Fallujah refugees complain of US military treatment

ARROGANCE: Many of those who have escaped the dangerous Iraqi city during a ceasefire say that their support for the US military waned in the face of insensitivity

THE GUARDIAN , BAGHDAD
Tuesday, Apr 13, 2004,Page 7

Umm Samir sits in a Baghdad garden in the shade of two palm trees, worrying about the sons and grandchildren she left behind in Fallujah.

On a balmy spring evening, with the smell of freshly mown grass around her, her present refuge with relatives seems a world away from the nightmare city she left.

"It was the bombing, the constant bombing, and the children being so afraid, and the journey across the open desert to escape," she said when asked what was the worst thing about the week under siege.

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Source: Agence France-Presse
Date: 12 Apr 2004
Iraqi families live rough around besieged city of Fallujah

NUAMIYEH, Iraq, April 12 (AFP) - Frightened families were building makeshift shelters in palm groves outside the embattled Iraqi town of Fallujah on Monday, hoping for a lasting truce between US forces and insurgents that would allow them to go home.

Wheelchair-bound Khaled Huseein looked lost and in pain as his family, one of hundreds which have been displaced, prepared to spend the night among the date palms near this village some seven kilometres (four miles) south of Fallujah.

Aid began to pour into Fallujah on Monday, according to an AFP correspondent embedded with US marines, as talks continued between Iraqi officials and leaders of the insurgency aimed at ending the violence. But the displaced people here said they were in no hurry to go home after a week-long offensive, which saw some of the bloodiest violence since last year's US-led invasion of Iraq, left around 600 Iraqis dead.
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http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/480fa8736b88bbc3c12564f6004c8ad5/3707fdf9af8743f885256e74005df50c?OpenDocument

Source: UN OCHA Integrated Regional Information Network
Date: 12 Apr 2004
Aid reaches Fallujah

Baghdad, 12 April (IRIN) - Aid agencies still able to operate in Iraq have managed to deliver supplies to the troubled city of Fallujah, some 50 km northwest of the capital, Baghdad, where the US military launched a campaign to quash resistance fighters last week.
According to international media reports, more than 600 Iraqis, most of them civilians, have been killed, while the US military maintains almost all the casualties were combatants.
<snip>
More than a hundred cars packed with families left the city by convoy over the weekend on a back road where there was no US checkpoint, according to Ghassan Elkahlout, programme coordinator at the UK-based Islamic Relief NGO in Baghdad.

Most of the families were staying with relatives in Baghdad. An estimated one third of the population of 200,000 have fled the city, according to local sources. "When our team went in, they had the problem of evacuating people," Elkahlout told IRIN. "We took three cars loaded with emergency health kits, food, water and drugs."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has sent more than a ton of medical supplies over the past week to a field hospital set up and run by a Jordanian couple several kilometres outside of the restive Sunni city, said an aid worker who declined to be named. Fallujah is part of the "Sunni triangle," a region known for its loyalty to former president Saddam Hussein and the epicentre of anti-US resistence.
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This is so sickening...

Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.

One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.

<SNIP>

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.

"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."

<SNIP>

The American approach was markedly different: "When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.

"They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. They are very concerned about taking casualties and have even trained their guns on British troops, which has led to some confrontations between soldiers.

Source: Telegraph (free registration required)

Pointing weapons at your allies is not a good sign...