Fallujah And
The Reality Of War
By Rahul Mahajan
06 November, 3004
Counterpunch.org
The
assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of the
people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to implementing
"democracy" in Iraq. These are lies.
I was in Fallujah
during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you a word picture
of what such an assault means.
Fallujah is dry
and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an agricultural
area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been known for years
as a particularly devout city; people call it the City of a Thousand
Mosques. In the mid-90's, when Saddam wanted his name to be added to
the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.
U.S. forces bombed
the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for the next several
weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators
only in critical places like mosques and clinics. The town was placed
under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic
items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks.
The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing and the threat
of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick people, the elderly,
and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in which
people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone
to leave except for what they called "military age males,"
men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a
place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of course,
if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, there can be
no better sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in fact,
your war is on the people, not on their oppressors,, not a war of liberation.
The main hospital
in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right
at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off
the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to treat patients had
to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they could carry, and
set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one I stayed at had
been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no
operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a soft-drink vending
machine. Another clinic, I,m told, had been an auto repair shop. This
hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also
violates the Geneva Convention.
In Fallujah, you
were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in the background,
punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the mujaheddin's hand-held
mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have to stop paying attention
to it and yet, of course, you never quite stop. Even today, when I hear
the roar of thunder, I,m often transported instantly to April 10 and
the dusty streets of Fallujah.
In addition to the
artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs,
and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole
city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing
the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually
inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man's-lands of sniper fire paths.
Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people
I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were
"military-age males." I saw old women, old men, a child of
10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in
Baghdad they might have been able to save him.
One thing that snipers
were very discriminating about every single ambulance I saw had bullet
holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate
sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were
shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal
execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew
that it wasn't the mujaheddin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville,
Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course,
Mr. Bush courageously protected us from during the Vietnam war era)
and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the
residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would
not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry
of Health and even by the U.S. military.
The best estimates
are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt,
or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation,
is that 2/3 to were noncombatants.
But the damage goes
far beyond that. You can read whenever you like about the bombing of
so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas in Fallujah, but
the reports don't tell you what that means. You read about precision
strikes, and it's true that America's GPS-guided bombs are very accurate
when they,re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of the time that they
work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10
meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound
bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb shakes the
whole neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A town under
bombardment is a town in constant fear.
You read the reports
about X killed and Y wounded. And you should remember those numbers;
those numbers are important. But equally important is to remember that
those numbers lie in a war zone, everyone is wounded.
The first assault
on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the resistance is stronger,
better-armed, and better-organized; to "win," the U.S. military
will have to pull out all the stops. Even within horror and terror,
there are degrees, and we and the people of Fallujah ain't seen nothin,
yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new mandate the world has been
delivered into his hands.
There will be international
condemnation, as there was the first time; but our government won't
listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the people of Fallujah
will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the horror will be us,
the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn't meet
in April and we didn't meet in August when Najaf was similarly attacked;
will we meet it this time?
Rahul Mahajan
is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes, with regularly updated commentary
on U.S. foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq, and the state of the
American Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was in Fallujah
during the siege in April. His most recent book is Full Spectrum Dominance:
U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond. He can be reached at [email protected]