation, and bloodshed is everywhere. Iyad Allawi has visited Sadr City, which has laid down its arms, and said that he is determined to uproot terror. No Iraqi or US official has yet told the Iraqis, who live in constant danger, exactly what terror is. Does the US warning people to stay away because a force with a licence to kill operates, not qualify as terror? Does murder by "friendly" fire not qualify as terror? Does occupation by a foreign force not qualify as terror?
These are all acts of terror and the Iraqis are paying a price that rises every day. Until Al-Zarqawi is apprehended, operations against the Iraqis are going to continue. These operations have bizarre code names, such as "Angry Ghost". The Angry Ghost is now screaming through Falluja. Will it ever be laid to rest?
On Wednesday, October 27, a packed meeting organised in Newcastle by the Tyneside Stop the War Coalition heard a talk by Dr Salam T Ismael, General Secretary, Doctors for Iraq Society – The Impact of the Occupation on Health and Human Rights in Iraq . Throughout the day Doctor Ismael had spoken in the University Medical School and at a meeting organised by NATFHE – all part of national tour to speak about his experiences in Iraq since the Anglo-US invasion.
Young in years but a senior Doctor in Baghdad, Dr Ismael spoke about the practical problems facing the medical services in occupied Iraq and then about his first hand experiences and a medical volunteer during the US siege of Falluja. Finally he spoke about the purposes of his trip and what he hoped to achieve.
Dr Ismael relayed to the audience the absence of management and organisational structures and general sense of chaos with medical staff just left to get on with it the best they can. This was worse than when Saddam was in power, because, even with equipment shortages and other problems linked to international sanctions, there had at least then some sort of organisation. He spoke about the corruption with money just disappearing, salaries being siphoned off to fictitious people, medical services not linked to other social structures and financial chaos. Even when cash was available, he said, the instability of currency meant that it was difficult to match the cash to the equipment.
He described a sense of a world in which no one knew the value of anything any more. Payments for the job becoming almost random seemingly – no pay grades or salary structures, for example. In addition, there was a complete breakdown in training and career development. There was no sense of staff being part of structured workforce and a sense of operating in a "bandit" environment, with cash for wages being carried around with armed guards and theft rife. He spoke about the senior staff shortages, their leaving the country and that there were only 130 senior doctors left in the country. He said that support staff were in short supply with staff just coming and going.
Speaking about the privatisation of the economy he focused attention particularly on shortage of oxygen supplies and the many lives being lost because the hospitals have no oxygen. The previous state companies that supplied oxygen for 150 dinas per 100 litres were either closed down, or privatised. The five teaching hospitals in Baghdad could not afford the cost of oxygen supplied by the new foreign corporations, which charged thousands of dinas per 100 litres. Dr Ismael said that one of the main points of his trip was a campaign to raise £80,000 to secure a small plant that would produce oxygen for these five hospitals.
The countenance of Dr Ismael then got even graver when he went on to talk about the US siege of Falluja. He said he has nightmares every day. He spoke the word genocide over and over again before he could bring himself to recall the account of those days. He modestly said that it was the junior doctors that were the bravest and persuaded him to go there. He made the comment that Falluja was a city of 300-400,000 where the British occupation had been defeated in 1920 and that it was revenge for this that was behind the US attack on Falluja. There was no justification, he said even pointing out that the contractors who were killed were deliberately sent into danger as a pretext for the attack on Falluja.
Dr Ismael testified to personal experience of the war crimes by occupying powers:
The US army prevented food and medication from entering the town. Despite the protests they cut the main bridge link to the town's main hospital. This meant casualties died because they could not get to the hospital. He and his staff set up field hospitals in the town, but were prevented from taking even basic equipment to them.
They witnessed extensive and deliberate bombing of civilians. At the meeting he produced photographic evidence of the casualties. He produced civilian casualty figures estimates:
More than 750 civilians killed. More than 1,800 injured. Of casualties treated, an estimated 5% could be classified as fighters, 95% civilians. Of the civilian casualties, he estimated about 50% were children, about 30% adult women, about 20% adult men.
He defined fighters as those actively involved in resistance, which he later described in terms of their right to resist the occupation under international law. Anyone else was a civilian. Elsewhere in the talk, he spoke of the fighters as being mostly Islamic national fighters – mostly from Iraq, but some from elsewhere – rather than left-over Saddam supporters. But he also emphasised the ways previously disunited factions were being brought together in a resistance movement against the occupying powers.
Dr Ismael and other medical colleagues witnessed the use of illegal weapons, and he spoke of the evidence of unrestrained use of cluster bombs and a "new" type of air-burst anti-personnel weapon in areas containing many civilians.
He also spoke about the abuse of mosques: crass and/or deliberately provocative disrespectful acts at religious sites; troops entering without permission; using mosque towers as sniper points. The occupiers deliberately destroyed copies of the Koran and other religious texts.
Dr Ismael related in his account the targeting of ambulances and medical staff, as well as the targeting of media. He described an occasion when he and a British journalist in an ambulance tried to go to the aid of a family in a burning car. As they tried to leave the ambulance to rescue a burning child on the bonnet of the car they were fired on and hit and unable to complete the rescue. As a result the family died, burnt to death, and only their charcoal bodies remained. He described how they delivered food by ambulance, unable to leave the ambulance. They had to throw the food to the people in their houses. The US snipers fired on water that they left in cans so that the water ran away. Several times he used the telling phrase "bored snipers" – it would seem that in these areas all "rules of engagement" broke down, and snipers just shot at anyone – or any thing – that moved. He made the poignant point that an Iraqi had been imprisoned indefinitely for striking a donkey in Baghdad, but in Falluja these great upholders of "animal rights" when they where bored with shooting humans beings shot at the animals of Falluja.
Illustrating his comments with graphic pictures, Dr Ismael showed how casualties died, how they had to bury people in the football ground as they were prevented from burying the dead in the cemetery because of the US snipers.
Doctor Ismael felt the resistance in Falluja has acted as an inspiration to people elsewhere in Iraq – there was a sense of unity emerging through resistance to a hated enemy. He ridiculed the western propaganda that depicts the people of Iraq in religious factions and he said that firstly they consider themselves as Iraqis.
In his final contribution Dr Ismael said that he had called for the support of the work of the Doctors for Iraq Society to secure the oxygen plant he mentioned, but in particular he had found support among medical students for the idea of sending a small medical caravan to Falluja in solidarity with the people of that city against whom Bush is threatening a renewed offensive and more war crimes against the Iraqi people. Such an outrage was supported by the British Army moving to the north of Baghdad.
People listened intently and vowed to step up their work in Britain against the occupation of Iraq. One woman asked how the Iraqi people could ever forgive us. "The living maybe, the dead cannot," was the answer.
For our part let us bring the war criminals to justice, was the mood of the meeting. The US and Britain must end the occupation and pay full war reparations, and forever ban war as an instrument of humankind.
- Kassim Abdullsattar al-Jumaily, Study Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, October 14, 2004 -
Excellency,
It is very obvious that the American forces are committing crimes of genocide every day in Iraq. Now, while we are writing to your Excellency, the American forces are committing such crimes in the city of Fallujah. The American warplanes are dropping its most powerful bombs on civilians in the city, killing and injuring hundreds of innocent people.
At the same time their tanks are attacking the city by using their heavy artillery. As you know, there is not any military position in the city.
There were not any activities by its resistance in the past weeks; the negotiation with representatives of the city and the government was going well. In this atmosphere the new development happened while its people are trying to prepare themselves to fast the first day of the holy month of Ramadan. Many of them are now under the wreckage of their demolished houses, nobody can help while the military activity are continues.
Just to give your Excellency an example: the result of one night of bombardments by the American forces (that was on October 13-14, 2004) was the demolition of 50 houses on its residents. Is this a genocide crime or a lesson about American democracy?
It is obvious that the Americans would like to terrify the people of the city for one reason only: their resistance to the occupation.
Your Excellency knows and the whole world that the Americans and their allies destroyed the entire country using the pretext of the threat of WMD. Now after all the destruction and the killing of thousands of civilians they simply come out to say that no weapons were found. But they said nothing about all the crimes they committed. Unfortunately everybody is silent, even a word of condemnation became more expensive than the Iraqi civilian. Are the Americans going to pay compensation as Iraq was forced to do after the Gulf War? We know that we are living in a double standard world. In Fallujah, they created a new vague target that is Al-Zarqawi: a new pretext to justify their crimes, killing and bombardment of the civilians every day. Almost one year has elapsed since the creation of this new pretext. Whenever they destroyed houses, mosques, restaurants, and killed children and women, they said they launched a successful operation on Al-Zarqawi. They will never say that they were able to kill him because there is no such person. And that means the continuation of killing civilians and the committing of genocide crimes every day.
The people of Fallujah assure you that this person if he is alive is not in Fallujah and may be not in any part of Iraq. The people of Fallujah themselves announced many times that any person who could see Al-Zarqawi is free to kill him. Everybody realises now that the man is just a hypothetical hero created by the Americans.
At the same time the representatives of Fallujah, their tribal leaders denounced many times the kidnapping and killing of any civilian and they have no link to any group of such inhuman behaviour.
Excellency, we appeal to you, and to all world leaders to exert the most effort and pressure on the American administration to stop its crimes in Fallujah and withdraw its army far from the city. The city was very quiet and peaceful when its people ran it. We didn't witness any disorder in the city. The civil administration was going well with its limited resources.
We simply don't welcome the occupation forces. This is our right according to the Charter, international law and the norms of the humanity. If the Americans believe in the opposite, they have to withdraw first from the UN and all its agencies.
It is very urgent, that your Excellency, along with the world leaders, intervenes in a speedy manner to avoid the new massacre.
We were trying to reach your representatives in Iraq to be more active in this regard but as you know they are living in the green zone. We want the UN to be involved in any kind of arrangement with regard to the situation in Fallujah to avoid the new massacre.
We were trying to reach you through different channels and asking our friends to convey this letter to your office in New York or Geneva with the hope that our letter will find its way to you. At the same time we appeal to you to urge the UN agencies in Iraq to take an active role to protect civilians and to prevent the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah as well as many parts of our country.
Best regards,
Kassim Abdullsattar al-Jumaily
President
The Study Centre of Human Rights & Democracy
On behalf of the people of Fallujah and for: Al-Fallujah Shura Council, The Bar Association, The Teacher Union, Council of Tribes Leaders, The House of Fatwa and Religious Education
The humanitarian situation in Fallujah has been deteriorating. "The humanitarian situation is gravely deteriorating in light of the displacement of thousands of families from the city where large numbers of them are living on the roads to escape the hell of the US imminent offensive," Ismail Al-Delaimi of the Fallujah general hospital told IOL. "The approach of the winter season has caused the situation of thousands of people to deteriorate."
"Dysentery and diseases of children have been on the rise at a time we suffer a shortage of medicines." The Director of the Fallujah general hospital said that grave diseases have been increasing among the Iraqis over the past period, foremost among such diseases are intensive dysentery, food poisoning and miscarriage.
Islam.Online 3/11/04
The Ministry of Defence has denied allegations that it has been trying to stop the wives of Black Watch soldiers talking to the media. British troops in Iraq are being asked to tell their families to stop criticising the Government, a regiments campaign group said. Jeff Duncan, spokesman for the Save Our Scottish Regiments Campaign, said a number of wives at the regiment's HQ in Warminster, Wiltshire, had received the edict.
Evening Standard 1/11/04