Fallujah Hell

Falluja: A Symbol of Wanton Murder, Destruction And Brutality
Wed, 27 Apr 2005 14:07:42 -0500
Summary:

By Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail
Republished from The Guardian/dahrjamailiraq.com
This is our Guernica - Ruined, cordoned Falluja is emerging as the decade's monument to brutality.

Robert Zoellick is the archetypal US government insider, a man with a
brilliant technical mind but zero experience of any coalface or war
front. Sliding effortlessly between ivy league academia, the US treasury
and corporate boardrooms (including an advisory post with the scandalous
Enron), his latest position is the number-two slot at the state department.

Yet this ultimate “man of the suites” did something earlier this month
that put the prime minister and the foreign secretary to shame. On their
numerous visits to Iraq, neither has ever dared to go outside the
heavily fortified green zones of Baghdad and Basra to see life as Iraqis
have to live it. They come home after photo opportunities, briefings and
pep talks with British troops and claim to know what is going on in the
country they invaded, when in fact they have seen almost nothing.

Zoellick, by contrast, on his first trip to Iraq, asked to see Falluja.
Remember Falluja? A city of some 300,000, which was alleged to be the
stronghold of armed resistance to the occupation.

Two US attempts were made to destroy this symbol of defiance last year.
The first, in April, fizzled out after Iraqi politicians, including many
who supported the invasion of their country, condemned the use of air
strikes to terrorise an entire city. The Americans called off the
attack, but not before hundreds of families had fled and more than 600
people had been killed.

Six months later the Americans tried again. This time Washington’s
allies had been talked to in advance. Consistent US propaganda about the
presence in Falluja of a top al-Qaida figure, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was
used to create a climate of acquiescence in the US-appointed Iraqi
government. Shia leaders were told that bringing Falluja under control
was the only way to prevent a Sunni-inspired civil war.

Blair was invited to share responsibility by sending British troops to
block escape routes from Falluja and prevent supplies entering once the
siege began.

Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja’s
300,000 people to flee. The city was then declared a free-fire zone on
the grounds that the only people left behind must be “terrorists”.

Three weeks after the attack was launched last November, the Americans
claimed victory. They say they killed about 1,300 people; one week into
the siege, a BBC reporter put the unofficial death toll at 2,000. But
details of what happened and who the dead were remain obscure. Were many
unarmed civilians, as Baghdad-based human rights groups report? Even if
they were trying to defend their homes by fighting the Americans, does
that make them “terrorists”?

Journalists “embedded” with US forces filmed atrocities, including the
killing of a wounded prisoner, but no reporter could get anything like a
full picture. Since the siege ended, tight US restric tions – as well as
the danger of hostage-taking that prevents reporters from travelling in
most parts of Iraq – have put the devastated city virtually off limits.

In this context Zoellick’s trip, which was covered by a small group of
US journalists, was illuminating. The deputy secretary of state had to
travel to this “liberated” city in a Black Hawk helicopter flying low
over palm trees to avoid being shot down. He wore a flak jacket under
his suit even though Falluja’s streets were largely deserted. His convoy
of eight armoured vehicles went “so quickly past an open-air bakery
reopened with a US-provided micro-loan that workers tossing dough could
be glanced only in the blink of an eye,” as the Washington Post
reported. “Blasted husks of buildings still line block after block,” the
journalist added.

Meeting hand-picked Iraqis in a US base, Zoellick was bombarded with
complaints about the pace of US reconstruction aid and frequent
intimidation of citizens by American soldiers. Although a state
department factsheet claimed 95% of residents had water in their homes,
Falluja’s mayor said it was contaminated by sewage and unsafe.

Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of
the city’s compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were
destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries
and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.

Daud Salman, an Iraqi journalist with the Institute for War and Peace
Reporting, on a visit to Falluja two weeks ago, found that only a
quarter of the city’s residents had gone back. Thousands remain in tents
on the outskirts. The Iraqi Red Crescent finds it hard to go in to help
the sick because of the US cordon around the city.

Burhan Fasa’a, a cameraman for the Lebanese Broadcasting Company,
reported during the siege that dead family members were buried in their
gardens because people could not leave their homes. Refugees told one of
us that civilians carrying white flags were gunned down by American
soldiers. Corpses were tied to US tanks and paraded around like trophies.

Justin Alexander, a volunteer for Christian Peacemaker Teams, recently
found hundreds living in tents in the grounds of their homes, or in a
single patched-up room. A strict system of identity cards blocks access
to anyone whose papers give a birthplace outside Falluja, so long-term
residents born elsewhere cannot go home. “Fallujans feel the remnants of
their city have been turned into a giant prison,” he reports.

Many complain that soldiers of the Iraqi national guard, the fledgling
new army, loot shops during the night-time curfew and detain people in
order to take a bribe for their release. They are suspected of being
members of the Badr Brigade, a Shia militia that wants revenge against
Sunnis.

One thing is certain: the attack on Falluja has done nothing to still
the insurgency against the US-British occupation nor produced the death
of al-Zarqawi – any more than the invasion of Afghanistan achieved the
capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Thousands of bereaved and homeless
Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies.

At least Zoellick went to see. He gave no hint of the impression that
the trip left him with, but is too smart not to have understood
something of the reality. The lesson ought not to be lost on Blair and
Straw. Every time the prime minister claims it is time to “move on” from
the issue of the war’s legality and rejoice at Iraq’s transformation
since Saddam Hussein was toppled, the answer must be: “Remember
Falluja.” When the foreign secretary next visits Iraq, he should put on
a flak jacket and tour the city that Britain had a share in destroying.

The government keeps hoping Iraq will go away as an election issue. It
stubbornly refuses to do so. Voters are not only angry that the war was
illegal, illegitimate and unnecessary. The treatment inflicted on Iraqis
since the invasion by the US and Britain is equally important.

In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton
murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the
Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade’s unforgettable monument
to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to
handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will
always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.

Jonathan Steele is the Guardian’s senior foreign correspondent; Dahr
Jamail is a freelance American journalist.