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How The U.S. Murdered a
City
Fallujah: The Truth at
Last
Doctor Salam Ismael took aid to Fallujah
last month. This is a report of his visit.
02/17/05
- "SW" -
IT WAS the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to
describe, and one that will never leave me. It was the smell of
death. Hundreds of corpses were decomposing in the houses, gardens
and streets of Fallujah. Bodies were rotting where they had
fallen-bodies of men, women and children, many half-eaten by wild
dogs.
A wave of hate had wiped out two-thirds of the
town, destroying houses and mosques, schools and clinics. This was
the terrible and frightening power of the US military
assault.
The accounts I heard over the next few days
will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in
Fallujah. But the truth is worse than you could possibly have
imagined.
In Saqlawiya, one of the makeshift refugee
camps that surround Fallujah, we found a 17 year old woman. "I am
Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Jolan district of Fallujah," she
told me. "Five of us, including a 55 year old neighbour, were
trapped together in our house in Fallujah when the siege
began.
"On 9 November American marines came to our
house. My father and the neighbour went to the door to meet them. We
were not fighters. We thought we had nothing to fear. I ran into the
kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going to enter our house
and it would be wrong for them to see me with my hair uncovered.
"This saved my life. As my father and neighbour approached the door,
the Americans opened fire on them. They died
instantly.
"Me and my 13 year old brother hid in the
kitchen behind the fridge. The soldiers came into the house and
caught my older sister. They beat her. Then they shot her. But they
did not see me. Soon they left, but not before they had destroyed
our furniture and stolen the money from my father's
pocket."
Hudda told me how she comforted her dying
sister by reading verses from the Koran. After four hours her sister
died. For three days Hudda and her brother stayed with their
murdered relatives. But they were thirsty and had only a few dates
to eat. They feared the troops would return and decided to try to
flee the city. But they were spotted by a US
sniper.
Hudda was shot in the leg, her brother ran but
was shot in the back and died instantly. "I prepared myself to die,"
she told me. "But I was found by an American woman soldier, and she
took me to hospital." She was eventually reunited with the surviving
members of her family.
I also found survivors of
another family from the Jolan district. They told me that at the end
of the second week of the siege the US troops swept through the
Jolan. The Iraqi National Guard used loudspeakers to call on people
to get out of the houses carrying white flags, bringing all their
belongings with them. They were ordered to gather outside near the
Jamah al-Furkan mosque in the centre of town.
On 12
November Eyad Naji Latif and eight members of his family-one of them
a six month old child-gathered their belongings and walked in single
file, as instructed, to the mosque.
When they reached
the main road outside the mosque they heard a shout, but they could
not understand what was being shouted. Eyad told me it could have
been "now" in English. Then the firing began. US soldiers appeared
on the roofs of surrounding houses and opened fire. Eyad's father
was shot in the heart and his mother in the chest.
They
died instantly. Two of Eyad's brothers were also hit, one in the
chest and one in the neck. Two of the women were hit, one in the
hand and one in the leg. Then the snipers killed the wife of one of
Eyad's brothers. When she fell her five year old son ran to her and
stood over her body. They shot him dead too. Survivors made
desperate appeals to the troops to stop firing.
But
Eyad told me that whenever one of them tried to raise a white flag
they were shot. After several hours he tried to raise his arm with
the flag. But they shot him in the arm. Finally he tried to raise
his hand. So they shot him in the hand.
The five
survivors, including the six month old child, lay in the street for
seven hours. Then four of them crawled to the nearest home to find
shelter. The next morning the brother who was shot in the neck also
managed to crawl to safety. They all stayed in the house for eight
days, surviving on roots and one cup of water, which they saved for
the baby. On the eighth day they were discovered by some members of
the Iraqi National Guard and taken to hospital in Fallujah. They
heard the Americans were arresting any young men, so the family fled
the hospital and finally obtained treatment in a nearby
town.
They do not know in detail what happened to the
other families who had gone to the mosque as instructed. But they
told me the street was awash with blood. I had come to Fallujah in
January as part of a humanitarian aid convoy funded by donations
from Britain.
Our small convoy of trucks and vans
brought 15 tons of flour, eight tons of rice, medical aid and 900
pieces of clothing for the orphans. We knew that thousands of
refugees were camped in terrible conditions in four camps on the
outskirts of town.
There we heard the accounts of
families killed in their houses, of wounded people dragged into the
streets and run over by tanks, of a container with the bodies of 481
civilians inside, of premeditated murder, looting and acts of
savagery and cruelty that beggar belief.
Through the
ruins That is why we decided to go into Fallujah and investigate.
When we entered the town I almost did not recognise the place where
I had worked as a doctor in April 2004, during the first
siege.
We found people wandering like ghosts through
the ruins. Some were looking for the bodies of relatives. Others
were trying to recover some of their possessions from destroyed
homes.
Here and there, small knots of people were
queuing for fuel or food. In one queue some of the survivors were
fighting over a blanket.
I remember being approached by
an elderly woman, her eyes raw with tears. She grabbed my arm and
told me how her house had been hit by a US bomb during an air raid.
The ceiling collapsed on her 19 year old son, cutting off both his
legs.
She could not get help. She could not go into the
streets because the Americans had posted snipers on the roofs and
were killing anyone who ventured out, even at
night.
She tried her best to stop the bleeding, but it
was to no avail. She stayed with him, her only son, until he died.
He took four hours to die.
Fallujah's main hospital was
seized by the US troops in the first days of the siege. The only
other clinic, the Hey Nazzal, was hit twice by US missiles. Its
medicines and medical equipment were all destroyed. There were no
ambulances-the two ambulances that came to help the wounded were
shot up and destroyed by US troops.
We visited houses
in the Jolan district, a poor working class area in the north
western part of the city that had been the centre of resistance
during the April siege.
This quarter seemed to have
been singled out for punishment during the second siege. We moved
from house to house, discovering families dead in their beds, or cut
down in living rooms or in the kitchen. House after house had
furniture smashed and possessions scattered.
In some
places we found bodies of fighters, dressed in black and with
ammunition belts.
But in most of the houses, the bodies
were of civilians. Many were dressed in housecoats, many of the
women were not veiled-meaning there were no men other than family
members in the house. There were no weapons, no spent
cartridges.
It became clear to us that we were
witnessing the aftermath of a massacre, the cold-blooded butchery of
helpless and defenceless civilians.
Nobody knows how
many died. The occupation forces are now bulldozing the
neighbourhoods to cover up their crime. What happened in Fallujah
was an act of barbarity. The whole world must be told the truth.
Dr Salam Ismael, now 28 years old, was head of
junior doctors in Baghdad before the invasion of Iraq. He was in
Fallujah in April 2004 where he treated casualties of the assault on
the city.
At the end of 2004 he came to Britain to collect
funds for an aid convoy to Fallujah. Now the British government does
not want Dr Salam Ismaels testimony to be heard.
He
was due to come here last week to speak at trade union and anti-war
meetings. But he was refused entry. The reason given was that he
received expenses, covering the basic costs of his trip, when he
came to Britain last year and this constitutes illegal
working.
Dr Salam Ismael merely wishes to speak the truth.
Yet it seems the freedom that Bush and Blair claim to champion in
Iraq does not extend to allowing its citizens to travel
freely.
Legal challenges, supported by the Stop the War
Coalition, were launched this week in an effort to
allow Dr Salam Ismael to come to Britain.
This article was first published by www.socialistworker.co.uk
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