[Shadow_Group] Fw: Occupation Watch Bulletin - November 21, 2004

Mon Nov 29 22:36:56 PST 2004

Occupation Watch Bulletin
www.occupationwatch.org<http://www.occupationwatch.org/>
November 21, 2004
By Marjorie Lasky

Slowly, very slowly, the story about what has happened in Falluja is emerging. The numbers of killed and wounded civilians might never be known but we do know that hospitals were flooded with wounded Iraqis, 80% of the 300,000 residents of Falluja fled to neighboring towns, US troops and their Iraqi counterparts destroyed the town, and the U.S. refused access to trucks carrying humanitarian aid.  There are also narratives about starving and wounded Iraqis, more than 50 dead and hundreds of wounded US military personnel, the deaths of 1200 "insurgents" and the arrest of approximately 1500 more, a US marine killing an injured and unarmed Iraqi in a mosque, and the discovery of hostage houses where hostages might have been tortured and slain.  One needs to remember that most of these reports emanate from either military personnel or reporters embedded with U.S. troops.  Occasionally, refugee stories have reached the media, but the lack of coverage from varying perspectives, ten!
 ds to provide a limited view of what actually occurred in Falluja.

A commentary by Tom Engelhardt and Jonathan Schell offers a collage of materials from eyewitness reports in Fallujah, mainly appearing in the mainstream media:

"Even the dogs have started to die, their corpses strewn among twisted metal and shattered concrete in a city that looks like it forgot to breathe. The aluminum shutters of shops on the main highway through town have been transformed by the force of war into mangled accordion shapes, flat, sharp, jarring slices of metal that no longer obscure the stacks of silver pots, the plastic-wrapped office furniture, the rolls of carpet...

[T]he Insurgents were putting up their most tenacious resistance as U.S. and Iraqi forces pursued them through a bleak landscape of bombed-out cinder block factories and houses reminiscent of the movie Blade Runner Driving down Highway 10, the main street running east to west through the heart of Fallujah, is like entering a film that is set sometime on the other side of Armageddon. Cars sit on the roofs of buildings. Lamp posts lie at odd angles on the street. Just south of the highway, a minaret has been snapped off near the base like a pretzel stick, and another minaret is missing a huge chunk. Fire has blackened the facade of building after building 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 northwest Jolan district, once an insurgent stronghold, looked like a ghost town, the only sound the rumbli!
 ng of tank tracks...

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...

See: "The Battle for Minds, (forget the Hearts)"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7914<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7914>

Other reports describing the results of the battle fought in Fallujah include:

Robert R. Worth
"Clues of Hostages Emerge from Houses in Falluja"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7964<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7964>

"Grim, Angry Rites as Falluja Buries its Dead"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7906<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7906>

Michael Georgy and Fadel al-Badrani
"1,600 Iraqis Killed in U.S. Assault on Falluja"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7865<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7865>

"Children Pay Price of US Offensive"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7865<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7865>

Patrick McDonell
"Troops Round Up Corpses, Weapons in Falluja"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7909<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7909>

Scott Peterson
"Still Under Fire US forces shifting to Relief Effort"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7883<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7883>

Jackie Spinner
"Falluja Residents Emerge, Find "City of Mosques" in Ruins"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7869<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7869>

Opinions on what the battle of Falluja accomplished vary considerably--from the US military's pronouncement that the battle had broken the back of the Iraqi insurgency, a view echoed by Qasim Daoud, Iraq's interim minister of state for national security, who told a news conference: 'Mission accomplished ... Fallujah has been liberated,' to the belief that the insurgents, most of whom are believed to have left Falluja, will simply fight in other places, at other times.

For a sampling of these opinions, see:

Hadi Yahmid
"US Losses in Falluja to Outweigh Victory:  Expert"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7890<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7890>

Haifa Zangana
"Collective Punishment is Escalating in Iraq"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7913<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7913>

Simon Jenkins
"A Wrecked Nation.  A Desert. A Ghost Town.  And This Will Be Called Victory"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7861<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7861>

Ken Coates
"Fallujah:  Shock and Awe"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7910<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7910>

On November 18, the BBC's website featured one of the most poignant pictures to emerge from Falluja -- a headless Iraqi corpse lying in a street, one arm draped (in protection?) around a dead child who is lying on the corpse.  Clearly, barbarity was and is evident and abundant on both sides in Fallujah (and elsewhere).  And one needs to ask, in judging the depth and level of barbarity, how does a corpse, decapitated by hand, differ from a corpse decapitated by technology?  Indeed, the events of Falluja and elsewhere have led the International Committee of the Red Cross to condemn the "utter contempt for humanity" shown by all sides of the Iraq War.

"Red Cross Condemns Rights Abuses in Iraq"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7924<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7924>

Of course, as anyone who has been following events in Iraq during the last few weeks knows, the resistance to the US occupation took a new and virile form throughout Iraq, but particularly amidst the Sunnis, almost from the day that Fallujah was attacked.  For a recent report on these attacks see:

Edward Wong
"Rebels Keep Up Attacks in Central and North Iraq"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7915<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7915>

The US administration stated that one major reason for the Falluja assault was the need to safeguard Iraq's upcoming January elections.  Now that a date for those elections has been set (January 30), the threat of wide scale boycotts by various Iraqi groups and the continuing chaos occasioned by the resistance to the US occupation have led many observers to question the possibility of "free and democratic" Iraqi elections.

Elizabeth Schrader and Mark Mazzetti
"Chaos in Iraq Imperils Vote"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7917<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7917>

Mazen Ghazi
"Protesting US Raids, 47 Iraqi Bodies Boycott Polls
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7847<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7847>

Edward Wong
"Date for Iraqi Elections; Violence Slows Registration"
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7965<http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=7965>

READ DAHR JAMAIL'S DISPATCHES FROM IRAQ:
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/<http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/>

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