'Why Did They Come And Kill Our Sons?' Uneasy Truce In The City Of Ghosts By Rory McCarthy The Guardian -
UK 4-24-4
- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "I gave my thanks to God, for he was a martyr. And
then we buried him in the cemetery."
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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?"
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- Ferocious
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- City of ghosts
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- "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.
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- "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."
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- The city's main hospital, on the western bank of the
Euphrates, was closed by the marines. Ibrahim Younis, the Iraq emergency
coordinator for MÈdecins sans FrontiËres, said that meant many wounded
had died because of inadequate healthcare.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- Yesterday 20 Iraqi civilians began to dig through the
rubble of houses looking for bodies buried by the bombing. But US
commanders are still warning that resistance fighters have "days not
weeks" to give up their heavy weapons or face a renewed onslaught from
the marines still encircling Falluja.
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- Key dates in the fight for Falluja
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- * March 31 Four American contractors working for
Blackwater security company killed and mutilated in the centre of
Falluja
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- * April 1 Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy
director of operations for the US military in Iraq, promises an
"overwhelming" response. "We will pacify that city," he said
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- * April 4 Operation Vigilant Resolve begins as around
2,000 troops from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force begin encircling
Falluja at night
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- * April 8 US army F-16 fighter jet drops a bomb on the
Abdul Aziz al-Samarrai mosque, killing up to 40 Iraqis
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- * April 9 US military announces a "unilateral
suspension of offensive operations"
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- * April 19 US military officials and Fallujan leaders
agree to work for a ceasefire in which guerrilla fighters will give up
their heavy weapons. US agrees to allow access to Falluja's hospital for
the first time
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- * April 22 US marine Lieutenant General James Conway
says guerrillas have "days not weeks" to give up their weapons
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1202163,00.html
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