Fallujah In
Ruins And
Unknown Numbers Dead
By James Cogan
11 November 2004
World
Socialist Website
The
US assault on Fallujah is a criminal and barbaric operation. The descriptions
of the thrust through Fallujahs northern suburbs make clear the
city is being destroyed, and its poorly-armed defenders slaughtered,
by 10,000 American soldiers over whom all moral constraints have been
lifted.
A Christian Science
Monitor journalist embedded with a marine unit wrote Wednesday: Every
vehicle is treated as a potential car bomb and every person as a possible
enemy. Approval even came over the radio to shoot dogs with shotguns,
to prevent them carrying explosives.
As the American
forces advanced into the city, a Chicago Tribune journalist reported
that a psychological operations unit trailed behind, blaring out Wagners
Ride of the Valkyriesthe music used by film director
Francis Ford Coppola to accompany the scene in Apocalypse Now in which
US troops massacre civilians in a Vietnamese village.
Iraqi fighters in
Fallujahs north were overwhelmed by the firepower and the murderous
tactics of the US military. While American infantry waited a safe distance
away, jets, helicopters, tanks and other armoured vehicles pounded the
buildings ahead of them with rockets, shells and heavy-calibre machine-guns
to clear them of any defenders. Explosive coil designed to clear mine-fields
was fired down city streets and detonated. Artillery bombarded residential
areas with phosphorous rounds, which explode into a fireball that cannot
be put out with water. No attempt has been made by the US military to
avoid civilian casualties.
Iraqi journalist
Fadil al-Badrani, reporting for Reuters from Fallujah, recounted on
Tuesday: Every minute, hundreds of bombs and shells are exploding...
The north of the city is in flames. I can see fire and smoke. Fallujah
has become like hell...
Electricity
is cut off because of damage to the main power station from the bombardment.
The water supply has been cut off too. People, particularly children
and women, tend to stay at home, fearing being mistaken for a military
target.
On Wednesday, Badrani
reported to Al Jazeerah that almost half of the citys
120 mosques have been destroyed after being targeted by US air
and tank strikes.
According to the
New York Times correspondents, more than half the houses in the
northern suburbs of Jolan and Askeri have been destroyed. They reported
Wednesday: Dead bodies were scattered on the streets and narrow
alleys of Jolan, one of Fallujahs oldest neighborhoods. Blood
and flesh were splattered on the walls of some of the houses, witnesses
said, and the streets were full of holes.
Other reports by
journalists embedded with US units include references to five-storey
apartment complexes and hospitals being raked with tank fire and heavy
machine-guns, after Iraqi fighters engaged US troops from them. Women
and boys as young as 12 are among those who have taken up arms to defend
their city against the invasion force.
The contrast between
the firepower being unleashed by the US military and the capacity of
the Iraqis to fight back was graphically contained in a report by the
Los Angeles Times on the capture of the Al Hadra al-Muhammadiya mosque,
the focus of the popular resistance in Fallujah to the US occupation
of Iraq.
A marine captain
told the newspaper: This is the nerve centre of the resistanceand
were here. The weapons found in the nerve centre
consisted of only rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), AK-47s, obsolete
rifles, materials for homemade bombs and improvised blasting caps.
How many people
in Fallujah have been killed in the inferno of bombs, bullets, collapsing
buildings and fire is not known, and may not be known for weeks or months.
By the US militarys own estimate though, between 100,000 and 150,000
civilians were still in the city before it began its rampage.
A Marine Corp spokesman
declared on Wednesday that the US military has no information
of anyone [civilians] being hurt. The only conclusion that can
be drawn is that they are not looking for such information. A Fallujah
resident told the British Guardian by phone: People cannot reach
the clinics or the hospital and there are many wounded people. Most
people are staying in their houses... There are a lot of people dead
who I saw with my own eyes.
As the assault progresses
and it is clear that the US military is treating the entire population
as a target, the Bush administration has abandoned its cynical propaganda
that the city was being attacked to liberate it from foreign
terrorists headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi before elections are held
in January.
An unnamed military
official in Washington told the New York Times: The important
idea to consider is that this is not an operation against Zarqawi and
his network. It is just one of the many steps that need to be taken
in order to defeat a complex and diverse insurgency, in which the Zarqawi
network is but one element. US generals and officials are now
stating it is likely Zarqawi and the foreign terrorists
have left Fallujahwithout providing any evidence to refute the
claims of the Fallujah resistance leaders that they were never in the
city in the first place.
The US media, which
dutifully reported every airstrike on Fallujah over the past five months
as a precision strike on Zarqawi safehouses, has barely
commented on the shifting rationale for the attack on the city. It can
be predicted with virtual certainty, however, that it will prominently
report US military claims that Zarqawi has surfaced in Ramadi,
Samarra, Baquaba or whichever is the next Iraqi city slated for destruction.
The savagery in
Fallujah is the real face of the US occupation of Iraq. The claim by
the Bush administration that the slaughter taking place in the city
will facilitate democratic elections in January is obscene.
Fallujah is being razed to the ground as part of a perspective of killing
or driving underground every voice of opposition to the US presence
in the country. The only participants in any elections will be the venal
pro-occupation organisations that joined the puppet Iraqi interim government
headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
The occupation of
Iraq will not give rise to democracy, but a pro-US police-state
that sanctions the indefinite presence of American troops and the looting
of the countrys oil resources by American corporations. Allawi,
the intended head of such a regime, is earning the nickname that Iraqis
have given himSaddam without the moustache. Already
accused of personally murdering prisoners, he has invoked martial law
across most of the entire country and requested that the US military
conduct bloody offensives against the resistance in as many as 21 other
Iraqi cities and towns. On Tuesday night, Allawi rejected outright an
appeal for a four- or five-hour truce in Fallujah so that the injured
and noncombatants could be evacuated from the city.
The fighting in
Fallujah is continuing in the southern suburbs and is likely to rage
for days to come. The conquest of the city, however, will have the opposite
effect to that intended by the Bush administration and the US military.
Far from weakening or intimidating the opposition to the occupation,
resistance groups have already stepped up their attacks throughout the
predominantly Sunni Muslim regions of central and northern Iraq. Clashes
between US troops and guerillas have taken place over the past 48 hours
in Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi, and other smaller towns.
The reports of occupation
casualties are climbing as a result, even without accurate figures on
the number of American dead and wounded in Fallujah. So far in November,
30 US troops have been confirmed killed in action, as well as four members
of the British Black Watch regiment that the Blair government made available
to the US military for the Fallujah operation.