[Marxism] What I saw in Fallujah

[Horacio Oliveira]

http://www.newstatesman.com/200711010031

What I saw in Fallujah
Dahr Jamail

Published 01 November 2007

Dahr Jamail set out to report the truth about the US invasion of Iraq  
and its terrible impact on daily life. Determined to remain  
independent of the army, he embedded himself instead with the Iraqi  
people


On the day martial law was declared, US tanks began rolling into the  
outskirts of Fallujah, while war planes continued to pound the city  
with as many as 50,000 residents still inside. Iyad Allawi, the US- 
installed interim prime minister, laid out the six steps for  
implementing his "security law". These entailed a 6pm curfew in  
Fallujah, the blocking of all highways except for emergencies and for  
government vehicles, the closure of all city and government services,  
a ban on all weapons in Fallujah, the closure of Iraq's borders with  
Syria and Jordan (except to allow passage to food trucks and vehicles  
carrying other necessary goods), and the closure of Baghdad  
International Airport for 48 hours.

Meanwhile, in the US, most corporate media outlets were busy spreading  
the misinformation that Fallujah had fallen under the control of the  
Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There was no available  
evidence that Zarqawi had ever set foot inside the city. It was amply  
evident that the resistance in the city was composed primarily of  
people from Fallujah itself. However, that did not deter the  
establishment media, which portrayed the assault on the city as a  
hostage intervention situation.

As they had done during the April siege, the military raided and  
occupied Fallujah general hospital, cutting it off from the rest of  
the city. On 8 November 2004 the New York Times reported, "The assault  
against Fallujah began here Sunday night as American Special Forces  
and Iraqi troops burst into Fallujah General Hospital and seized it  
within an hour." Of course, this information was immediately followed  
by the usual parroting of US military propaganda, "At 10pm, Iraqi  
troops clambered off seven-ton trucks, sprinting with American Special  
Forces soldiers around the side of the main building of the hospital,  
considered a refuge for insurgents and a centre of propaganda against  
allied forces, entering the complex to bewildered looks from patients  
and employees."

Harb al-Mukhtar, my interpreter and driver, arrived at my hotel the  
next morning in a sombre mood. "How can we live like this, we are  
trapped in our own country. You know Dahr, everyone is praying for God  
to take revenge on the Americans. Everyone!" He said even in their  
private prayers people were praying for God to take vengeance on the  
Americans for what they were doing in Fallujah. "Everyone I've talked  
to the last couple of nights, 80 or 90 people, have admitted that they  
are doing this," he said as I collected my camera and notepad to  
prepare to leave. Out on the streets of Baghdad, the anxiety was  
palpable. The threat of being kidnapped or car bombed, or simply  
robbed, relentlessly played on our minds as Harb and I went about  
conducting interviews that had been prearranged. We tried to minimise  
our time on the streets by returning to my hotel immediately on  
completing interviews. The security situation, already horrible, was  
deteriorating further with each passing day.

That night, when Salam Talib arrived at my hotel to work on a radio  
despatch with me, he had a wild look in his eyes and sweat beads on  
his forehead. "My friend has just been killed, and he was one of my  
best friends," he said staring out my window. Salam went on to tell me  
that a relative of another of his friends had been missing for six  
days. "This morning, his body was brought to his family by someone who  
found it on the road. The body had been shot twice in the chest and  
twice in the head. There were visible signs of torture, and the four  
bullet shells that were used to kill him had been placed in his  
trouser pockets. This news has driven me crazy, Dahr. The number of  
people killed here is growing so fast every day," he said, his hands  
raised in that familiar gesture of despair. "When I was a child, it  
was common to have some family member who was killed in the war with  
Iran. But now, it feels as though everyone is dying every day."

Not yet one full week into the latest assault on Fallujah, the flames  
of resistance had engulfed much of Baghdad and other areas in Iraq. In  
Baghdad alone, neighbourhoods like Amiriyah, Abu Ghraib, Adhamiya and  
al-Dora had fallen mostly under the control of the resistance. In  
these areas, and much of the rest of Baghdad, US patrols were few and  
far between, since they were being attacked so often. People we  
interviewed showed no surprise at fighting having rapidly spread  
across other cities. It was expected, because the general belief was  
that the resistance had fled Fallujah prior to the siege. Most of the  
fighters had melted away to other areas to choose effective methods to  
strike the enemy. Fighting had thus spread across much of Baghdad,  
Baquba, Latafiya, Ramadi, Samarra, Mosul, Khaldiya and Kirkuk just  
days into Operation Phantom Fury.


Media repression

Media repression during the second siege of Fallujah was intense. The  
"100 Orders" penned by former US administrator Bremer included Order  
65, passed on 20 March 2004, which established an Iraqi communications  
and media commission. This commission had powers to control the media  
because it had complete control over licensing and regulating  
telecommunications, broadcasting, information services, and media  
establishments. On 28 June, when the US handed over power to a  
"sovereign" Iraqi interim government, Bremer simply passed on his  
authority to Iyad Allawi, who had long-standing ties with the British  
intelligence service MI6 and the CIA. The media commission sent out an  
order just after the assault on Fallujah commenced ordering news  
organisations to "stick to the government line on the US-led offensive  
in Fallujah or face legal action". The warning was circulated on  
Allawi's letterhead. The letter also asked the media in Iraq to "set  
aside space in your news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi  
government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear".

On the ground, aside from the notorious bombing and then banning of al- 
Jazeera, other instances of media repression were numerous. A  
journalist for the al-Arabiya network, who attempted to get inside  
Fallujah, was detained by the military, as was a French freelance  
photographer named Corentin Fleury, who was staying at my hotel.  
Fleury, a soft-spoken, wiry man, was detained by the US military along  
with his interpreter, 28-year-old Bahktiyar Abdulla Hadad, when they  
were leaving Fallujah just before the siege of the city began. They  
had worked in the city for nine days leading up to the siege, and were  
held for five days in a military detention facility outside the city.

"They were very nervous and they asked us what we had seen, and looked  
through all my photos, asking me questions about them," he said as we  
talked in my room one night. He told me he had photographed homes  
destroyed by US war planes. Despite appeals by the French government  
to the US military to free his translator and return Fleury's  
confiscated camera equipment and his photos, there had been no luck in  
attaining either. (When I had last seen Fleury in February 2005, Hadad  
was still being held by the US military.)

The military was maintaining a strict cordon around most of Fallujah.  
As I could not enter the city, I set out to interview doctors and  
patients who had fled and were presently working in various hospitals  
around Baghdad. While visiting Yarmouk Hospital looking for more  
information about Fallujah, I came across several children from areas  
south of Baghdad. One of these was a 12-year-old girl, Fatima Harouz,  
from Latifiya. She lay dazed in a crowded hospital room, limply waving  
her bruised arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US  
soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, were  
both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red  
fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another  
bullet. Her mother told us, "They attacked our home, and there weren't  
even any resistance fighters in our area."


Victims' testament

Fatima's uncle was shot and killed, his wife had been wounded, and  
their home was ransacked by soldiers. "Before they left, they killed  
all our chickens." A doctor who was with us looked at me and asked,  
"This is the freedom. In their Disneyland are there kids just like  
this?"

Another young woman, Rana Obeidy, had been walking home in Baghdad  
with her brother two nights earlier. She assumed the soldiers had shot  
her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda. She had  
a chest wound where a bullet had grazed her, but had struck her little  
brother and killed him. In another room, a small boy from Fallujah lay  
on his stomach. Shrapnel from a grenade thrown into his home by a US  
soldier had entered his body through his back and was implanted near  
his kidney. An operation had successfully removed the shrapnel, but  
his father had been killed by what his mother described as "the  
haphazard shooting of the Americans". The boy, Amin, lay in his bed  
vacillating between crying with pain and playing with his toy car.

Later, I found myself at a small but busy supply centre in Baghdad set  
up to distribute goods to refugees from Fallujah. Standing in an old,  
one-storey building that used to be a vegetable market, I watched as  
people walked around wearily to obtain basic foodstuffs, blankets or  
information about housing. "They kicked all the journalists out of  
Fallujah so they could do whatever they want," said Kassem Mohammed  
Ahmed, who had escaped from Fallujah three days before. "The first  
thing they did was bomb the hospitals because that is where the  
wounded have to go. Now we see that wounded people are in the street  
and the soldiers are rolling their tanks over them. This happened so  
many times. What you see on the TV is nothing. That is just one  
camera. What you cannot see is much more."

There were also stories of soldiers not discriminating between  
civilians and resistance fighters. Another man, Abdul Razaq Ismail,  
had arrived from Fallujah one week earlier and had been helping with  
the distribution of supplies to other refugees, having received  
similar help himself. Loading a box with blankets to send to a refugee  
camp, he said, "There are dead bodies on the ground and nobody can  
bury them. The Americans are dropping some of the bodies into the  
Euphrates River near Fallujah. They are pulling some bodies with tanks  
and leaving them at the soccer stadium." Another man sat nearby  
nodding his head. He couldn't stop crying. After a while, he said he  
wanted to talk to us. "They bombed my neighbourhood and we used car  
jacks to raise the blocks of concrete to get dead children out from  
under them."

Another refugee, Abu Sabah, an older man in a torn shirt and dusty  
pants, told of how he escaped with his family, just the day before,  
while soldiers shot bullets over their heads, killing his cousin.  
"They used these weird bombs that first put up smoke in a cloud, and  
then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind  
them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burned for  
half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. When anyone  
touched those fires, their body burned for hours."

This was the first time I had heard a refugee describing the use of  
white phosphorous incendiary weapons by the US military, fired from  
artillery into Fallujah. Though it is not technically a banned weapon,  
it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to use white phosphorous  
in an area where civilians may be hit. I heard similar descriptions in  
the coming days and weeks, both from refugees and doctors who had fled  
the city.

Several doctors I interviewed had told me they had been instructed by  
the interim government not to speak to any journalists about the  
patients they were receiving from Fallujah. A few of them told me they  
had even been instructed by the Shia-controlled Ministry of Health not  
to accept patients from Fallujah.

That night I interviewed a spokesman for the Iraq Red Crescent, who  
told me none of their relief teams had been allowed into Fallujah, and  
the military said it would be at least two more weeks before any  
refugees would be allowed back into their city. Collecting information  
from doctors in the city, he had estimated that at least 800 civilians  
had been killed so far in the siege.

The second assault on Fallujah was a monument to brutality and  
atrocity made in the United States of America. Like the Spanish city  
of Guernica during the 1930s, and Grozny in the 1990s, Fallujah is our  
monument of excess and overkill. It was soon to become, even for many  
in the US military, a textbook case of the wrong way to handle a  
resistance movement. Another case of winning the battle and losing the  
war.


Conquerors' truth

I would like to say that I decided to go to Iraq for philosophical  
reasons, because I believe that an informed citizenry is the bedrock  
of any healthy democracy. But I went to Iraq for personal reasons. I  
was tormented by the fact that the government of my country illegally  
invaded and then occupied a country that it had bombed in 1991.  
Because the government of my country had asphyxiated Iraq with more  
than a decade's worth of "genocidal" sanctions (in the words of former  
United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday). The  
government of my country then told lies, which were obediently  
repeated by an unquestioning media in order to justify the invasion  
and occupation. I felt that I had blood on my hands because the  
government had been left unchecked.

My going to Iraq was an act of desperation that has since transformed  
itself into a bond to that country and so many of her people. There  
were stories there that begged to be heard and told again. We are  
defined by story. Our history, our memory, our perceptions of the  
future, are all built and held within stories. As a US citizen  
complicit in the devastation of Iraq, I was already bound up in the  
story of that country. I decided to go to learn what that story really  
was.

While the vast majority of the reporting of Iraq was provided by  
journalists availing themselves of the Pentagon-sponsored "embed"  
programme, I chose to look for stories of real life and "embed"myself  
with the Iraqi people. The US military side of the occupation is  
overly represented by most mainstream outlets. I consciously decided  
to focus on the Iraqi side of the story. The story of the many  
oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who  
oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written  
down by the conquerors.

The above is extracted from "Beyond the Green Zone: Despatches From an  
Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq" (Haymarket Books, £13.99),  
which is available from 8 November