[Media-watch] Falluja survivors. Uneasy truce in the city of ghosts - Guardian - 24/04/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1202163,00.html

Uneasy truce in the city of ghosts

Rory McCarthy talks to survivors of the US forces' assault on Falluja, the
bloodiest battle of the uprising, which doctors say killed up to 600 Iraqis

Saturday April 24, 2004
The Guardian

By the time Menem Latif Hussain returned to his house early in the afternoon
on the third day of the battle for Falluja there was little he could do. In
the driveway by the front gate lay the body of his son Wisam, 16.

The boy had suffered one injury, caused by a blow so powerful that the back
of his skull had been torn away. It killed him instantly.

"He had been standing by the gate looking out. There had been bombing
nearby. I don't know whether it was a shell or a sniper that hit him," said
Mr Hussain.

"I gave my thanks to God, for he was a martyr. And then we buried him in the
cemetery."

When they returned to the house later that afternoon they found Wisam's
cousin Thair Ahmed, 18, was also missing. He had left that morning to cross
town to check on his fiancee's family. Hours later the family retrieved the
young man's body from where it lay in the street. He had been hit once, by a
sniper's bullet through the heart, and he too died where he fell. By then it
was too dangerous to reach the cemetery.

"We buried him in a patch of dirt ground. There was no choice. Later we will
take out his body and bury him properly," said Mr Hussain, 41.

They were not the only deaths he saw that week. From his driveway he saw a
girl aged 18 standing at the gate of a house opposite shot dead by a
sniper's bullet. Her brother-in-law rushed to help her, and he too was shot
dead, Mr Hussain said.

At another time a house at the end of his street suffered a direct hit from
a powerful bomb. "We ran to the house because they were my friends. In the
garden I saw three men had been sitting on a bench. They were all dead, they
had been cut in half by the bomb. My wife went crazy," he said.

A few days later, Mr Hussain fled Falluja with his wife and four surviving
children and dozens of other families. They now live under canvas in an
Iraqi Red Crescent camp in al-Khadra, western Baghdad.

"We are peaceful people and they came and bombed us," Mr Hussain said
yesterday. "From the start of the war it was just like hell. Why did they
come and kill our sons?"

Ferocious

For the past three weeks, around 2,000 troops from the US 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force, supported by jet fighters and attack helicopters, have
carried out the most ferocious urban street fighting in Iraq since the start
of the war last year.

The battle has taken a horrific toll. Doctors in Falluja say up to 600
people have died. The US military says more than 100 of its troops have been
killed in combat in Iraq since April 1, many in the battle for Falluja. More
American soldiers have died in Iraq this month than in the war against
Saddam Hussein a year ago.

Inside Falluja, a city of 300,000, the marines prevented access to the
city's only hospital for more than two weeks. Dozens of houses were
destroyed, mosques were bombed and clerics turned a football ground beside
the Euphrates into a crude cemetery.

Three weeks on, it is still almost impossible to get an independent account
of the fighting. Access to the city is severely restricted: the marines
still hold a cordon around Falluja, and much of the city and many
surrounding villages are crawling with Iraqi resistance fighters.

But in interviews with the Guardian in Baghdad, more than a dozen civilians,
doctors, clerics and politicians have begun to piece together the US
military's bloodiest battle in Iraq.

On the day that Wisam and Thair died, a US general in Baghdad said the aim
of the new combat in Falluja, codenamed Operation Vigilant Resolve, was to
"take the fight to the enemy".

The previous week four American contractors working for the Blackwater
security firm were killed and mutilated in the high street, the gruesome
culmination of a year-long guerrilla war against the US military in the
Sunni areas west and north of Baghdad. Commanders promised an "overwhelming"
response.

It began in secret on the night of Sunday April 4 when the marines
surrounded Falluja and moved into the industrial area on the eastern edge of
the city. Troops set up command centres in factories and sent out snipers.
On the Monday morning, before he left for his brick factory in the
industrial area, Tariq Zaidan, 48, had a call from the office. US troops had
raided the building, arrested three of his security guards and seized his
office.

"On the Sunday night we had heard the sounds of helicopters and tanks and we
knew something big was happening but we didn't expect them to seize the
city," he said.

He spent the day at home waiting. "It was quiet and then at 9pm the
Americans tried to get inside the city. Every neighbourhood started fighting
against the Americans to defeat them." Helicopters and fighter jets could be
heard overhead across the city.

"Four houses in my block were destroyed. The house behind mine was hit with
two rockets," said Mr Zaidan, who later fled with his family to Baghdad. "We
didn't go out, but from my gate I could see fighters carrying their weapons
in the street and fighting the Americans. I saw them being killed and I saw
their bodies in the street."

On the Thursday marines called in an F-16 air strike on a community centre
next to the Abdul Aziz al-Samarrai mosque, in the centre of city. Residents
said up to 40 people were killed and the troops then spent another six hours
fighting a gun battle at the site. Doctors said the Iraqi death toll in the
first three or four days had climbed above 300.

Doctors in the city said most of the dead were civilians, among them women
and children. US commanders have refused to accept this, continuing to
insist their targeting is precise.

"What I think you will find is 95% of those were military age males that
were killed in the fighting," Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne, of the US
marines, said during the fighting. "The marines are trained to be precise in
their firepower."

As the fighting intensified, so aid convoys carrying medical supplies and
food from Baghdad began to arrive. On the Thursday several doctors from the
capital were also brought in along with four ambulances. Among them was a
surgeon, aged 30, who spent five days treating the injured.

City of ghosts

"I wanted to cry. It looked like a city of ghosts," said the doctor, who was
too frightened of the resistance fighters to give his name. "You didn't see
any cars, you didn't see anything except the mojahedin.

"We had a clinic with two operating rooms. It was the worst place in Iraq to
deal with a patient," he said in his hospital in Baghdad. "There were many
civilians, there were women. I saw one woman who was pregnant and there was
shrapnel in her abdomen from a shell. Her baby died."

The city's main hospital, on the western bank of the Euphrates, was closed
by the marines. Ibrahim Younis, the Iraq emergency coordinator for Médecins
sans Frontières, said that meant many wounded had died because of inadequate
healthcare.

"The Americans put a sniper position on top of the hospital's water tower
and had troops in the single-storey building," said Mr Younis, who visited
Falluja during the fighting two weeks ago. "The hospital had four operating
theatres, which could no longer be used. If they had been working, it would
have saved many lives."

He said MSF wanted an independent inquiry to determine why the US military
used the hospital as a military position - a violation of the Geneva
convention.

Most of those in Falluja during the fighting described the mojahedin in
heroic terms. Some of the gunmen are led by clerics and are fighting as
Islamists not, as the US military continues to insist, because they are
former Ba'athists or foreign terrorists. Others are fighting on the basis of
a tribal code or a desire to avenge the deaths of other Iraqis at the hands
of US troops.

Only a handful, the young doctor included, were prepared to criticise the
guerrilla fighters. "The mojahedin are brave and fear nothing," he said.
"But is it wise to do all these things? Who is responsible for those who
died: the Americans for sure, but the mojahedin too."

The fighting has resonated across Iraq with the large majority, who feel a
growing sense of frustration and disappointment with the past year's
occupation.

"There are a lot of people who don't want the mojahedin to fight because
they have been forced out of their houses and their jobs," said Sabah Noori
al-Jumaili, 49, a retired architect, who fled Falluja after the first week.
"But it is the fault of the Americans: it is people's right to fight against
occupation."

Mr al-Jumaili was jailed under Saddam as a political prisoner for supporting
an Arab nationalist party. He welcomed the fall of Saddam, but like many
educated professionals in the Sunni community he has seen little reward from
the occupation that followed.

"We fought for this country. Is this what we are fighting for?" he said. His
family is now living in a former air raid shelter in Amariya, in western
Baghdad, waiting for the chance to return to Falluja.

Five days after the fighting began, US troops called a "unilateral
suspension of offensive operations". A delegation of politicians from the
Iraqi Islamic party (IIP), a Sunni group on the governing council, entered
Falluja for talks and carloads of families began to pour out of the city
along little used country back roads.

A much-violated ceasefire has held for two weeks as negotiations continue.
Not all the negotiators are confident that the battle has forestalled more
guerrilla resistance.

"Using force in the way they used it in Falluja made people fight," said
Hajim al-Hassani, a senior member of the IIP. "It isn't like these people
were terrorists. They were normal people and they had children who were
dying and so everybody started to fight."

Yesterday 20 Iraqi civilians began to dig through the rubble of houses
looking for bodies buried by the bombing. But US commanders are still warnin
g that resistance fighters have "days not weeks" to give up their heavy
weapons or face a renewed onslaught from the marines still encircling
Falluja.