Destroying
Fallujah To "Save" It
By Rahul Mahajan
13 April, 2004
Empirenotes.org
Report from Fallujah
Destroying a Town in Order to Save it
Fallujah, Iraq --
On the edge of Iraq's western desert, Fallujah is extremely arid but
has been rendered into an agricultural area by extensive irrigation.
A town of wide streets and squat, sand-colored buildings, its population
is primarily farmers.
We were in Fallujah
during the "ceasefire." This is what we saw and heard.
When the assault
on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed. Electricity is provided
by generators and usually reserved for places with important functions.
There are four hospitals currently running in Fallujah. This includes
the one where we were, which was actually just a minor emergency clinic;
another one of them is a car repair garage. Things were very frantic
at the hopsital where we were, so we couldn't get too much translation.
We depended for much of our information on Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong
Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian NGO Intersos, and had
been pressed into service as the manager of the clinic, since all doctors
were busy, working around the clock with minimal sleep.
A gentle, urbane
man who spoke fluent English, Al-Nazzal was beside himself with fury
at the Americans' actions (when I asked him if it was all right to use
his full name, he said, "It's ok. It's all ok now. Let the bastards
do what they want.") With the "ceasefire," large-scale
bombing was rare. With a halt in major bombing, the Americans were attacking
with heavy artillery but primarily with snipers.
Al-Nazzal told us
about ambulances being hit by snipers, women and children being shot.
Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah had become, he said,
"I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European
and American civilization."
I had heard these
claims at third-hand before coming into Fallujah, but was skeptical.
It's very difficult to find the real story here. But this I saw for
myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes in the windshield
on the driver's side, pointing down at an angle that indicated they
would have hit the driver's chest (the snipers were on rooftops, and
are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance again with a single,
neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There's no way this was due to panicked
spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots designed to kill the drivers.
The ambulances go
around with red, blue, or green lights flashing and sirens blaring;
in the pitch-dark of blacked-out city streets there is no way they can
be missed or mistaken for something else). An ambulance that some of
our compatriots were going around in, trading on their whiteness to
get the snipers to let them through to pick up the wounded was also
shot at while we were there.
During the course
of the roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps
a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old,
shot in the head. She was seizing and foaming at the mouth when they
brought her in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another
likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding.
I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and shredded
thighs, with wounds that could have been from a cluster bomb; there
was no way to verify in the madhouse scene of wailing relatives, shouts
of "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), and anger at the Americans.
Among the more laughable
assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small
group of isolated "extremists" repudiated by the majority
of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of
course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we
saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are not necessarily
even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and
fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj
and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others. They
conferred together about logistical questions; not once did I see the
muj threatening people with the ubiquitous Kalashnikovs.
One of the muj was
wearing an Iraqi police flak jacket; on questioning others who knew
im, we learned that he was in fact a member of the Iraqi police.
One of our translators,
Rana al-Aiouby told me, "these are simple people." Although
patronizing, the statement has a strong element of truth. Agricultural
tribesmen with very strong religious beliefs, the people of Fallujah
are insular and don't easily trust strangers. We were safe because of
the friends we had with us and because we came to help them. They are
much like the Pashtun of Afghanistan -- good friends and terrible enemies.
The muj are of the
people in the same way that the stone-throwing shabab in the first Palestinian
intifada were and the term, which means youth, is
used for them as well. I spoke to a young man, Ali, who was among the
wounded we transported to Baghdad. He said he was not a muj but, when
asked his opinion of them, he smiled and stuck his thumb up. Any young
man who is not one of the muj today may the next day wind his aqal around
his face and pick up a Kalashnikov.
Al-Nazzal told me
that the people of Fallujah refused to resist the Americans just because
Saddam told them to; indeed, the fighting for Fallujah last year was
not particularly fierce. He said, "If Saddam said work, we would
want to take off three days. But the Americans had to cast us as Saddam
supporters. When he was captured, they said the resistance would die
down, but even as it has increased, they still call us that."
Nothing could have
been easier than gaining the good-will of the people of Fallujah had
the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. Tribal peoples like
these have been the most easily duped by imperialists for centuries
now. But now a tipping point has been reached. To Americans, Fallujah
may still mean four mercenaries killed, with their corpses then mutilated
and abused; to Iraqis, Fallujah means the savage collective
punishment for that attack, in which over 600 Iraqis have been killed,
with an estimated 200 women and over 100 children (women do not fight
among the muj, so all of these are noncombatants, as are many of the
men killed).
A Special Forces
colonel in the Vietnam War said of the town, Ben Tre, We had to
destroy the town in order to save it. That statement encapsulated
the Vietnam War. The same is true in Iraq today -- Fallujah cannot be
saved from its mujaheddin unless it is destroyed.
Rahul Mahajan is
publisher of Empire Notes. He was in Fallujah recently and is currently
writing and blogging from Baghdad. His latest book, Full Spectrum
Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond, covers U.S. policy on
Iraq, deceptions about weapons of mass destruction, the plans of the
neoconservatives, and the face of the new Bush imperial policies.