Falluja - an eyewitness account

,...two weeks before the war and two weeks after it started. I was admonished as being an adversary against our country. I demanded that I be judged according to my actions in life,...and challenged my "opposition" to compare my integrity against that leadership which they "assumed" was integral. I was beaten down by others' incapacity to handle the devastation associated with the absolute shock of such a BETRAYAL.

Being betrayed,...is probably the worst crime with which any human victim can cope.

We invade another country, kill their men, women, and children and expect them to not fight us?

We talked with Issam Rashid, the chief of security for the mosque. He told us the story. At 3:30 am on Sunday morning, 100 American troops raided the mosque. They were looking for weapons and mujaheddin. They started the riad the way they virtually always do -- by smashing in the gates with tanks and then driving Hummer in. The Hummers ran over and destroyed some of the stored relief goods (the bulk of the goods had already been sent to Fallujah -- over 200 tons -- but the amount remaining was considerable). More was destroyed as soldiers ripped apart sacks looking for rifles. Rashid estimated maybe three tons of supplies were destroyed. We saw for ourselves some of the remains, sacks of beans ripped apart and strewn around.

The mosque was full of people, including 90 down from Kirkuk (many with the Red Crescent). They were all pushed down on the floor, with guns put to the backs of their heads. Another person associated with the mosque, Mr. Alber, who speaks very good English, told us that he repeatedly said, "Please, don't break down doors. Please, don't break windows. We can help you. We can have custodians unlock the doors." (Alber, by the way, was imprisoned by Saddam for running a bakery. As he said, "Under the embargo, you could eat flour, you could eat sugar, you could eat eggs, all separately. But mix them together and bake them and you were harming the economy by raising the price of sugar and you could get 15 years in prison.)
more...
http://empirenotes.org/

As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who'd been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in.

One woman and small child had been shot through the neck -- the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning.

The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life.

After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.

One victim of American aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children.

More: http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=871&list=/home.php&

TYY

It appears that a LOT of non-combatants got caught in the crossfire on this one. Don't expect their families and neighbors to forget it; we made lots more recruits for Osama this week.;(

propagandists are calling "saddam loyalists"/"dead-enders"/"foreign fighters"...

from EmpireNotes.org April 12/1:20pm

The Marines are corroborating my judgment, expressed previously, that the mujaheddin of Fallujah (and we're really talking about all of al-Anbar province, which includes Ramadi), are just the men of Fallujah, not some extremist faction. They don't allow "military-age males" out of town. And check out this quote from Time Magazine:
In some neighborhoods, the Marines say, anyone they spot in the streets is considered a "bad guy." Says Marine Major Larry Kaifesh: "It is hard to differentiate between people who are insurgents or civilians. You just have to go with your gut feeling."

. . . but that story broke the tear barrier.

TYY *sad* *disgusted* *angry* *helpless*

,...the same mindset of "losers" concerning Vietnam are waging their inability to accept failure upon our people and the world,...today.

I wish they would go away.

They are nothing but dark, with "winning" being their core without any regard for righteousness or humanity or hope or healing.

Let humanity overwhelm these abolitions, once and for all.

our elected officials and the media. These are all reputable sources.

http://wildfirejo.blogspot.com / This is a long and very sad, disturbing report. Jo and the group she is with have been trying to work with kids at different centers holding "circuses", theater for the kids.

An English activist in Iraq

Monday, April 12, 2004April 11th
Falluja

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that’s not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people and a few possessions, heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people inside still inside Falluja.

The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I’m on the bus is that a journalist I knew turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja, he’d been bringing out children with their limbs blown off, the US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were being stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down. .......

snip to end:
And the satellite news says the cease-fire is holding and George Bush says to the troops on Easter Sunday that, “I know what we’re doing in Iraq is right.” Shooting unarmed men in the back outside their family home is right. Shooting grandmothers with white flags is right? Shooting at women and children who are fleeing their homes is right? Firing at ambulances is right?

Well George, I know too now. I know what it looks like when you brutalise people so much that they’ve nothing left to lose. I know what it looks like when an operation is being done without anaesthetic because the hospitals are destroyed or under sniper fire and the city’s under siege and aid isn’t getting in properly. I know what it sounds like too. I know what it looks like when tracer bullets are passing your head, even though you’re in an ambulance. I know what it looks like when a man’s chest is no longer inside him and what it smells like and I know what it looks like when his wife and children pour out of his house.

It’s a crime and it’s a disgrace to us all.

Posted by: Jo / 10:33 PM


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040426&s=jamail

Sarajevo on the Euphrates
by DAHR JAMAIL

Falluja, Iraq, a low-rise, mostly Sunni city of about 200,000, has become this war's Sarajevo. I was there on Saturday and Sunday during what was supposed to be a cease-fire. Instead of calm, I found a city under siege from American artillery and snipers.

At one of the city's clinics I saw dozens of freshly wounded women and children, victims of US Marine Corps munitions. Hospital officials report that more than 600 Iraqis have now been killed, most of them civilians. Two soccer fields in Falluja have been converted to graveyards. I went to Falluja with a small group of international journalists and NGO workers. We traveled in a large bus full of medical supplies; our plan was to unload our cargo, take a look around, then leave with as many wounded as we could take out with us.

I have some "land in Florida" to sell you.

Your desperation to attack Shrub is causing you to grasp at straws. And an apparent lack of experience with the U.S. military lets you believe any negative thing you're told about it.

Three different web sources, from separate "correspondents," each describing the same events that they "witnessed" at (coincidentally) the exact same times. :eyes:

- "American snipers" shooting little kids in the head
- "Americans" raiding a mosque
- "Americans" shooting at ambulances
- "Americans" inside Fallujah "sniping" at people at the hospital
- "Americans" telling Fallujah residents to get out of town because of impending "air strikes"
- an "11 year old mujahadeen" with an AK-47
- the mujahadeen guy running up and announcing the glorious mujahadeen had "wiped out an American convoy"/"killed an American sniper"


But the real killer is this photoshop "ambulance":


<sarcasm>I really believe that an Arabic speaking country would have an ambulance with english language "ambulance" reversed on the hood, while all other language on the vehicle is in Arabic.</Sarcasm>

Grow TFU, people . . . :eyes:

Baghdad? Kut? Tikrit? What else can you tell us about what's going on in Iraq?

in Fallujah over the last week, including quite a few women and children. I'm sure you have proof that you can post here that they were all killed by their godless insurgent dead-ender Sunni Shi'a Saddamite Sadr-Follower relatives and neighbors.

Fact is, there's lots and lots of dead people there. The Iraqis and most of the Middle East believe we're responsible. Screw blaming Bush--we have a big, big problem and it's only gonna get worse.

They still have the orginal Jersey stickers on them.

Know where Tashkent is, and what language they speak there?

It was not photoshopped.

BTW, do you know where this ambulance originally came from? I don't. There are a lot of ambulances in Iraq that came from elsewhere. The one that the US blew up with a missile today was from Indonesia, for example.

These 3 different sources, two independent and one working with an organization were all part of the same volunteer group that made the trip. They made seperate reports based upon their observations apart from one another while they were there.

Do you believe that 3 people just got together, conspired and came up with this? Have you read over the course of the last year anything anyone of them have written? If you had been, if you knew anything about them you might have been able to piece that part of the story together.

If you are serious in your "grow TFU, people" remark, I might suggest the same to you.

And then go check out google and look up Rahul Mahajan or Jo Wilding. Better yet, check out Baghdad Burning. Enlighten thyself.

Robert Fisk is another good source as well.

PS/nothing in Florida but I will honestly sell you good desert property in Arizona.

be wealthy soon!!! Buy low.. sell high.. Our home has appreciated from purchase price in 2001 of $86k to now $130k... so the Florida land to sell kicks him in the arse...take it anarchy1999!!!! He's the one on the short end of the stick on both accounts.... :hi:

English has been the "Universal language" for about 150 years (Supplanting French and Latin after the Napoleonic wars). You will be surprise where English shows up, for example drivers who go down to sunken ships in the Pacific and see English warnings and directions on ships, may very while be on a JAPANESE WWII ship for the Japan's Imperial Navy used English almost as a second language and put many warning and directions on ships IN ENGLISH, even through the only people who were ever going to read them were Japanese. This was a practice in the Japanese Imperial Fleet by the late 1800s and continue till today.

In Saudi Arabia the Saudi Arabia ground support for their Air Force all learn English, because the technical manuals for the Planes their are servicing are in English and it is easier to teach them English than to translate the books.

I suspect the same in Iraq, England controlled Iraq from 1919 till 1932 and even afterward had extensive interests in Iraq (For Example During WWII England Occupied all of Iraq and put the Iraq Military on a diet design to be 200 calories BELOW what they needed, this was to force the Iraq Army to look for food as opposed to conspiring to drive out the British).

Do to this extensive English influence since WWI, English has been used in Iraq consistently since WWI. For many years English signs were used at the same time as Arabic Signs, the English for the British Troops, the Arabic for the locals. Thus English is often used in signs, for while the natives may not know how to speak English, they have since WWI often seen signs in English and have learns WHAT Various ENGLISH WORDS MEAN. Given this long history of the use of English in Signs in their country I am NOT surprise by seeing English Words on objects like Ambulances which were first used while Iraq was under British Occupation.

This is further complicated by the fact Arabic letters tend to be cursive compared to English letters and a such it is often easier to "recognize" a sign in English than a sign in Arabic (Please note I do not mean it is easier to READ, but to recognize, for example a typical Iraqi may not know what the work "Ambulance" means, but he may know that any Ambulances in Iraq has the English word "Ambulance" on it. The English word "Ambulance" may be meaningless to the average Iraqi, but as a Symbol it may very well be understood.

Such use of English is quite common in India, Egypt and the rest of the world that England once occupied. It is like certain Latin phases still in use in America, we have adopted those phases as part of the English language even through the phase is Latin. The same with certain English words in former British Colonies, those English words MEAN something to the locals even if they speak little or no English and this is true even if all the locals understand of English are what certain Words look like and what that collection of scratches mean to him or her.

communicates in English. It is the closest thing to a planetary language as exists.

... and in a small village we drove through there was a large sign painted on the side of a building in English. I don't recall the exact wording, but it was obvious English is the universal language. In Beijing, the street signs are in both Chinese and English.

The most common error when faking a picture in photo shop is to ignore the shadows, thus always look at the shadows, are their the same?

The shadow from the Yellow type and the Shadow from the Ambulance itself appears to be in the same directions, something a little harder to fake than most photo shoppers are willing to do.The Yellow tape goes over one part of the word Ambulance.

Another problem is the Letter E, it seems to be indented rights where the hood has indents, another thing most photo shoppers miss (The Letter A also falls in an indent but I can not see if it falls or not falls into the indent).

My point is this does not on a quick exam look Photo shop (Or if it is Photo shop a person went through a lot of effort to do it and also photo shop most of the usual errors out of the picture).

Fiats are also NOT used in the US as Ambulances, so if this is photo shop where did the Fiat come from? New Zealand DOES use Fiats, but the pictures I have seen of New Zealand Ambulances is New Zealand does NOT put the word "Ambulance" on the front of their Ambulances (Repeat I am going by Pictures NOT report, statute or actual Knowledge).

Thus I have problem with this being Photo shopped, it might be, but the above tend to make me think it is NOT.

For Pictures of Ambulances from New Zealand and other Countries:
http://derek.servepics.com/Fiat.htm

Perhaps you haven't kept up with the news the past few years but raiding a mosque would NOT surprise me and I have been in many coutries and their ambulances say AMBULANCE even if it is not an English speaking country.

I think you embarassed yourself with that post.

I would give you the same response only I would replace GROW with WAKE.

The word on the hood has no shading, and does not correspond to the curvature and outline of the hood. More media lies, per the usual.

... and you forgot the <sarcasm> flags. :eyes:

"ECNALUBMA" (I can't reverse the letters) is very commonplace.

A stupid, usless waste. I wonder if Sadr, sitting in his mosque and surrounded by his cronies, understood the misery that he would unleash by staging this moronic, venal uprising. Or what might have happened if we'd actually had a good plan for the occupation and enought troops to implement it after the war.

As much as I hate Bush I oftentimes wish that the war had gone just how he said it would. The Iraqis glad to see us and ready for a democracy, and the soldiers back after a year.

Instead it's just this bloody damn mess.

Fuck.

Fucking stupid.

its a complete failure of something that could have gone right the occupying force should have been removed and a peace keeping force moved in or at least give the appearance change their uniforms or something to get these people to realize that we do not want to be in a war mode. It could have been done correctly but the ball was dropped.

As of 4/28/03 this town had no place to go but where we are here now. I'm sorry, I take that back. After the 4/28 massacre, our Americans (soldiers) could have possibly made amends. I think it was probably the June incident, when our troops killed 8-9 police officers and wounded many other men of Fallujah that we (American soldiers), pushed the people of this suburb of Baghdad over the edge ( by the way the town police force were chasing bad guys, the bad guys got away, the police took the hit). Don't forget the 2,3 or 4 sons from another family that were killed as they tried to bring in a truckload of chickens to sell at the family store. Also please pay special attention to the midnight raids, doors being kicked in, fathers, brothers being rounded up and taken away not to be heard from for months.........or the orchards that have been mowed down. Palm trees 50-60 years old along with the citrus trees growing beneath them, keep in mind your great-grandfather planted them and they are your familys' sustenance. Picture yourself there with your family.

How about just this last week, one house, 25 family members dead, one survivor, age 1 and 1/2 years old.

Please dear, educate yourself, all this town has seen is bad, from the very beginning. I'm sorry to say but since our troops rolled into this town there is a long, documentable list of war crimes committed by an occupying force.

We should not have summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army. We antagonised thousands upon thousands of trained soldiers. Most with far more tactical combat experience than the occupation troops they face. If we had spent the money to keep the paychecks coming, and allowed them to retain a semblance of authority in their own homeland, I'm pretty sure that this situation would not have developed on the scale it has.

This has been a Class A Fubar from the getgo.

If I had no feelings for the innocents lives taken, I'd still be ashamed that the neo-cons running this shindig could be so fucking stupid.

I'm just a regular guy with a modicum of intelligence, and I could have run this op better. (that ought to get me a quote on the FreepBoard, eh?)

Sadr sounds mostly like an angry young man.

Bush shot us all in the foot with this one, if not in the head.

There's no joy in 'we told you so.'

Welcome to DU, by the way.

beyond words yet again :cry: As for it saying ambulance in English but written backwards, I think it is so that US military knows it is an ambulance, BUT someone forgot the correct direction :D Seems like an attempt to make known what the vehicle is, but again, an honest mistake by someone still learning the little things about the English language!

BTW, how did this guy with this horrible post come to have 1k in posts here in DU? :wow

The letters are intentionally applied reversed, so that they will be quite legible in the rear view mirror of vehicles in front of them, identifying it clearly as an emergency vehicle, get out of the way.

I'm sure you knew this already, just distressed and not thinking right. yes?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1411490

http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18414

The 'Ceasefire' in Fallujah

By Dahr Jamail, The Nation
April 14, 2004

Fallujah, Iraq, a low-rise, mostly Sunni city of about 200,000, has become this war's Sarajevo. I was there on Saturday and Sunday during what was supposed to be a cease-fire. Instead of calm, I found a city under siege from American artillery and snipers.


At one of the city's clinics, I saw dozens of freshly wounded women and children, victims of U.S. Marine Corps munitions. Hospital officials report that more than 600 Iraqis have now been killed, most of them civilians. Two soccer fields in Fallujah have been converted to graveyards. I went to Fallujah with a small group of international journalists and NGO workers. We traveled in a large bus full of medical supplies; our plan was to unload our cargo, take a look around, then leave with as many wounded as we could take out with us.


When we left Baghdad, the road was desolate and littered with the scorched and smoldering shells of vehicles. At the first U.S. checkpoint, the soldiers said they'd been there for thirty hours straight. They looked exhausted and scared. After being searched, we continued along bumpy dirt roads, winding our way through parts of Abu Ghraib, steadily but slowly making our way toward besieged Fallujah. At one point, we passed a supply truck that had been hit and was being looted by people from a nearby village. Men and boys were running from the wreck carrying boxes. A small child yelled at our bus, "We will be mujahedeen until we die!"


At one overpass, we rolled by an M-1 tank that resistance fighters had destroyed. Smoke and flames still billowed from its burning guts. Down the road were more fires – the whole thirty kilometers to Fallujah was strewn with burned-out fuel tankers, trucks, armored personnel carriers (APCs) and tanks. As we approached Fallujah, we started running into mujahedeen checkpoints. Seeing our supplies and hearing that we were headed for Fallujah, the guerrillas let us pass.

..more..
-------------
Fallujah and Baghdad -- Eyewitness Accounts

WASHINGTON - April 12 -

-RAHUL MAHAJAN, rahul@empirenotes.org, www.empirenotes.org
Currently in Baghdad, Mahajan was just in Fallujah. He is regularly posting to a blog at the above web page. Mahajan is author of the book 'Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond'. Mahajan said today: "During the course of roughly four hours at a small clinic in Fallujah, I saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure 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.... Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian NGO InterSOS, had been pressed into service as the manager of the clinic, since all doctors were busy, working around the clock with minimal sleep.... He 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.' ... Nothing could have been easier than gaining the goodwill of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. People I interviewed vehemently denied that they were Saddam supporters and expressed immense anger and disappointment at American conduct.... 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. 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, with current reports of 600 Iraqis killed, including estimates of 200 women and over 100 children.... When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed."


-NAOMI KLEIN clmagill@shaw.ca >, www.nologo.org
Klein is just back from Iraq. Her most recent article is "Fury Ignites Solidarity in Iraq" in the April 9 edition of the Los Angeles Times, in which she wrote: "Before U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer III provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Al Mahdi army was not fighting coalition forces; it was doing their job for them. After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority still hasn't managed to get the traffic lights working or to provide the most basic security for civilians. So in Sadr City, Sadr's so-called 'outlaw militia' can be seen engaged in such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding factories.... I saw charred cars, which dozens of eyewitnesses said had been hit by U.S. missiles, and I confirmed with hospitals that their drivers had been burned alive.... And Thursday, I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of the Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of what was Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City. A few hours earlier, witnesses said, U.S. tanks broke down the walls of the center after two guided missiles pierced its roof.... For months, the White House has been making ominous predictions of a civil war breaking out between the majority Shiites ... and the minority Sunnis.... But this week, the opposite appeared to have taken place...." Klein is author of the book 'Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate'.


-LAMIS ANDONI, LamisAndoni@yahoo.com, www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR022803.htm
Andoni has covered the Mideast for various publications for two decades; she has been banned in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and was blacklisted in Jordan during the 1980s. She is currently a lecturer at the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been monitoring the Arab media. Andoni said today: "Fallujah clearly unmasks the reality of Bush's call for 'democracy' in the Middle East. Collective punishment of the Iraqi population underscores the fallacy of U.S. government claims about its motives.... The submissive Arab regimes, afraid of the U.S. government's wrath, are largely colluding with the Bush administration. They have not spoken out against the U.S. assault, instead stifling dissent at home on the administration's behalf." Bush meets today with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
For stories on Fallujah, see:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3619661.stm

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79CAAE90-3E7F-4815-B47D-46863A6 ...

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D334DDD4-F26F-483F-9AE4-E08BB9E ...

they are climping up the list of history's war criminals. Who knows how high on the list they will be when it's over?

Of COURSE much of what the Arab media offers is crap (Like Jenin), but not all. What percentage has to be true for us to be outraged? 10% 20% The one thing we know for sure is that the American version is ALSO complete bullshit. I go about 80-20 Us vs. Arab press, myself, and I am disgusted by what's going on.

"On Wednesday, Christine Hauser of The New York Times covered the carnage in Fallujah, but from a hospital in Baghdad, where some of the victims had been taken. Writing from Fallujah, her colleague Jeffrey Gettleman noted that the Marines in that city "have orders to shoot any male of military age on the streets after dark, armed or not."

A lance corporal told Gettleman he had seen an American helicopter fire a missile at a man with a slingshot. "Crazy, huh?" the soldier said."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000487569