[Shadow_Group] Fallujah, A City in Ruins

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

A city lies in ruins, along with the lives of the
wretched survivors

By Michael Georgy in Fallujah and Kim Sengupta

15 November 2004

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582915<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582915>

After six days of intense combat against the Fallujah
insurgents, US warplanes, tanks and mortars have left a
shattered landscape of gutted buildings, crushed cars
and charred bodies.

A drive through the city revealed a picture of utter
destruction, with concrete houses flattened, mosques in
ruins, telegraph poles down, power and phone lines
hanging slack and rubble and human remains littering
the empty streets. The north-west Jolan district, once
an insurgent stronghold, looked like a ghost town, the
only sound the rumbling of tank tracks.

US Marines pointed their assault rifles down abandoned
streets, past Fallujah's simple amusement park, now
deserted. Four bloated and burnt bodies lay on the main
street, not far from US tanks and soldiers. The stench
of the remains hung heavy in the air, mixing with the
dust.

Another body lay stretched out on the next block, its
head blown off, perhaps in one of the countless
explosions which rent the city day and night for nearly
a week. Some bodies were so mutilated it was impossible
to tell if they were civilians or militants, male or
female.

Fallujah, regarded as a place with an independent
streak where citizens even defied the former leader
Saddam Hussein at times, seemed lifeless. The minarets
of the city's dozens of mosques stood silent, no longer
broadcasting the call to holy war that so often echoed
across the rooftops, inspiring fighters to join the
insurgency.

Restaurant signs were covered in soot. Pavements were
crushed by 70-ton Abrams tanks, and rows of crumbling
buildings stood on both sides of deserted streets.
Upmarket homes with garages looked as if they had been
abandoned for years. Cars lay crushed in the middle of
streets. Two Iraqis in one street desperately trying to
salvage some of their smashed belongings were the only
signs of life.

As US soldiers walked through neighbourhoods, their
allies in the Iraqi forces casually moved along dusty
streets past wires hanging down from gutted buildings.
They carried boxes of bottled water to the rooftops of
the upmarket villas they now occupy. The soldiers sat
on the roofs staring at the ruins.

As a small convoy of Humvees moved back to position on
the edge of the Jolan district, a rocket landed in the
sand about 100ft away, a reminder that militants were
still out there somewhere, even if the city that
harboured them has fallen. The few civilians left in
Fallujah talked of a city left in ruins not just by the
six days of the ground assault, but the weeks of
bombing that preceded the attack.

Residents have long been without electricity or water,
abandoning their homes and congregating in the centre
of the city as the US forces advanced from all sides.
They had cowered in buildings as the battle unfolded
past the windows.

The reaction of US troops to attacks, say residents,
have been out of all proportion; shots by snipers have
been answered by rounds from Abrams tanks, devastating
buildings and, it is claimed, injuring and killing
civilians. This is firmly denied by the American
military.

About 200,000 refugees fled the fighting, and there
have been outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases.

People leaving the city described rotting corpses being
piled up and thousands still trapped inside their
homes, many of them wounded and without access to food,
water or medical aid. US commanders insist civilian
casualties in Fallujah have been low, but the Pentagon
famously claims 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 last
week, a nine-year-old boy was hit in the stomach by
shrapnel. Unable to reach a hospital, he died hours
later from blood loss. His father had to bury his body
in their garden.

Those trapped inside the city say they are reaching a
point of desperation. "Our situation is very hard,"
said Abu Mustafa, contacted by telephone in the central
Hay al-Dubat neighbourhood. "We don't have food or
water," he told Reuters. "My seven children all have
severe diarrhoea. One of my sons was wounded by
shrapnel last night and he's bleeding, but I can't do
anything to help him."

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 follow. "The Americans have been firing at
buildings if they see even small movements," he said.

As the fighting died down yesterday 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."

There was no sign of the guerrillas who scribbled
graffiti along the walls of the park, encouraging
Fallujah's 300,000 residents to join a holy war against
US-led troops. "Long live the mujahedin," read the
graffiti.

Mohammed Younis, a former policeman, said: "The
Americans and [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. We have been saying to Allawi and the
Americans that they are not here, but they do not
believe us."

THE CIVILIAN DEATH TOLL

By Harvey McGavin

US military officials were last night counting the cost
of their week long assault on Fallujah in which they
claim to have killed some 1,200 insurgents and some 44
servicemen lost their lives.

But in the city which was once home to 300,000 people
there were few reports of the number of civilians
killed.

Many are thought to have fled the fighting, but reports
from the city say it is impossible to tell how many of
the bodies that litter its rubble-strewn streets are
those of ordinary citizens.

Last week a report collated by the UN said 20 doctors
had died during a US air strike on a clinic and there
have been numerous reports of the US dropping huge
bombs.

The US Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed last
week that Iraqi civilians had been warned how to avoid
injury. "Innocent civilians in that city have all the
guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting
into trouble. There aren't going to be large numbers of
civilians killed and certainly not by US forces," he
said.

In addition to the 38 Americans and six Iraqis killed
in the assault, more than 200 US soldiers were injured.
About 400 suspected insurgents have been arrested in
Fallujah including "some" foreigners, interim Prime
Minister Ayad Allawi said.

The Iraq Coalition Casualties website reported that, as
of Saturday, 1,181 US troops had been killed in Iraq.
One Iraq-based report estimates civilian casualties to
be 37,000. A report in the British medical journal The
Lancet put the figure as high as 100,000.

Prime minister Iyad Allawi said there had been no
civilian casualties during the battle for Fallujah,
contradicting accounts from residents inside the city.

_______________________________________________________

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