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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. The primary modes of attack were a little bit of
heavy artillery and a lot of 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 to kill people in driving the ambulances.
The ambulances go around with red, blue, or green
lights flashing and sirens blaring; in the pitch-dark of a blacked-out
city 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 throug to pick up
the wounded was also shot at while we were there.
...
I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and wounds
in his thighs that might 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. 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." It is true that they are agricultural tribesmen
with very strong religious beliefs. They are not so far different from
the Pashtun of Afghanistan -- good friends and terrible enemies. They
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.
The muj are of the people in the same way that the
stone-throwing shabab in the Palestinian intifada were. A young man
who is not one today may the next day wind his aqal around his face
and pick up a Kalashnikov. 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.
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. Now, a tipping-point has been reached. Fallujah
cannot be "saved" from its mujaheddin unless it is destroyed.
...
Saturday morning I got a call from my friend Dahr Jamail, with whom
I have been traveling around in Iraq (his Iraq Dispatches are a valuable
resource). A British journalist who had been making trips into Fallujah
delivering medical supplies had told him that he was the only Western
journalist in the town (there was also an al-Jazeera correspondent).
He was organizing a bus of foreigners to go to Fallujah, with three
purposes: we would take medicine in, evacuate wounded and women and
children, and we would tell the world what we saw.
...
In a minute, I'll tell you what I saw. Right now, I'll just describe
the most frightening two minutes of my life. We had spent most of our
time at a makeshift hospital but were walking to one of the locals'
houses to sleep. Fallujah is a blacked-out city and it was pitch-dark
(the Americans bombed the power plant in the first day of the operation).
It was a long walk, over half a mile, and the booming of Iraqi mortars
and American heavy artillery was a continual accompaniment (booms you
get used to and learn to ignore -- whines you don't want to ignore).
Suddenly, as we rounded a corner, we saw several
bright flares. We took cover, sitting against a wall, and then we saw
flares coming at us from the other directions. It turns out they were
flares used by the unmanned Predator drone planes to light the area
so they can get good pictures -- a good sign that the area would be
bombed later, but not an immediate threat. Somebody, however, yelled "Cluster
bombs," and we all freaked out (and indeed we had seen at least one
patient in the hospital/clinic with wounds consistent with cluster
bombs).
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