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Reference

Falluja Archive Oct 2004

Falluja Table - April 18

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IBC Extracted Falluja News - April 18

News Source
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Author
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Title

New Standard
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Dahr Jamail
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IRAQI HEALTH MINISTER PRESSES AUTHORITIES TO EXPLAIN U.S. TARGETING OF FALLUJA AMBULANCE

Specific incidents / deaths

 

Date killed?  
Total  
Civilian / Fighter

 

Cumulative deaths [and injuries]

 

Date range?  
Total  
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Selected info, comment, analysis

I attended a press conference today at the Ministry of Health, led by the Iraqi Minister of Health himself. In short, he held the press conference to stave off criticism of not doing enough to assist (medically) the besieged and suffering residents of Falluja, as well as some of the areas down south where fighting has occurred.

Al-Iraqia television, the Coalition Provisional Authority-run propaganda station that most of my Iraqi friends call the "CIA Station", was at the press conference. They packed up and left promptly after the minister and his two doctors finished their discussion, entirely missing the pointed questions that were to follow.

A stunning surprise, however, was that the minister acknowledged the U.S. military had been intentionally targeting ambulances in Falluja. He expressed his outrage over the matter, and stated that he had personally pressed the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and Bremer for explanations about why these human rights violations, as well as violations of the Geneva Conventions, are occurring.

He said that the U.S. military had accused mujahedeen in Falluja of using ambulances for fighting, and that is why Marines were firing on them. Perhaps there is some truth in this, but at the same time, ambulances that were being used legitimately are being targeted as well, and innocents are dying. My personal friends Jo Wilding and David Martinez were riding in one of these that received 5 sniper rounds through it. I can vouch that they are not mujahedeen.

The minister said that he tried to negotiate with the military, promising to try to insure that ambulances were cleared, and not being used by the mujahedeen.

I asked the minister if he would comment on the U.S. military using cluster bombs in Falluja. When I was in Falluja last weekend I took several statements from citizens there that said cluster bombs were being used on civilians (that they are being used at all in Falluja is a war crime), and when my friends Jo and David returned there several days ago, they reported hearing the distinctive sound cluster bombs make often through the night in Falluja.

I too have heard the horrendous sound, for during my last trip in Iraq when Al-Dora was being bombed on a nightly basis for a few nights, I heard the other worldly sound--a long buzz which sounds almost like a roar, then an explosion, another buzz, followed by several random explosions going off (these would be the "bomblets"). It's really difficult to describe with words, as I've never heard anything quite like it. A gruesome sound, knowing that on the other end of it is found shredded and burning bodies.

A doctor sitting next to the minister took the microphone and said that as a surgeon himself, there was no way to differentiate between bombs by the wounds they make on bodies.

So my question was effectively dodged.

US/military viewpoint

 

News Source
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Author
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Title
Associated Press
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8:01 PM (UK)
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JASON KEYSER
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FALLUJAH IS REALM OF SNIPERS ON BOTH SIDES
Specific incidents / deaths A black-garbed Iraqi gunman slinked over a rooftop and shimmied down a palm tree, pausing for a few seconds to grab a rifle from a comrade. A few blocks away, on another rooftop, a Marine sniper squeezed a trigger and shot the man in the leg. A second shot into his chest killed him, throwing his body out of the tree. The man became Sgt. Sean Crane's 11th kill in Fallujah.

...

Haqi Ismail was shot dead by an American sniper just after leaving his house for prayers at a nearby mosque, said his cousin Ismail Hamada.

"His wife could not move forward to help him because she would have been killed too. She stood crying as he bled to death," Hamada told The Associated Press in Baghdad, where he fled with his family.

...

Crane leads a squad of Marine snipers posted along a row of houses on the city's northern edge. "If the enemy is taking to the rooftops, you want to be on high ground, too," he said.

A mound of freshly turned earth in a dark alley below his post marked a shallow grave where he buried a gunman he shot in the street below.

...

A 16-year-old living near al-Khulafaa, Mohannad Abdel-Rahman, went up on his roof and was shot in the head by a sniper, his relatives told AP. When his uncle went to retrieve his body, he too was killed, they said.

Date killed? pre-18th
Total 1 (gunman on roof) +10 (sniper Crane's previous 'kills') +1 (Haqi Ismail on way to prayers) +2 ('16-year-old living near al-Khulafaa, Mohannad Abdel-Rahman' and uncle) = 14
Civilian / Fighter 3/11 (if all 10 previous 'kills' combatant)
Cumulative deaths [and injuries] The Marine offensive to crush Sunni insurgents in this Euphrates River city has killed five Marines and more than 600 Iraqis, mostly civilians, according to hospital sources.
Date range? 5th-17th?
Total 600+
Civilian / Fighter 'mostly civilians'
Selected info, comment, analysis

Residents of Fallujah have lived in terror of the Marine snipers and have blamed them for civilian deaths, particularly during heavy fighting in the first week after the siege began April 5. Iraqis said it seemed that just stepping outside or looking out a window at the wrong time could draw sniper fire.

...

The push was stopped on April 9 to allow for negotiations.

But Marines continue to defend their positions, responding to fire but also attacking to break up insurgent movements that could threaten them.

...

Iraqi gunmen are often hit in the early morning and early evening, as they travel to and from points of attack on U.S. forces. Some have done combat dive rolls across streets or hidden behind civilians to try to avoid being hit, Marines said.

During the first week of fighting, some residents reported seeing Marines firing from the tops of minarets, particularly that of al-Khulafaa Mosque in eastern Fallujah. A local cleric even issued a religious ruling allowing insurgents to shoot at minarets to down the Americans.

US/military viewpoint  
News Source
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Author
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Title
Sunday Herald
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Jo Wilding
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EYEWITNESS IN FALLUJAH
Specific incidents / deaths

Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, takes me to the bed where a child of about 10 is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Fallujah.

The lights go out, the fan stops and in the sudden quiet someone holds up the flame of a cigarette lighter for the doctor to carry on operating by. The electricity to the town has been cut off for days and when the generator runs out of petrol, they just have to manage till it comes back on. The children are not going to live.

...

The next morning the doctors at the clinic look haggard. None has slept more than a couple of hours a night for a week. One has had only eight hours' sleep in the last seven days, missing the funerals of his brother and aunt because he was needed at the hospital. "The dead we cannot help," he says. "I must worry about the injured."

...

In the street there's a man, face down, in a white dishdasha, a small red stain on his back. As we roll him on to the stretcher, my colleague Dave's hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out. There's no weapon in his hand. When we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. "He was unarmed," they scream. "He just went out the gate and they shot him." None of them has dared come out since. Nobody had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately.

Date killed? pre-18th?
Total 2 (aunt and brother of doctor) +1 (man shot in front of home)
Civilian / Fighter 2 (min) 3 (max) civilians
Cumulative deaths [and injuries]  
Date range?  
Total  
Civilian / Fighter  
Selected info, comment, analysis

I am ushered into a room where an old woman has just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched , a white flag still clutched in her hand. She tells the same story: "I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I was hit by a US sniper." Some of the town is held by US marines, other parts by the local fighters. Their homes are in the US controlled area and they are adamant that the snipers were US marines.

Snipers are causing not just carnage but also the paralysis of the ambulance and evacuation services. The biggest hospital after the main one was bombed is in US territory and cut off from the clinic by snipers. The ambulance has been repaired four times after bullet damage. Bodies are lying in the streets because nobody can go to collect them without being shot.

US/military viewpoint  
News Source
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Author
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Title
INQ7.net
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Walden Bello
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FALLUJA AND THE FORGING OF THE NEW IRAQ
Specific incidents / deaths  
Date killed?  
Total  
Civilian / Fighter  
Cumulative deaths [and injuries] There is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cursing telecasts by Al Arabiya and Al Jezeerah claiming there are 600 women and children dead when even CNN has admitted that a high proportion of the dead and wounded in Falluja were indeed women and children.
Date range?  
Total 600
Civilian / Fighter 'a high proportion'
Selected info, comment, analysis

The Americans are now confronted with an unenviable dilemma: they stick to the ceasefire and admit they can't handle Falluja, or they go in and take it at a terrible cost both to the civilian population and to themselves. There is no doubt the heavily armed Marines can pacify Falluja, but the costs are likely to make that victory a Pyrrhic one.

...

The last few days have left us with indelible images that will forever underline the quicksand that is US policy in Iraq. There are the marines blaring speakers at Falluja insurgents taunting them for hiding behind women and children, when the reality is that women and children are part of the Iraqi resistance.

US/military viewpoint  
News Source
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Author
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Title
IslamOnline
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Jack Dalton - The Country I Believe In
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Specific incidents / deaths  
Date killed?  
Total  
Civilian / Fighter  
Cumulative deaths [and injuries]  
Date range?  
Total  
Civilian / Fighter  
Selected info, comment, analysis

The article I read in IslamOnline, written by Sara Khorshid and titled "Pacify Fallujah," is right on the money from the opening paragraph. The US has no policy in Iraq other than beat the Iraqis down into the ground to the point that the Iraqi people become impotent in terms of taking charge of their own affairs and country. And in the meantime, the US forces and the mercenaries employed by the US military will continue to savage the people of Iraq. Gen Richard Myers will be right there attempting to convince us all that the United Sates does not murder innocent women and children, that women and children are being murdered in Fallujah because the "bad" guys are using them as "human shields." What a crock of *&%$! They tried to use that when this invasion started last year... it didn't wash then, it does not wash now!

Not only does the United States have way to many 18 - 24 year old kids pulling triggers but the number of mercenaries shooting people is outrageous to say the least. Surrounding an entire city, cutting off all entrances and exits to that city, cutting off the supply of water and electricity, shooting at ambulances, literally creating a "free fire zone" in an entire populated city, using B-52s to carpet bomb the city, and the list goes on � these are not the actions of a "free and democratic" country that worries about the human condition... these are the actions of a country that cares about nothing but its own selfish self-interest, period.

...

I grew up believing in a country that for all intense and purposes no longer exists. I know not in what country I now live... it is not the one I was willing to serve in uniform and serve two years fighting another war for.

...

The country that I grew up in and believed in would have investigated the attack and killing of the 17 innocent Iraq citizens in April of last year in the same city the United States is now in the process of making "disappear."


...

But this is just a letter of agreement to the analysis in Sara Khorshid's article. It is also the letter of an American (and a disabled Vietnam veteran) that is ashamed, to say the least, at what this country is doing in and to Iraq and the Iraqi people.

US/military viewpoint  

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