Slash And Burn
By Dahr Jamail
18 November, 2004
Dahrjamailiraq.com
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the photos
She
lays dazed in the crowded hospital room, languidly waving her bruised
arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US soldiers when
they fired through the front door of her house, are both covered by
casts. Small plastic drainage backs filled with red fluid sit upon her
abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet.
Fatima Harouz, 12
years old, lives in Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Just three
days ago soldiers attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us says,
They attacked our home and there werent even any resistance
fighters in our area. Her brother was shot and killed, and his
wife was wounded as their home was ransacked by soldiers. Before
they left, they killed all of our chickens, added Fatimas
mother, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage.
A doctor standing
with us, after listening to Fatimas mother tell their story, looks
at me and sternly asks, This is the freedom
in their Disney
Land are there kids just like this?
Another young woman,
Rana Obeidy, was walking home with her brother two nights ago. She assumes
the soldiers shot her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle
of soda. This happened in Baghdad. She has a chest wound where a bullet
grazed her, unlike her little brother who is dead.
Laying in a bed
near Rana is Hanna, 14 years old. She has a gash on her right leg from
the bullet of a US soldier. Her family was in a taxi in Baghdad this
morning which was driving near a US patrol when a soldier opened fire
on the car.
Her fathers
shirt is spotted with blood from his head which was wounded when the
taxi crashed.
In another room
a small boy from Fallujah lays on his stomach. Shrapnel from a grenade
thrown into their home by a US soldier entered his body through his
back, and implanted near his kidney.
An operation successfully
removed the shrapnel. His father was killed by what his mother called,
the haphazard shooting of the Americans. The boy, Amin,
lies in his bed vacillating between crying with pain and playing with
is toy car.
Its one case
after another of people from Baghdad, Fallujah, Latifiya, Balad, Ramadi,
Samarra, Baquba
from all over Iraq, who have been injured by the
heavy-handed tactics of American soldiers fighting a no-win guerilla
war spawned from an illegal invasion based on lies. Their barbaric acts
of retaliation have become the daily reality for Iraqis, who continue
to take the brunt of the frustration and rage of the soldiers.
Out in front of
the hospital three Humvees pull up as soldiers alert the hospital staff
that some of the wounded from outside of Fallujah will be brought there.
One of the staff begins to yell at the soldier who is doing the talking,
while a soldier manning a machine gun atop a Humvee with his face completely
covered by an olive balaclava and goggles looks on.
We dont
need you here! Get the fuck out of here! Bring back Saddam! Even he
was better than you animals! We dont want to die by your hands,
so get out of here! We can take care of our own people!
The translator with
the soldiers does not translate this. Instead he watches with a face
of stone.
The survivors of
those killed and wounded by the US military in Iraq, as well as those
who care for them, are left with feelings of bitter anguish, grief,
rage and vengeance.
This afternoon at
a small, but busy supply center set up in Baghdad to distribute goods
to refugees from Fallujah, the stories the haggard survivors are telling
are nearly unimaginable.
They kicked
all the journalists out of Fallujah so they could do whatever they want,
says Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who just escaped from Fallujah three days
ago, The first thing they did is they bombed the hospitals because
that is where the wounded have to go. Now we see that wounded people
are in the street and the soldiers are rolling over them with tanks.
This happened so many times. What you see on the TV is nothing-that
is just one camera. What you cannot see is so much.
While Kassem speaks
of the television footage, there are also stories of soldiers not discriminating
between civilians and resistance fighters.
Another man, Abdul
Razaq Ismail arrived from Fallujah last week.
While distributing
supplies to other refugees he says, There are dead bodies on the
ground and nobody can bury them. The Americans are dropping some of
the bodies into the Euphrates River near Fallujah. They are pulling
the bodies with tanks and leaving them at the soccer stadium.
Nearby is another
man in tears as he listens, nodding his head. He cant stop crying,
but after a little while says he wants to talk to us.
They bombed
my neighborhood and we used car jacks to raise the blocks of concrete
to get dead children out from under them.
Another refugee,
Abu Sabah, an older man wearing a torn shirt and dusty pants tells of
how he escaped with his family while soldiers shot bullets over their
heads, but killed his cousin.
They used
these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud, he
said, having just arrived yesterday, Then small pieces fell from
the air with long tails of smoke behind them. These exploded on the
ground with large fires that burnt for half an hour. They used these
near the train tracks. You could hear these dropped from a large airplane
and the bombs were the size of a tank. When anyone touched those fires,
their body burned for hours.
The comparison of
Iraq to Vietnam is becoming more valid by the day here.
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