[News] When the smoke clears around Fallujah

[News at freedomarchives.org]

THE INDEPENDENT
World: Middle East
14 November 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582722
Kim Sengupta and Raymond Whitaker report

As the Americans move street by bloody street towards control of the
insurgents' stronghold, aid agencies warn of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Victory was being declared yesterday in the battle of Fallujah, with 1,000
rebels reported dead, hundreds more in custody and spectacular footage from
embedded television crews, showing Marines charging through deserted
neighbourhoods.

"It's like those pictures from the advance into Baghdad," said one watcher
as the TV showed the view over a tank gunner's shoulder, with fire pouring
down an empty street. But that comment unconsciously identified the real
problem: more than a year and a half after George Bush declared major
combat operations in Iraq at an end, the US military, backed by British and
Iraqi forces, is having to fight the war all over again.

Yesterday, as American forces embarked on what were described as
"mopping-up" operations in Fallujah - though heavy shelling was still being
reported - relief organisations warned that there could be a humanitarian
disaster in the city. "Conditions in Fallujah are catastrophic," said
Fardous al-Ubaidi of the Iraqi Red Crescent. The Iraqi Health Minister,
Alaa Alwan, said ambulances had begun transferring "significant numbers" of
civilian wounded to Baghdad hospitals, but did not say how many.

Washington and the Iraqi interim government could argue that civilians in
Fallujah had ample warning of what was to come. More than 80 per cent of
the population of 200,000 to 300,000 were said to have fled before the
assault was launched on Monday. But enough reports trickled out of the
besieged city to show that many inhabitants still remained, despite their
invisibility in the television footage, and that their plight was severe.

Aamir Haidar Yusouf,a 39-year-old trader, sent his family out of Fallujah,
but stayed behind to look after his home, not just during the fighting, but
the looting which will invariably follow. "The Americans have been firing
at buildings if they see even small movements," he said. "They are also
destroying cars, because they think every car has a bomb in it. People have
moved from the edges of the city into the centre, and they are staying on
the ground floors of buildings.

"There will be nothing left of Fallujah by the time they finish. They have
already destroyed so many homes with their bombings from the air, and now
we are having this from tanks and big guns."

US commanders insist civilian casualties in Fallujah have been low, but the
Pentagon famously claims that it does not keep figures. Escaping residents
described incidents in which non-combatants, including women and children,
were killed by shrapnel or hit by bombs. In one case earlier in the week, a
nine-year-old boy was hit in the stomach by shrapnel. Unable to reach a
hospital, he died hours later of blood loss.

"Anyone who gets injured is likely to die, because there's no medicine and
they can't get to doctors," said Abdul-Hameed Salim, a volunteer with the
Iraqi Red Crescent. "There are snipers everywhere. Go outside and you're
going to get shot."

Sami al-Jumaili, a doctor at the main Fallujah hospital who escaped arrest
when it was taken, said the city was running out of medical supplies, and
only a few clinics remained open. "There is not a single surgeon in
Fallujah," he said. "We had one ambulance hit by US fire and a doctor
wounded. There are scores of injured civilians in their homes whom we can't
move. A 13-year-old child just died in my hands."

Around 10,000 people took shelter in Habbaniya, 12 miles to the west of the
city, and many had tragic stories. "There have been a lot of innocent
people killed," said Suleiman Ali Hassan, who lost his brother. "The
Americans say they are just aiming their tanks and aircraft at the
mujaheddin, but I know of at least eight other people who have died beside
my brother."

Samira Sabbah arrived at the refugee centre yesterday with her three
children, but her husband stayed behind in Fallujah. "People have been
living like animals," she said. "There has been no electricity, no food and
no water. We were very afraid to move out because there were so much
shooting everywhere. I do not know how we will live now."

Rasoul Ibrahim, a father of three, fled Fallujah on foot with his wife and
children. "There's no water," he said. "People are drinking dirty water.
Children are dying. People are eating flour because there's no proper
food."

Mohammed Younis, a former policeman, said: "The Americans and Allawi [Iyad
Allawi, Iraq's interim Prime Minister] have been saying that Fallujah is
full of foreign fighters. That is not true, they left a long time ago. You
will find them in other places, in Baghdad."

The truth of his words were confirmed by no less than Mr Allawi's national
security adviser, Qassem Daoud, who said more than 1,000 "Saddamists and
terrorists" had been killed in the battle for Fallujah, and 200 captured.
Of those 200, however, only 14 are believed to be non-Iraqis, mostly
Iranians. What of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Washington's top bogeyman in Iraq,
the al-Qa'ida arch-terrorist whose supposed presence in Fallujah was one of
the main justifications for the assault? "He has escaped," said Mr Daoud.

This was the first official admission of what virtually everyone else in
Iraq had realised long ago: that Zarqawi, even if he had ever been in
Fallujah, was not going to stay put to await arrest by the Americans. Every
time the interim government demanded of the city's clerical leadership that
they hand him over, they insisted they did not have the power to hand over
foreign extremists, and did not even know where the Jordanian was.

They repeated this after a final ultimatum last weekend from Mr Allawi
himself. The assault went ahead anyway, just as everyone knew it would,
even though a senior American officer said as it was beginning that it was
likely that most of the "foreign fighters" had already melted away. So who
were the Americans fighting? In Mr Daoud's parlance, nearly all appeared to
be "Saddamists" - in other words, Iraqis whose main motive is to fight
against the occupation, rather than "terrorists", who presumably come from
outside to force local people into acts of resistance against their will.

Despite the Iraqi interim government officially having ordered the attack,
military strategy is still being driven by a White House obsessed with
"smoking terrorists out of their holes". Fallujah has been the victim of
this misconception of what is happening in Iraq, but other places will
follow - perhaps Mosul, which was reported yesterday to be partly under
insurgent control, or Ramadi, where many of the hardliners fled from
Fallujah.

The US simply does not have enough forces to pacify the whole of the Sunni
centre of Iraq at once, which explains why Britain was asked to send the
Black Watch north. "As soon as we press down hard in one place, they pop up
somewhere else," complained one officer, and his words were borne out by a
rash of small-scale attacks yesterday in places where US troops had been
thinned out for the assault on Fallujah.

The city was unquestionably the base for many of the car bombers and
fighters who have staged attacks across central Iraq in recent months, but
the main reason it became so was the resentment caused by the previous
attempt to win hearts and minds by military means - the botched US assault
in April. In military terms this operation has been more successful, but
politically it will be just as disastrous as its predecessor, which fuelled
the present insurgency.

One of the main Sunni populist groups, the Iraqi Islamic Party, has
resigned from the Iraqi government in protest against the Fallujah battle.
"The American attack on our people in Fallujah has led, and will lead, to
more killings and genocide without mercy from the Americans," said its
leader, Mohsen Abdel-Hamid.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential group of Sunni clerics ,
is calling for a boycott of January's planned elections, saying they will
be held "over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah and the blood of the
wounded".

Even President Bush admits that violence is likely to increase rather than
decline as the election approaches. But as American forces contemplate what
is left of Fallujah, some might remember the words of a US officer standing
amid the ruins of Hue in Vietnam a generation ago. "In order to save the
city," he declared without a hint of irony, "we had to destroy it."

Copyright © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd


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