http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/04/200948132212418175.html'Fallujah never leaves my mind'
By Laith Mushtaq, cameraman, Al Jazeera
Laith Mushtaq was one of only two non-embedded cameramen working throughout the April 2004 'battle for Fallujah' in which 600 civilians died.
Five years on, he recounts the events he witnessed and filmed.
"What you saw on your TV sets at home reflects only ten per cent of the reality. Also, if you watch those pictures at home, you can change the channel.
But we were in the middle. We smell. We feel, see, and touch everything. We could touch the bodies, but we couldn't change the channel. We were the channel.
When I think of Fallujah, I think of the smell. The smell was driving me crazy. In a dead body, there is a kind of liquid. Yellow liquid. The smell is disgusting, really. It sticks in your nose. You cannot eat anymore.
And you can't get the pictures off your mind, because every day you see the same: Explosion, death, explosion, death, death.
After work, you sit down and notice there are pieces of flesh on your shoes and blood on your trousers. But you don't have time to ask why.
In April 2004, I remember I was in the Baghdad office and my boss said: "We have information that the Americans will attack Fallujah. We need a crew to go inside Fallujah immediately. Who can go there?"
I said: "Yes. Me. I can go there." I didn't hesitate at all.
Filming was a 'duty'
-snip-
One day, I think it was April 9, 2004, someone with a loudspeaker in Fallujah's main mosque said: "The Americans will open a gate and women and children can go out."
As soon as he had finished, all the women and children of Fallujah tried to find a car to leave the city but when they were in the streets, the US forces opened fire.
-snip-
Me and all of the Al Jazeera crew, we felt paralysed. It was bigger than us. We were only two cameramen and two reporters. It's not enough.
Reporters, editors in Doha and Baghdad, the people of Fallujah, all of them kept calling for us to film what was happening, and the ambulances just kept coming and going.
-snip-
Corpse-strewn streets
But then you remember the heroes of Fallujah that nobody talks about.
Like this old man. He had a pick-up truck and every day, he drove through the streets and listened to the people who told him there is a dead body in this or that street, but nobody can go there because there's a sniper.
Then he went there, stopped his car, and on his knees, he'd crawl to the body and carry it to his pick-up car. One day he brought five bodies.
-snip-
The month that I spent in Fallujah, my mom was watching TV all the time, because she knew her son was there and she knew those were the pictures that he had shot. Sometimes we couldn't talk for a couple of days.
One day, she heard on the news that the Americans would try to reach the middle of the city. She couldn't bear it anymore. She went to the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad and cried: "Give me my son back!"
I was embarrassed, but my mother is, well, a mother.
Around the same time, in the evening, we got a phone call from the general manager of Al Jazeera. He wanted to talk to every member of the crew. The driver. Me. Everyone.
He said: "Thank you very much, we appreciate what you're doing." And then he said: "If you want to leave Fallujah, we'll send someone and will try to get you out of there."
We all refused. Everyone wanted to stay.
Why should we be better than the women and children of Fallujah? No one had called them to ask whether they wanted to leave."
-----------------------------------------
no one had called them
we are so guilty.
put the god damned neo cons in prison NOW
thank you Laith for putting your life and your mind on the line.
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