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Reference

Falluja Archive Oct 2004

Falluja Table - April 25

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IBC Extracted Falluja News - April 25

News Source
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Author
-
Title
Agence France-Presse
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Marwan Naamani
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VOLUNTEERS SET UP TENTS OUTSIDE BAGHDAD TO SHELTER FALLUJAH REFUGEES
Specific incidents / deaths

"They (Americans) claim to be democrats. Is killing and raiding innocent people a democratic thing?" asked Umm Khaled, 45, who lost her 15-year-old son and her 20-year-old nephew when a shell struck her house.

Date killed? pre-25th
Total

2 (15 & 20-yr-olds by shell on house)

Civilian / Fighter

2/0

Cumulative deaths [and injuries]

The fighting has already claimed 271 lives, according to the Iraqi health ministry.

Date range? 5th-22nd?
Total 271
Civilian / Fighter  
Selected info, comment, analysis

"I left my clothes and fled with my ten children from the war zone," said Mawla, who said several of his colleagues in the para-military ICDC did the same.

"We are not working for the Americans. We joined the ICDC to protect our city but not to fight our own people," he added.

Many ICDC members fled Fallujah, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad, or refused to take part in the fighting that pitted US marines against insurgents opposed to the occupation of their country.

...

Almost all the refugees deplored the fighting and said they wanted a peacful solution to the standoff. But they feel bitter towards the Americans.

...

"They are shelling the city in a savage way claiming that there are foreign fighters and they claim that they have arrested many of them. We ask them (marines) to show the media those fighters," said Abdel Hamid.

"Those who are fighting in Fallujah are the people of Fallujah. They are defending it because it is a symbol of Islam," he added.

US/military viewpoint

 

News Source
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Author
-
Title
Reuters
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05:51 AM ET
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Michael Georgy
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U.S. MARINES BIDE TIME IN FALLUJA QUAGMIRE
Specific incidents / deaths  
Date killed?  
Total  
Civilian / Fighter  
Cumulative deaths [and injuries]

U.S. spokesmen say an earlier deal on joint patrols, part of an agreement with Falluja's civic leaders two weeks ago to end ferocious fighting in which local doctors say 600 people were killed, was never implemented mainly due to continued attacks on American forces.

Date range? 5th-15th?
Total 600
Civilian / Fighter  
Selected info, comment, analysis

 

US/military viewpoint

"We could go into the town if I wanted to and turn it into gravel and then rub that gravel between my feet, but how will that help," asked Colonel John Coleman, chief of staff of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

...

A U.S. general has said that fighters have just days to hand over their heavy weapons or face the possibility of a renewed U.S. offensive they have suspended.

...

U.S. Marines, who say they fire back only when attacked, are eager to storm Falluja.

That could be a daunting task in a place where residents said thousands of civilians grabbed their AK-47 assault rifles and joined the guerrillas in resisting the crackdown.

...

Pondering options in a huge dirt lot among a reinforced battalion of light armored reconnaissance vehicles, Humvees, mortar units and infantrymen, a Marine intelligence analyst said the U.S. military could not afford to wait.

"We don't need patrols, we need to go house to house, we need to fight like they do, like guerrillas on the ground," said Lance Corporal Joe Bogan, 20, of Houston, Texas.

But even that approach poses risks.

"There will be booby traps, doors that will explode when we kick them in. They are a lot smarter than we think. I read in a report there were Iraqis who led soldiers to someone who they said need medical help. It was an ambush, four were killed."

News Source
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Author
-
Title
Empire Notes
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REPORT FROM FALLUJAH -- DESTROYING A TOWN IN ORDER TO SAVE IT
Specific incidents / deaths During the course of the roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth when they brought here in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding.
Date killed? 10th or later
Total 18 yr-old woman, young boy 'likely terminal' cases
Civilian / Fighter  
Cumulative deaths [and injuries] We were in Fallujah during the "ceasefire." We had heard all kinds of horrible things about what was going on. I think the current reports say something like 500-600 people killed in Fallujah, including estimates of 200 women and over 100 children (there are no women among the mujahideen, so all of the above are noncombatants. Many of the men who were wounded also told us they were just going about their business when they got hit).
Date range? 5th-10th
Total 5-600, 'current reports say'
Civilian / Fighter estimated 200 women and over 100 children
Selected info, comment, analysis

When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed. Electricity is provided by generators and usually reserved for places with important functions. There are four hospitals currently running in Fallujah. This includes the one where we were, which was actually just a minor emergency clinic; another one of them is a car repair garage. Things were very frantic at the hopsital where we were, so we couldn't get too much translation. We depended for much of our information on Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian NGO Intersos, and had been pressed into service as the manager of the clinic, since all doctors were busy, working around the clock with minimal sleep.

A gentle, urbane man who spoke fluent English, Al-Nazzal was beside himself with fury at the Americans' actions (when I asked him if it was all right to use his full name, he said, "It's ok. It's all ok now. Let the bastards do what they want.") With the "ceasefire," large-scale bombing was rare. The primary modes of attack were a little bit of heavy artillery and a lot of snipers.

Al-Nazzal told us about ambulances being hit by snipers, women and children being shot. Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah had become, he said, "I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization."

I had heard these claims at third-hand before coming into Fallujah, but was skeptical. It's very difficult to find the real story here. But this I saw for myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes in the windshield on the driver's side, pointing down at an angle that indicated they would have hit the driver's chest (the snipers were on rooftops, and are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There's no way this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots to kill people in driving the ambulances.

The ambulances go around with red, blue, or green lights flashing and sirens blaring; in the pitch-dark of a blacked-out city there is no way they can be missed or mistaken for something else). An ambulance that some of our compatriots were going around in, trading on their whiteness to get the snipers to let them throug to pick up the wounded was also shot at while we were there.

...

I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and wounds in his thighs that might have been from a cluster bomb; there was no way to verify in the madhouse scene of wailing relatives, shouts of "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), and anger at the Americans.

Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small group of isolated "extremists" repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others. One of the muj was wearing an Iraqi police flak jacket; on questioning others who knew im, we learned that he was in fact a member of the Iraqi police.

One of our translators, Rana al-Aiouby told me, "these are simple people." It is true that they are agricultural tribesmen with very strong religious beliefs. They are not so far different from the Pashtun of Afghanistan -- good friends and terrible enemies. They are insular and don't easily trust strangers. We were safe because of the friends we had with us and because we came to help them.

The muj are of the people in the same way that the stone-throwing shabab in the Palestinian intifada were. A young man who is not one today may the next day wind his aqal around his face and pick up a Kalashnikov. I spoke to a young man, Ali, who was among the wounded we transported to Baghdad. He said he was not a muj but, when asked his opinion of them, he smiled and stuck his thumb up.

Al-Nazzal told me that the people of Fallujah refused to resist the Americans just because Saddam told them to; indeed, the fighting for Fallujah last year was not particularly fierce. He said, "If Saddam said work, we would want to take off three days. But the Americans had to cast us as Saddam supporters. When he was captured, they said the resistance would die down, but even as it has increased, they still call us that."

Nothing could have been easier than gaining the good-will of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. Now, a tipping-point has been reached. Fallujah cannot be "saved" from its mujaheddin unless it is destroyed.

...

Saturday morning I got a call from my friend Dahr Jamail, with whom I have been traveling around in Iraq (his Iraq Dispatches are a valuable resource). A British journalist who had been making trips into Fallujah delivering medical supplies had told him that he was the only Western journalist in the town (there was also an al-Jazeera correspondent). He was organizing a bus of foreigners to go to Fallujah, with three purposes: we would take medicine in, evacuate wounded and women and children, and we would tell the world what we saw.

...

In a minute, I'll tell you what I saw. Right now, I'll just describe the most frightening two minutes of my life. We had spent most of our time at a makeshift hospital but were walking to one of the locals' houses to sleep. Fallujah is a blacked-out city and it was pitch-dark (the Americans bombed the power plant in the first day of the operation). It was a long walk, over half a mile, and the booming of Iraqi mortars and American heavy artillery was a continual accompaniment (booms you get used to and learn to ignore -- whines you don't want to ignore).

Suddenly, as we rounded a corner, we saw several bright flares. We took cover, sitting against a wall, and then we saw flares coming at us from the other directions. It turns out they were flares used by the unmanned Predator drone planes to light the area so they can get good pictures -- a good sign that the area would be bombed later, but not an immediate threat. Somebody, however, yelled "Cluster bombs," and we all freaked out (and indeed we had seen at least one patient in the hospital/clinic with wounds consistent with cluster bombs).

US/military viewpoint  

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