Uneasy
Truce In Falluja
By Rory McCarthy
24 April, 2004
The Guardian
By
the time Menem Latif Hussain returned to his house early in the afternoon
on the third day of the battle for Falluja there was little he could
do. In the driveway by the front gate lay the body of his son Wisam,
16.
The boy had suffered one injury, caused by a blow so powerful that the
back of his skull had been torn away. It killed him instantly.
"He had been
standing by the gate looking out. There had been bombing nearby. I don't
know whether it was a shell or a sniper that hit him," said Mr
Hussain.
"I gave my
thanks to God, for he was a martyr. And then we buried him in the cemetery."
When they returned
to the house later that afternoon they found Wisam's cousin Thair Ahmed,
18, was also missing. He had left that morning to cross town to check
on his fiancee's family. Hours later the family retrieved the young
man's body from where it lay in the street. He had been hit once, by
a sniper's bullet through the heart, and he too died where he fell.
By then it was too dangerous to reach the cemetery.
"We buried
him in a patch of dirt ground. There was no choice. Later we will take
out his body and bury him properly," said Mr Hussain, 41.
They were not the
only deaths he saw that week. From his driveway he saw a girl aged 18
standing at the gate of a house opposite shot dead by a sniper's bullet.
Her brother-in-law rushed to help her, and he too was shot dead, Mr
Hussain said.
At another time
a house at the end of his street suffered a direct hit from a powerful
bomb. "We ran to the house because they were my friends. In the
garden I saw three men had been sitting on a bench. They were all dead,
they had been cut in half by the bomb. My wife went crazy," he
said.
A few days later,
Mr Hussain fled Falluja with his wife and four surviving children and
dozens of other families. They now live under canvas in an Iraqi Red
Crescent camp in al-Khadra, western Baghdad.
"We are peaceful
people and they came and bombed us," Mr Hussain said yesterday.
"From the start of the war it was just like hell. Why did they
come and kill our sons?"
Ferocious
For the past three weeks, around 2,000 troops from the US 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force, supported by jet fighters and attack helicopters,
have carried out the most ferocious urban street fighting in Iraq since
the start of the war last year.
The battle has taken
a horrific toll. Doctors in Falluja say up to 600 people have died.
The US military says more than 100 of its troops have been killed in
combat in Iraq since April 1, many in the battle for Falluja. More American
soldiers have died in Iraq this month than in the war against Saddam
Hussein a year ago.
Inside Falluja,
a city of 300,000, the marines prevented access to the city's only hospital
for more than two weeks. Dozens of houses were destroyed, mosques were
bombed and clerics turned a football ground beside the Euphrates into
a crude cemetery.
Three weeks on,
it is still almost impossible to get an independent account of the fighting.
Access to the city is severely restricted: the marines still hold a
cordon around Falluja, and much of the city and many surrounding villages
are crawling with Iraqi resistance fighters.
But in interviews
with the Guardian in Baghdad, more than a dozen civilians, doctors,
clerics and politicians have begun to piece together the US military's
bloodiest battle in Iraq.
On the day that
Wisam and Thair died, a US general in Baghdad said the aim of the new
combat in Falluja, codenamed Operation Vigilant Resolve, was to "take
the fight to the enemy".
The previous week
four American contractors working for the Blackwater security firm were
killed and mutilated in the high street, the gruesome culmination of
a year-long guerrilla war against the US military in the Sunni areas
west and north of Baghdad. Commanders promised an "overwhelming"
response.
It began in secret
on the night of Sunday April 4 when the marines surrounded Falluja and
moved into the industrial area on the eastern edge of the city. Troops
set up command centres in factories and sent out snipers. On the Monday
morning, before he left for his brick factory in the industrial area,
Tariq Zaidan, 48, had a call from the office. US troops had raided the
building, arrested three of his security guards and seized his office.
"On the Sunday
night we had heard the sounds of helicopters and tanks and we knew something
big was happening but we didn't expect them to seize the city,"
he said.
He spent the day
at home waiting. "It was quiet and then at 9pm the Americans tried
to get inside the city. Every neighbourhood started fighting against
the Americans to defeat them." Helicopters and fighter jets could
be heard overhead across the city.
"Four houses
in my block were destroyed. The house behind mine was hit with two rockets,"
said Mr Zaidan, who later fled with his family to Baghdad. "We
didn't go out, but from my gate I could see fighters carrying their
weapons in the street and fighting the Americans. I saw them being killed
and I saw their bodies in the street."
On the Thursday
marines called in an F-16 air strike on a community centre next to the
Abdul Aziz al-Samarrai mosque, in the centre of city. Residents said
up to 40 people were killed and the troops then spent another six hours
fighting a gun battle at the site. Doctors said the Iraqi death toll
in the first three or four days had climbed above 300.
Doctors in the city
said most of the dead were civilians, among them women and children.
US commanders have refused to accept this, continuing to insist their
targeting is precise.
"What I think
you will find is 95% of those were military age males that were killed
in the fighting," Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne, of the US marines,
said during the fighting. "The marines are trained to be precise
in their firepower."
As the fighting
intensified, so aid convoys carrying medical supplies and food from
Baghdad began to arrive. On the Thursday several doctors from the capital
were also brought in along with four ambulances. Among them was a surgeon,
aged 30, who spent five days treating the injured.
City of ghosts
"I wanted to cry. It looked like a city of ghosts," said the
doctor, who was too frightened of the resistance fighters to give his
name. "You didn't see any cars, you didn't see anything except
the mojahedin.
"We had a clinic
with two operating rooms. It was the worst place in Iraq to deal with
a patient," he said in his hospital in Baghdad. "There were
many civilians, there were women. I saw one woman who was pregnant and
there was shrapnel in her abdomen from a shell. Her baby died."
The city's main
hospital, on the western bank of the Euphrates, was closed by the marines.
Ibrahim Younis, the Iraq emergency coordinator for Médecins sans
Frontières, said that meant many wounded had died because of
inadequate healthcare.
"The Americans
put a sniper position on top of the hospital's water tower and had troops
in the single-storey building," said Mr Younis, who visited Falluja
during the fighting two weeks ago. "The hospital had four operating
theatres, which could no longer be used. If they had been working, it
would have saved many lives."
He said MSF wanted
an independent inquiry to determine why the US military used the hospital
as a military position - a violation of the Geneva convention.
Most of those in
Falluja during the fighting described the mojahedin in heroic terms.
Some of the gunmen are led by clerics and are fighting as Islamists
not, as the US military continues to insist, because they are former
Ba'athists or foreign terrorists. Others are fighting on the basis of
a tribal code or a desire to avenge the deaths of other Iraqis at the
hands of US troops.
Only a handful,
the young doctor included, were prepared to criticise the guerrilla
fighters. "The mojahedin are brave and fear nothing," he said.
"But is it wise to do all these things? Who is responsible for
those who died: the Americans for sure, but the mojahedin too."
The fighting has
resonated across Iraq with the large majority, who feel a growing sense
of frustration and disappointment with the past year's occupation.
"There are
a lot of people who don't want the mojahedin to fight because they have
been forced out of their houses and their jobs," said Sabah Noori
al-Jumaili, 49, a retired architect, who fled Falluja after the first
week. "But it is the fault of the Americans: it is people's right
to fight against occupation."
Mr al-Jumaili was
jailed under Saddam as a political prisoner for supporting an Arab nationalist
party. He welcomed the fall of Saddam, but like many educated professionals
in the Sunni community he has seen little reward from the occupation
that followed.
"We fought
for this country. Is this what we are fighting for?" he said. His
family is now living in a former air raid shelter in Amariya, in western
Baghdad, waiting for the chance to return to Falluja.
Five days after
the fighting began, US troops called a "unilateral suspension of
offensive operations". A delegation of politicians from the Iraqi
Islamic party (IIP), a Sunni group on the governing council, entered
Falluja for talks and carloads of families began to pour out of the
city along little used country back roads.
A much-violated
ceasefire has held for two weeks as negotiations continue. Not all the
negotiators are confident that the battle has forestalled more guerrilla
resistance.
"Using force
in the way they used it in Falluja made people fight," said Hajim
al-Hassani, a senior member of the IIP. "It isn't like these people
were terrorists. They were normal people and they had children who were
dying and so everybody started to fight."
Yesterday 20 Iraqi
civilians began to dig through the rubble of houses looking for bodies
buried by the bombing. But US commanders are still warning that resistance
fighters have "days not weeks" to give up their heavy weapons
or face a renewed onslaught from the marines still encircling Falluja.
Key dates in the
fight for Falluja
· March 31
Four American contractors working for Blackwater security company killed
and mutilated in the centre of Falluja
· April 1
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the
US military in Iraq, promises an "overwhelming" response.
"We will pacify that city," he said
· April 4
Operation Vigilant Resolve begins as around 2,000 troops from the 1st
Marine Expeditionary Force begin encircling Falluja at night
· April 8
US army F-16 fighter jet drops a bomb on the Abdul Aziz al-Samarrai
mosque, killing up to 40 Iraqis
· April 9
US military announces a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations"
· April 19
US military officials and Fallujan leaders agree to work for a ceasefire
in which guerrilla fighters will give up their heavy weapons. US agrees
to allow access to Falluja's hospital for the first time
· April 22
US marine Lieutenant General James Conway says guerrillas have "days
not weeks" to give up their weapons
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