An Eyewitness Account From Inside the US siege of Falluja

The Nation

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

[ This article is an edited excerpt from Jamail’s
weblog <http://blog.newstandardnews.net> for the New
Standard News.]

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.

When we left Baghdad, the road was desolate and
littered with the scorched and smoldering shells of
vehicles. At the first US 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 Falluja. 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 Falluja
was strewn with burned-out fuel tankers, trucks,
armored personnel carriers (APCs) and tanks. As we
approached Falluja we started running into mujahedeen
checkpoints. Seeing our supplies and hearing that we
were headed for Falluja, the guerrillas let us pass.

Entering the city we saw a huge cloud from a US bomb.
To our horror we realized there was no cease-fire.
Falluja itself was virtually empty, aside from groups
of mujahedeen fighters positioned on every other street
corner, their faces covered by kaffiyehs. Many were
armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles; some had rocket
propelled grenade launchers. In all, I saw hundreds of
Iraqi fighters.

The Marines have occupied the northeastern edge of
Falluja, but most of the town is occupied by
mujahedeen—both local Sunni as well as Shiite members
of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi, Army who have come in from
the south. There seem to be separate groups of
Mujahadeen in charge of different parts of Falluja and
the various roads in and out. Between the mujahedeen
and the Marines’ lines is a no man’s land.

The streets were empty except for a rare ambulance
racing to pick up wounded, or the odd family car,
usually laden with wounded. We rolled toward one small
clinic behind mujahedeen lines, where we delivered our
medical supplies from INTERSOS, an Italian NGO.

The clinic building was small, dirty and packed with
wounded Iraqis. The Americans have bombed one hospital,
and were sniping at people who attempted to enter and
exit the other major medical facility. So there were
effectively only two small clinics that were safe to
care for the hundreds of wounded. (Along with the one
we visited, there is one set up in a mechanic’s
garage.)

As we unloaded our supplies, in came a stream of
wounded women and children. Civilian cars sped up to
the clinic and over the curb out front, their drivers
desperate to unload their wailing family members.

One woman, shot in the gut, was making rasping,
gurgling noises as the doctors worked frantically to
extract a bullet and patch the wound. All around were
the sounds of muffled moaning. The clinic was running
low on crucial supplies. The woman’s small son had a
bullet wound in the neck; his eyes glazed, he vomited
continually as other doctors raced to save his life.
The desperate work in the clinic continued, off and on,
into the night as more victims arrived. From outside
came the sound of occasional mortar explosions and
sporadic bursts of gunfire.

After we delivered the aid, three of my friends agreed
to ride out on the clinic’s remaining ambulance to no
man’s land to retrieve the wounded. The ambulance—the
only one left in this part of town, all the others
having been destroyed by the Marines—already had three
bullet holes from a US sniper through the front
windshield on the driver’s side. The previous driver
was out of action; a US sniper’s bullets had grazed his
head not long ago. The clinic staff hoped that having
English-speaking Westerners on board would allow the
vehicle to retrieve more wounded.

My friends made several trips in and out of no man’s
land, and even spoke to the Marines. But on the last
trip US sharpshooters blew out the vehicle’s tires. My
friends were forced to retreat, leaving a pregnant
woman trapped in her house.

As evening approached, a nearby mosque announced
through its loudspeakers that the mujahedeen had
completely destroyed a US convoy. Gunfire and
jubilation filled the streets. The celebration fell
silent when the mosque’s prayer calls began.

As it grew dark, we made our way to the home of a local
man who offered us shelter. Above us we heard the
buzzing sound of slow-moving unmanned aerial
surveillance drones circling the sky. Then a plane
above us began dropping flares. We ran for the cover of
a nearby wall, afraid the plane was dropping cluster
bombs. There had been reports of this, and two of the
most recent victims who arrived at the clinic were said
to have been hit by cluster bombs, which badly burned
them.

The next morning we walked back to the clinic, and the
mujahedeen in the area were extremely edgy, expecting
an invasion anytime. They were taking up positions to
fight, running to different streets carrying their
Kalashnikovs.

One of my friends who’d done another ambulance run to
collect two bodies said that a Marine she encountered
had told them to leave, because the military was about
to use air support to begin "clearing the city." One of
the bodies they brought to the clinic was that of a 55-
year-old man shot in the back by a sniper outside his
home, while his wife and children huddled wailing
inside.

The family could not retrieve his body, for fear of
being shot themselves. His stiff corpse was carried
into the clinic, flies swarming above it. One of his
arms was half-raised by rigor mortis.

We loaded our bus with wounded from the clinic and
headed out. Everyone felt a renewed US assault was
imminent. Fighter jets roared overhead, circling the
outskirts of the city. American bombs continued to fall
not far from us, and sporadic gunfire continued.

We left the city as part of a long convoy of civilian
vehicles loaded with families. On the way, we passed
groups of mujahedeen at their posts, among them defiant
armed boys as young as 11. Coming from the opposite
direction were US military vehicles, leaving huge dust
plumes behind them. The new troops seemed to be taking
up positions on the outskirts of town. We passed
several more smoking shells of vehicles destroyed by
the resistance—more fuel tankers, more blasted APCs.

We are now in Baghdad, afraid to walk the streets. The
Mahdi Army is rumored to be hunting down journalists.
The NGOs are pulling out. Everyone knows the "cease-
fire" was a lie. If this is a truce, what does war look
like?