Mass Slaughter
In Fallujah
By Doug Lorimer
17 November, 2004
Green
Left Weekly
On
November 8, the US military launched its long-anticipated second attempt
to recapture the rebel Iraqi city of Fallujah, located 55 kilometres
west of Baghdad.
The assault
conducted by some 10,000 US troops and 500 Iraqi troops under their
command, using tanks, artillery and attack helicopters was preceded
by weeks of nightly air strikes on residential buildings, restaurants
and mosques. The strikes were designed to terrorise the city's population
of 340,000, causing up to 200,000 of them to flee to Baghdad.
Two days before
the full-scale US assault began, US warplanes reduced the Nazzal Emergency
Hospital in the centre of the city to rubble. BBC News reported that
witnesses said only the hospital's facade remained.
The deliberate destruction
of this hospital was a clear indication that the US military wants to
ensure that dead or injured Fallujah residents are not brought to the
city's hospitals so as to conceal the scale of civilian casualties.
During the US military's
previous attempt to recapture Fallujah in April Iraqi
doctors at the city's hospitals reported that hundreds of residents,
most of them women, children and elderly men, were being killed by US
air strikes, artillery shelling and sniper attacks.
Outrage from Iraqis
at this casualty toll led to mass protests in Baghdad, including a three-day
general strike. The mass protests forced Washington to call off its
troops' siege of Fallujah at the end of April.
Significantly, the
first operation in the new US offensive to recapture the city was the
storming and seizure of the Fallujah General Hospital by US troops in
the early hours of November 8. This hospital is located on the western
edge of the Euphrates River, separating it from the rest of the city.
During their assault
on the city in April, the US marines prevented ambulances and other
vehicles from transporting dead or injured residents to what was at
that time and after the destruction of Nazzal Emergency Hospital,
is once again the citys only trauma-capable medical facility.
The day after the
US military's seizure of Fallujah General, Dr Salih al Issawi, the director
of the hospital, told the South African Press Association that US marines
were again preventing ambulances from delivering patients to emergency
care.
Free-fire zone
That the intention
of the US military is to turn Fallujah into a free-fire
zone was indicated by the rules of engagement given to the invading
US troops. On November 7, the puppet government of Prime Minister Iyad
Allawi declared that all Iraq except the Kurdish-run areas in the country's
north was under martial law, banning all protest rallies and street
demonstrations. He also announced that a 24-hour curfew applied in Fallujah,
to be observed by everyone in the city except the invading US and puppet
Iraqi troops, thus making any Fallujan who is not in a residential building
a free-fire target.
On the eve of their
offensive against Fallujah, US commanders were openly making it clear
to their troops that they were expected to shoot unarmed civilians.
Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that on November 7 US Marine Corps
Colonel Michael Shupp told his troops to shoot any Iraqi civilian who
approached them with raised hands because he or she might be a suicide
bomber.
The homicidal mentality
that US marine commanders have drummed into their soldiers was illustrated
by the comments made by 20-year-old Lance Corporal Joseph Bowman on
November 7. I want to go and kill people, so we can go home
he told an Associated Press reporter. Kill them and go home
thats all we can do now.
The US invasion
of Fallujah began with intense air strikes and artillery attacks on
civilian targets. The November 9 New York Times reported: Just
before the marines began to push south into Falluja, the American bombardment
intensified, and heavy artillery could be heard pounding positions in
or near the city every few minutes. An entire apartment complex was
ground to rubble. A train station was obliterated in a hail of 2000-pound
bombs.
The NYT report quoted
Marine Colonel Craig Tucker saying that Fallujah's defenders would win
if it's bloody; we'll win if we minimise civilian casualties.
Bombarding an entire apartment complex with artillery shells
and reducing it to rubble is how the US military minimises
civilian casualties!
An Agence France
Presse reporter in the city told the Qatar-based Aljazeera satellite
TV station on November 9 that in the northwestern Jolan district, one
building in every 10 had been flattened by US air strikes.
Associated Press
reported that same day that Fallujah residents said intense street clashes
between US troops and armed Fallujah residents were raging in the northern
sectors of the city. Witnesses reported seeing two US tanks engulfed
in flames.
Iraqi journalist
Abu Bakr al Dulaimi told Aljazeera on November 9 that almost half Fallujah's
120 mosques had been destroyed by US air strikes and tank attacks. Violent
clashes are now going on in the western areas of the city, he
added. Clashes have also erupted in Jolan neighbourhood. Resistance
in these areas is fierce. The city's defenders are responding to the
US attacks with everything at their disposal.
On November 10,
the US Knight Ridders Newspapers chain reported that US commanders claimed
they had taken control of most of Fallujah and were encountering only
light and unco-ordinated resistance. However,
it also reported that insurgents showed no sign of surrendering.
Rebels attacked sporadically throughout the day, using rocket-propelled
grenades, machine guns and mortar strikes, said a Knight Ridder reporter
embedded with the [US] Army's 1st Infantry Division.
Intense fighting
The November 10
London Evening Standard reported that, Fresh fighting erupted
today in areas of Fallujah declared cleared' by US forces,
adding: After battling to the centre of the city yesterday, American
commanders had thought they controlled at least its northern third
with rebel fighters fleeing to southern districts to regroup. But at
first light intense machinegun, mortar and rocket exchanges opened up
in the north-western district of Jolan.
The US military
responded with air strikes at a rate of six every 15 minutes.
Explosions again rocked an area already said to have had half its buildings
flattened in two days of solid shelling.
The Reuters news
agency reported on November 10 that American tanks pushing into
central Fallujah are meeting fierce resistance from well-organised insurgents
who show no signs of giving up.
Marine tank platoon
commander Lieutenant Joe Cash told the Reuters reporter the city's resistance
fighters were unleashing coordinated attacks on the US invaders. They
hit us from one area and then another right afterwards. There is in-depth
organisation.
There are
lots of them. We took heavy fire, Gunnery Sergeant Ishmail Castillo
told the Reuters reporter. They don't look like they are going
to cave in.
On November 8, Time
magazine reported that in a a pep talk to US troops ahead their
invasion of Fallujah on Sunday, the senior enlisted marine in Iraq,
Sgt. Major Carlton Kent drew inspiration from great Marine triumphs
of the past. You're all in the process of making history', he
told them. This is another Hue city in the making.'
Kent's analogy
to the 25-day battle in 1968 to wrest control of the old Vietnamese
colonial capital from guerrilla insurgents may be somewhat unfortunate,
however... To be sure, the enemy the Marines are facing in the fierce
fighting for Fallujah that began overnight Monday may be not dissimilar
from the one they encountered at Hue. Both are fiercely determined guerrilla
fighters motivated by a combination of nationalism and ideology, capable
of great cruelty and dug in so deep in the urban landscape that they
had to be rooted out building by building. But while Hue was an heroic
triumph, at the cost of some 580 fatalities for the Marines and other
US and South Vietnamese units who went in to recapture a city audaciously
seized by insurgents, winning the battle did not help the American side
win the war. And it's far from clear that victory in Fallujah, rendered
somewhat inevitable by the massive advantage in men and firepower of
the US-led operation, will prove more successful than Hue in turning
the tide of the conflict.
Political blow
US officials claim
that the capture of Fallujah is necessary to establish order
in Iraq so that they can proceed with their plans to legitimise Allawi's
US-appointed government through national elections next January. However,
the US invasion of Fallujah may already have dealt a fatal political
blow to these plans, with prominent Sunni Muslim clerics and politicians
condemning the invasion and urging Sunnis who make up 40% of
Iraq's population of 25 million to boycott the elections.
On November 8, the
Iraqi Islamic Party, described by the Western news media as Iraq's
most influential Sunni political party, announced its withdrawal
from Allawi's government. From today, we have nothing to do with
this government, said Iyad al Samurraie, the party's deputy secretary
general. We don't want to take the responsibility of shedding
Iraqi blood without any legal excuse.
The next day, the
Association of Muslim Scholars, a group of leading Sunni clerics that
claims to represent 3000 mosques, called for Iraqis to boycott the January
elections which they described as being held over the corpses
of those killed in Fallujah.
The scholars
of Iraq place full legal responsibility on Iyad Allawi for the genocide
Fallujah is exposed to at the hands of occupation forces and a bunch
of Iraqi National Guardsmen who cooperate with them, association
director Sheik Hareth al Dhari said in a statement broadcast throughout
the Arab world on satellite television.