City Of Ghosts
By Ali Fadhil
13 January, 2005
The
Guardian
On November
8, the American army launched its biggest ever assault on the Iraqi
city of Falluja, considered a stronghold for rebel fighters. The US
said the raid had been a huge success, killing 1,200 insurgents. Most
of the city's 300,000 residents, meanwhile, had fled for their lives.
What really happened in the siege of Falluja? In a joint investigation
for the Guardian and Channel 4 News, Iraqi doctor Ali Fadhil compiled
the first independent reports from the devastated city, where he found
scores of unburied corpses, rabid dogs - and a dangerously embittered
population
December 22 2004
It all started at
my house in Baghdad. I packed my equipment, the camera and the tripod.
Tariq, my friend, told me not to take it with us. "The fighters
might search the car and think that we are spies." Tariq was frightened
about our trip, even though he is from Falluja and we had permission
from one group of fighters to enter under their protection. But Tariq,
more than anyone, understands that the fighters are no longer just one
group. He is quite a character, Tariq: 32 and an engineer with a masters
degree in embryo implantation, he works now at a human rights institute
called the Democratic Studies Institute for Human Rights and Democracy
in Baghdad. He is also deeply into animal rights.
Foolishly, I took
a pill to try to keep down the flu, which made me sleepy. It was 9am
when we crossed the main southern gate out of Baghdad, taking care to
stay well clear of American convoys. The southern gate is the scene
of daily attacks on the Americans by the insurgents - either a car-bomb
or an ambush with rocket-propelled grenades.
It took just 20
minutes from Baghdad to reach the area known as the "triangle of
death", where the kidnapped British contractor Kenneth Bigley was
held and finally beheaded in the town of Latifya. It is supposed to
be a US military-controlled zone, but insurgents set up checkpoints
here. As the road became more rural and more isolated, I got nervous
that at any moment we would be stopped by carjackers and robbed of our
expensive equipment. At a checkpoint a hooded face came to the window;
he was carrying an old AK47 on his shoulder and looking for a donation
towards the jihad. There were six fighters in total, all hooded. The
driver and Tariq both made a donation; I was frightened he would search
the car and find the camera, so I gave him my Iraqi doctor's ID card,
hoping that would work. He apologized and asked that we excuse him.
Now, there was nothing
ahead but the sky and the desert. It was 1.30pm and a bad time to use
this road; we had been told that carjackers were particularly active
at this time of day. Tariq pointed out four young men dressed in red,
their two motorbikes parked by the side of the road. They were planting
a small, improvised explosive device made out of a tin of cooking oil
for the next American convoy to leave the base outside Falluja.
It was 3.30pm before
we got to Habbanya, a tourist resort on a lake supplied with fresh water
by the Euphrates, which was once controlled by Uday, Saddam's oldest
son. It was here that Fallujans, who used to be wealthy as they supplied
a lot of the top military for Saddam's army, came for holidays.
Now the place was
freezing, and full of refugees. All the holiday houses were crammed
with people, sometimes two families to a room. The first family we came
across had been there since a month before the attack started. A man
called Abu Rabe'e came up. He was 59 and used to be a builder; he said
he had a message for our camera. "We're not looking for this sort
of democracy, this attacking of the city and the people with planes
and tanks and Humvees." He had also fled Falluja with his family.
They were all living in a former mechanic's garage in Habbanya.
Most of the people
we spoke to in Habbanya were poor and uneducated, and had fled Falluja
in anticipation of the US attack. Some were in tents; others were sharing
the old honeymoon suites where newlyweds used to come when this was
a holiday resort. They squabbled among themselves to persuade me to
film the conditions they were living in. There was still a fairground
in Habbanya, but nothing was working. In the middle of the bumper cars
an old lady had pitched a tent with bricks, where she was living with
her son. I tried to talk to her but she told me to go away. There was
no cooking gas in Habbanya, so the Fallujan refugees were cutting down
trees to keep warm and cook food.
Then someone came
up and said the resistance fighters had heard we were asking questions.
We decided to put the camera away and go to a friendly village that
our driver knew. It was also filled with refugees from Falluja.
One 50-year-old
man, a major in the Iraqi Republican Guards under the former regime,
took us in. There were four families squeezed into one apartment, all
of them once wealthy. The major, like the others, was sacked after the
liberation when the US disbanded the army and police. Now jobless, his
house in Falluja was wrecked and he was a refugee with his five children
and wife near the town where he used to spend his holidays. He was angry
with the Americans, but also with the Iraqi rebels, whom he blamed,
alongside the clerics in the mosques, for causing Falluja to be wrecked.
"The mujahideen
and the clerics are responsible for the destruction that happened to
our city; no one will forgive them for that," he said with bitterness.
"Why are you
blaming them - why don't you blame the Americans and Allawi?" said
Omar, the owner of the apartment.
"We told the
mujahideen to leave it to us ordinary Fallujans, but those bloody bastards,
the sheikhs and the clerics, are busy painting some bloody mad picture
of heaven and martyrs and the victory of the mujahideen," said
Ali, another refugee. "And, of course, the kids believe every word
those clerics say. They're young and naive, and they forget that this
is a war against the might of the machine of the American army. So they
let those kids die like this and our city gets blown up with the wind."
I wanted to ask
the tough old Republican guard why they had let these young muj have
the run of the city, but I actually didn't have to. I remember being
in Falluja just before the fighting started and seeing a crowd gathered
around a sack that was leaking blood. A piece of white A4 paper was
stuck on to the sack, which read: "Here is the body of the traitor.
He has confessed to acting as a spotter for American planes and was
paid $100 a day."
At the same time
as we were standing looking at the sack, I knew I would be able to buy
a CD of the man in this sack making his confession before he was beheaded
in any CD shop in Falluja. These were the people who controlled Falluja
now - not old majors from Saddam's army.
December 24
In the morning we went back towards Falluja and heard that there were
queues of people waiting to try to get back into the city. The government
had made an announcement saying that the people from some districts
could start to go back home; they promised compensation. About midday
we got a mile east of the city and saw that four queues had formed near
the American base. They were mostly men, waiting for US military ID
to allow them back home.
The men were angry:
"This is a humiliation. I say no more than that. These IDs are
to make us bow Fallujan heads in shame," one of them said.
I met Major Paul
Hackett, a marine officer in the Falluja liaison base. He said that
the US military was not trying to humiliate anyone, but that the IDs
were necessary for security. "I mean, my understanding is that
ultimately they can hang this ID card on a wall and keep it as a souvenir,"
he said.
They took prints
of all my fingers, two pictures of my face in profile, and then photographed
my iris. I was now eligible to go into Falluja, just like any other
Fallujan.
But it was late
by then, somewhere near 5pm (the curfew is at 6pm). After that anyone
who moves inside the city will be shot on sight by the US military.
Tomorrow, we would try again to get into the city.
December 25
At around 8am, Tariq and I drove towards Falluja. We didn't believe
that we might actually get into the city.
The American soldiers
at the checkpoint were nervous. The approach to the checkpoint was covered
in pebbles so we had to drive very slowly. The soldiers spent 20 minutes
searching my car, then they bodysearched Tariq and me. They gave me
a yellow tape to put on to the windscreen of the car, showing I had
been searched and was a contractor. If I didn't have this stripe of
yellow, a US sniper would shoot me as an enemy car.
By 10am we were
inside the city. It was completely devastated, destruction everywhere.
It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to be a modern city; now
there was nothing. We spent the day going through the rubble that had
been the center of the city; I didn't see a single building that was
functioning.
The Americans had
put a white tape across the roads to stop people wandering into areas
that they still weren't allowed to enter. I remembered the market from
before the war, when you couldn't walk through it because of the crowds.
Now all the shops were marked with a cross, meaning that they had been
searched and secured by the US military. But the bodies, some of them
civilians and some of them insurgents, were still rotting inside.
There were dead
dogs everywhere in this area, lying in the middle of the streets. Reports
of rabies in Falluja had reached Baghdad, but I needed to find a doctor.
Fallujans are suspicious
of outsiders, so I found it surprising when Nihida Kadhim, a housewife,
beckoned me into her home. She had just arrived back in the city to
check out her house; the government had told the people three days earlier
that they should start going home. She called me into her living room.
On her mirror she pointed to a message that had been written in her
lipstick. She couldn't read English. It said: "Fuck Iraq and every
Iraqi in it!"
"They are insulting
me, aren't they?" she asked.
I left her and walked
towards the cemetery. I noticed the dead dogs again. I had been told
in Baghdad by a friend of mine, Dr Marwan Elawi, that the Baghdad Hospital
for Infectious Diseases admits one case of rabies every week. The problem
is that infected dogs are eating the corpses and spreading the disease.
As I was walking
by the cemetery, I caught the smell of death coming from one of the
houses. The door was open and the first thing I saw was a white car
parked in the driveway and on top of it a launcher for an RPG.
I went inside, and
the sound of the rain on the roof and the darkness inside made me very
afraid. The door was open, all the windows were broken and there were
bullet holes running down the hall to a bathroom at the end - as if
the bullets were chasing something or somebody. The bathroom led on
to a bedroom and I stepped inside and saw the body of a fighter.
The leg was missing,
the hand was missing and the furniture in the house had been destroyed.
I couldn't breathe with the smell. I realized that Tariq wasn't with
me, and I panicked and ran. As I got out of the house I saw a white
teddy bear lying in the rain, and a green boobytrap bomb.
Some of the worst
fighting took place here in the center of the city, but there was no
sign of the 1,200 to 1,600 fighters the Americans said they had killed.
I had heard that there was a graveyard for the fighters somewhere in
the city but people said that most of them had withdrawn from the city
after the first week of fighting. I needed to find one of the insurgents
to tell me the real story of what had happened in the city. The Americans
had said that there had been a big military victory, but I couldn't
understand where all the fighters were buried.
After I saw the
body I felt uncomfortable about sleeping in Falluja. The place was deserted
and polluted with death and all kinds of weapons. Imagine sleeping in
a place where any of the surrounding houses might have one, two or three
bodies. I wanted out.
We went back to
my friend the old Republican guard officer. I was so tired I could hardly
take my clothes off to go to sleep but I couldn't sleep with the smell
of death on my clothes.
December 26
In the morning, I went back to find the cemetery and look for evidence
of the fighters who had been killed. It was about 4pm before I got inside
the martyrs' cemetery; people kept waylaying me, wanting to show me
their destroyed houses and asking why the journalists didn't come and
show what the Americans had done to Falluja. They were also angry at
the interim President Allawi for sending in the mainly Shia National
Guard to help the Americans.
At the entrance
to the fighters' graveyard a sign read: "This cemetery is being
given by the people of Falluja to the heroic martyrs of the battle against
the Americans and to the martyrs of the jihadi operations against the
Americans, assigned and approved by the Mujahideen Shura council in
Falluja."
As I went into the
graveyard, the bodies of two young men were arriving. The faces were
rotting. The ambulance driver lifted the bones of one of the hands;
the skin had rotted away. "God is the greatest. What kind of times
are we living through that we are holding the bones and hands of our
brothers?"
Then he began cursing
the National Guard, calling them even worse things than the Americans:
"Those bastards, those sons of dogs." It wasn't the first
time I had heard this. It was the National Guard the Americans used
to search the houses; they were seen by the Fallujans as brutal stooges.
Most of the volunteers for the National Guard are poor Shias from the
south. They are jobless and desperate enough to volunteer for a job
that makes them assassination targets. "National infidels",
they were also called.
I counted the graves:
there were 74. The two young men made it 76. The names on the headstones
were written in chalk and some had been washed away. One read: "Here
lies the heroic Tunisian martyr who died", but I didn't see any
other evidence of the hundreds of foreign fighters that the US had said
were using Falluja as their headquarters. People told me there were
some Yemenis and Saudis, some volunteers from Tunisia and Egypt, but
most of the fighters were Fallujan. The US military say they have hundreds
of bodies frozen in a potato chip factory 5km south of the city, but
nobody has been allowed to go there in the past two months, including
the Red Crescent.
Salman Hashim was
crying beside the grave of his son, who had been a fighter in Falluja.
"He is 18 years
old. He wanted to be a doctor or engineer after this year; it was his
last year in high school." At the same grave, the boy's mother
was crying and remembering her dead son, who was called Ahmed. "I
blame Ayad Allawi. If I could I would cut his throat into pieces."
Then, to the mound of earth covering her son's body, she said: "I
told you those fighters would get you killed." The boy's father
told her to be quiet in front of the camera.
On the next grave
was written the name of a woman called Harbyah. She had refused to leave
the city for the camps with her family. One of her relatives was standing
by her grave. He said that he found her dead in her bed with at least
20 bullets in her body.
I saw other rotting
bodies that showed no signs of being fighters. In one house in the market
there were four bodies inside the guest room. One of the bodies had
its chest and part of its stomach opened, as if the dogs had been eating
it. The wrists were missing, the flesh of the arm was missing, and parts
of the legs.
I tried to figure
out who these four men were. It was obvious which houses the fighters
were in: they were totally destroyed. But in this house there were no
bullets in the walls, just four dead men lying curled up beside each
other, with bullet holes in the mosquito nets that covered the windows.
It seemed to me as if they had been asleep and were shot through the
windows. It is the young men of the family who are usually given the
job of staying behind to guard the house. This is the way in Iraq -
we never leave the house empty. The four men were sleeping the way we
sleep when we have guests - we roll out the best carpet in the guest
room and the men lie down beside each other.
"Its Abu Faris's
house. I think that the fat dead body belongs to his son, Faris,"
said Abu Salah, whose chip shop was also destroyed in the bombing.
It was getting dark
and it was time to go, but I needed some overview shots of the city.
There was a half-built tower, so I climbed it and looked around. I couldn't
see a single building that hadn't been hit.
After a few minutes
I got the sense that this wasn't a good place for me to be hanging around,
but I had to pee urgently. I found a place on the roof of the building.
While I was doing that a warning shot passed so close to my head that
I ducked and didn't even wait to pull up my zip, but ran to the half-destroyed
stairs to climb down the building. I felt as if the American sniper
was playing with me; he had had plenty of time to kill me if he wanted
to.
For the rest of
the day people were pulling on me to come and see their houses. Again,
they asked where all the journalists were. Why were they not coming
to report on what has happened in Falluja? But I have worked with journalists
for 18 months and I knew it would be too dangerous for them to come
to the city, that they are seen as spies and could end up in a sack.
So since I was the only one there with a camera, everyone wanted to
show me what happened to their house. It took hours.
Back in Baghdad
that night, I changed my clothes and decided to send them to the public
laundry. I was worried about contaminating my family with Falluja. I
was thinking that nobody was going to be able to live there for months.
Then, I took a very long bath.
December 27
I woke up at home in Baghdad around 9am. I had had enough of Falluja,
but I still felt that I didn't understand what had happened. The city
was completely devastated - but where were the bodies of all the dead
fighters the Americans had killed?
I wanted to ask
Dr Adnan Chaichan about the wounded. I found him at the main hospital
in Falluja at midday. He told me that all the doctors and medical staff
were locked into the hospital at the beginning of the attack and not
allowed out to treat anyone. The Iraqi National Guard, acting under
US orders, had tied him and all the other doctors up inside the main
hospital. The US had surrounded the hospital, while the National Guard
had seized all their mobile phones and satellite phones, and left them
with no way of communicating with the outside world. Chaichan seemed
angrier with the National Guards than with anyone else.
He said that the
phone lines inside the town were working, so wounded people in Falluja
were calling the hospital and crying, and he was trying to give instructions
over the phone to the local clinics and the mosques on how to treat
the wounds. But nobody could get to the main hospital where all the
supplies were and people were bleeding to death in the city.
It was late afternoon
when I drove out of Falluja and back to Baghdad, feeling that I had
just scratched the surface of what really happened there. But it is
clear that by completely destroying this Sunni city, with the help of
a mostly Shia National Guard, the US military has fanned the seeds of
a civil war that is definitely coming. If there are elections now and
the Shia win, that war is certain. The people I spoke to had no plans
to vote. No one I met in those five days had a ballot paper.
A week after I arrived
in London to make the film for Channel 4 News, the tape of the final
interview arrived by Federal Express. It was the interview with Alzaim
Abu, who had led the fighters in the Shuhada district of Falluja and
fought the Americans in the early battles in the city center We had
been been trying to track him down for nearly three weeks. Then Tariq
had got a call from him the night I had left for London saying that
he would talk.
There was a lot
of bullshit in the interview; lots of bravado about how many Americans
they had killed and about never surrendering and how Fallujans would
win. He said that there were a few foreign fighters in the city, but
none in his units; mostly, they were Fallujans.
But one thing stood
out for me that explained the empty graveyard and the lack of bodies.
He said that most of the fighters had been given orders to abandon the
city by November 17, nine days after the assault began. "The withdrawal
of the fighters was carried out following an order by our senior leadership.
We did not pull out because we did not want to fight. We needed to regroup;
it was a tactical move. The fighters decided to redeploy to Amiriya
and some went to Abu Ghraib," he said.
The US military
destroyed Falluja, but simply spread the fighters out around the country.
They also increased the chance of civil war in Iraq by using their new
national guard of Shias to suppress Sunnis. Once, when a foreign journalist,
an Irish guy, asked me whether I was Shia or Sunni - the way the Irish
do because they have that thing about the IRA - I said I was Sushi.
My father is Sunni and my mother is Shia. I never cared about these
things. Now, after Falluja, it matters.
© Copyright
2005 Guardian Newspapers