How The U.S.
Murdered Fallujah
By Salam Ismael
18 February, 2005
Socialist
Worker
It
was the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to describe,
and one that will never leave me. It was the smell of death. Hundreds
of corpses were decomposing in the houses, gardens and streets of Fallujah.
Bodies were rotting where they had fallen-bodies of men, women and children,
many half-eaten by wild dogs.
A wave of hate had
wiped out two-thirds of the town, destroying houses and mosques, schools
and clinics. This was the terrible and frightening power of the US military
assault.
The accounts I heard
over the next few days will live with me forever. You may think you
know what happened in Fallujah. But the truth is worse than you could
possibly have imagined.
In Saqlawiya, one
of the makeshift refugee camps that surround Fallujah, we found a 17
year old woman. "I am Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Jolan district
of Fallujah," she told me. "Five of us, including a 55 year
old neighbour, were trapped together in our house in Fallujah when the
siege began.
"On 9 November
American marines came to our house. My father and the neighbour went
to the door to meet them. We were not fighters. We thought we had nothing
to fear. I ran into the kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going
to enter our house and it would be wrong for them to see me with my
hair uncovered. "This saved my life. As my father and neighbour
approached the door, the Americans opened fire on them. They died instantly.
"Me and my
13 year old brother hid in the kitchen behind the fridge. The soldiers
came into the house and caught my older sister. They beat her. Then
they shot her. But they did not see me. Soon they left, but not before
they had destroyed our furniture and stolen the money from my father's
pocket."
Hudda told me how
she comforted her dying sister by reading verses from the Koran. After
four hours her sister died. For three days Hudda and her brother stayed
with their murdered relatives. But they were thirsty and had only a
few dates to eat. They feared the troops would return and decided to
try to flee the city. But they were spotted by a US sniper.
Hudda was shot in
the leg, her brother ran but was shot in the back and died instantly.
"I prepared myself to die," she told me. "But I was found
by an American woman soldier, and she took me to hospital." She
was eventually reunited with the surviving members of her family.
I also found survivors
of another family from the Jolan district. They told me that at the
end of the second week of the siege the US troops swept through the
Jolan. The Iraqi National Guard used loudspeakers to call on people
to get out of the houses carrying white flags, bringing all their belongings
with them. They were ordered to gather outside near the Jamah al-Furkan
mosque in the centre of town.
On 12 November Eyad
Naji Latif and eight members of his family-one of them a six month old
child-gathered their belongings and walked in single file, as instructed,
to the mosque.
When they reached
the main road outside the mosque they heard a shout, but they could
not understand what was being shouted. Eyad told me it could have been
"now" in English. Then the firing began. US soldiers appeared
on the roofs of surrounding houses and opened fire. Eyad's father was
shot in the heart and his mother in the chest.
They died instantly.
Two of Eyad's brothers were also hit, one in the chest and one in the
neck. Two of the women were hit, one in the hand and one in the leg.
Then the snipers killed the wife of one of Eyad's brothers. When she
fell her five year old son ran to her and stood over her body. They
shot him dead too. Survivors made desperate appeals to the troops to
stop firing.
But Eyad told me
that whenever one of them tried to raise a white flag they were shot.
After several hours he tried to raise his arm with the flag. But they
shot him in the arm. Finally he tried to raise his hand. So they shot
him in the hand.
The five survivors,
including the six month old child, lay in the street for seven hours.
Then four of them crawled to the nearest home to find shelter. The next
morning the brother who was shot in the neck also managed to crawl to
safety. They all stayed in the house for eight days, surviving on roots
and one cup of water, which they saved for the baby. On the eighth day
they were discovered by some members of the Iraqi National Guard and
taken to hospital in Fallujah. They heard the Americans were arresting
any young men, so the family fled the hospital and finally obtained
treatment in a nearby town.
They do not know
in detail what happened to the other families who had gone to the mosque
as instructed. But they told me the street was awash with blood. I had
come to Fallujah in January as part of a humanitarian aid convoy funded
by donations from Britain.
Our small convoy
of trucks and vans brought 15 tons of flour, eight tons of rice, medical
aid and 900 pieces of clothing for the orphans. We knew that thousands
of refugees were camped in terrible conditions in four camps on the
outskirts of town.
There we heard the
accounts of families killed in their houses, of wounded people dragged
into the streets and run over by tanks, of a container with the bodies
of 481 civilians inside, of premeditated murder, looting and acts of
savagery and cruelty that beggar belief.
Through the ruins
That is why we decided to go into Fallujah and investigate. When we
entered the town I almost did not recognise the place where I had worked
as a doctor in April 2004, during the first siege.
We found people
wandering like ghosts through the ruins. Some were looking for the bodies
of relatives. Others were trying to recover some of their possessions
from destroyed homes.
Here and there,
small knots of people were queuing for fuel or food. In one queue some
of the survivors were fighting over a blanket.
I remember being
approached by an elderly woman, her eyes raw with tears. She grabbed
my arm and told me how her house had been hit by a US bomb during an
air raid. The ceiling collapsed on her 19 year old son, cutting off
both his legs.
She could not get
help. She could not go into the streets because the Americans had posted
snipers on the roofs and were killing anyone who ventured out, even
at night.
She tried her best
to stop the bleeding, but it was to no avail. She stayed with him, her
only son, until he died. He took four hours to die.
Fallujah's main
hospital was seized by the US troops in the first days of the siege.
The only other clinic, the Hey Nazzal, was hit twice by US missiles.
Its medicines and medical equipment were all destroyed. There were no
ambulances-the two ambulances that came to help the wounded were shot
up and destroyed by US troops.
We visited houses
in the Jolan district, a poor working class area in the north western
part of the city that had been the centre of resistance during the April
siege.
This quarter seemed
to have been singled out for punishment during the second siege. We
moved from house to house, discovering families dead in their beds,
or cut down in living rooms or in the kitchen. House after house had
furniture smashed and possessions scattered.
In some places we
found bodies of fighters, dressed in black and with ammunition belts.
But in most of the
houses, the bodies were of civilians. Many were dressed in housecoats,
many of the women were not veiled-meaning there were no men other than
family members in the house. There were no weapons, no spent cartridges.
It became clear
to us that we were witnessing the aftermath of a massacre, the cold-blooded
butchery of helpless and defenceless civilians.
Nobody knows how
many died. The occupation forces are now bulldozing the neighbourhoods
to cover up their crime. What happened in Fallujah was an act of barbarity.
The whole world must be told the truth.
Dr Salam Ismael,
now 28 years old, was head of junior doctors in Baghdad before the invasion
of Iraq. He was in Fallujah in April 2004 where he treated casualties
of the assault on the city.
At the end of 2004
he came to Britain to collect funds for an aid convoy to Fallujah. Now
the British government does not want Dr Salam Ismaels testimony
to be heard.
He was due to come
here last week to speak at trade union and anti-war meetings. But he
was refused entry. The reason given was that he received expenses, covering
the basic costs of his trip, when he came to Britain last year and this
constitutes illegal working.
Dr Salam Ismael
merely wishes to speak the truth. Yet it seems the freedom that Bush
and Blair claim to champion in Iraq does not extend to allowing its
citizens to travel freely.
Legal challenges,
supported by the Stop the War Coalition, were launched this week in
an effort to allow Dr Salam Ismael to come to Britain.