Eyewitness: US has turned Fallujah into another Sarajevo, (heartbreaking)

[G_j]

I found this account extremely disturbing..

http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18414

The 'Ceasefire' in Fallujah

By Dahr Jamail, The Nation
April 14, 2004

Fallujah, 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 U.S. Marine Corps munitions. Hospital officials report that more than 600 Iraqis have now been killed, most of them civilians. Two soccer fields in Fallujah have been converted to graveyards. I went to Fallujah 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 U.S. 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 Fallujah. 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 Fallujah was strewn with burned-out fuel tankers, trucks, armored personnel carriers (APCs) and tanks. As we approached Fallujah, we started running into mujahedeen checkpoints. Seeing our supplies and hearing that we were headed for Fallujah, the guerrillas let us pass.

..more..

[G_j]

1. Human Rights Watch: Probe Needed Into US Action in Falluja

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0413-03.htm

Published on Tuesday, April 13, 2004 by Reuters

Human Rights Watch: Probe Needed Into US Action in Falluja
by Luke Baker

BAGHDAD - A U.S. military offensive in Falluja last week in which 600 Iraqis may have died has raised concerns about excessive use of force and needs immediate investigation, a leading human rights group said Tuesday.

Civilians who fled the fighting described the streets of Falluja as being littered with bodies, including women and children, and Iraqi politicians have accused U.S. forces of meting out collective punishment on the city's residents.

"The questions being asked are very legitimate. When you cordon off a town and hear many stories that are very worrisome about civilians being killed it needs to be examined," said Hania Mufti, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based rights group.

"There is enough from the footage we've seen and from what has been said about what went on in Falluja to warrant a very serious investigation. We are deeply concerned about the consistent reports we are getting about women, children and unarmed civilians being killed," Mufti told Reuters.

..more..

[G_j]

2. Fallujah and Baghdad -- Eyewitness Accounts

http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0412-02.htm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APRIL 12, 2004
2:01 PM

CONTACT: Institute for Public Accuracy
Sam Husseini, [phone]
David Zupan, [phone]


Fallujah and Baghdad -- Eyewitness Accounts

WASHINGTON - April 12 -

-RAHUL MAHAJAN, [e-mail], www.empirenotes.org
Currently in Baghdad, Mahajan was just in Fallujah. He is regularly posting to a blog at the above web page. Mahajan is author of the book 'Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond'. Mahajan said today: "During the course of roughly four hours at a small clinic in Fallujah, I 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 her in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding.... Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian NGO InterSOS, had been pressed into service as the manager of the clinic, since all doctors were busy, working around the clock with minimal sleep.... He 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.' ... Nothing could have been easier than gaining the goodwill of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. People I interviewed vehemently denied that they were Saddam supporters and expressed immense anger and disappointment at American conduct.... 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. To Americans, 'Fallujah' may still mean four mercenaries killed, with their corpses then mutilated and abused; to Iraqis, 'Fallujah' means the savage collective punishment for that attack, with current reports of 600 Iraqis killed, including estimates of 200 women and over 100 children.... When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed."


-NAOMI KLEIN [e-mail] >, www.nologo.org
Klein is just back from Iraq. Her most recent article is "Fury Ignites Solidarity in Iraq" in the April 9 edition of the Los Angeles Times, in which she wrote: "Before U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer III provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Al Mahdi army was not fighting coalition forces; it was doing their job for them. After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority still hasn't managed to get the traffic lights working or to provide the most basic security for civilians. So in Sadr City, Sadr's so-called 'outlaw militia' can be seen engaged in such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding factories.... I saw charred cars, which dozens of eyewitnesses said had been hit by U.S. missiles, and I confirmed with hospitals that their drivers had been burned alive.... And Thursday, I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of the Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of what was Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City. A few hours earlier, witnesses said, U.S. tanks broke down the walls of the center after two guided missiles pierced its roof.... For months, the White House has been making ominous predictions of a civil war breaking out between the majority Shiites ... and the minority Sunnis.... But this week, the opposite appeared to have taken place...." Klein is author of the book 'Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate'.


-LAMIS ANDONI, [e-mail], www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR022803.htm
Andoni has covered the Mideast for various publications for two decades; she has been banned in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and was blacklisted in Jordan during the 1980s. She is currently a lecturer at the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been monitoring the Arab media. Andoni said today: "Fallujah clearly unmasks the reality of Bush's call for 'democracy' in the Middle East. Collective punishment of the Iraqi population underscores the fallacy of U.S. government claims about its motives.... The submissive Arab regimes, afraid of the U.S. government's wrath, are largely colluding with the Bush administration. They have not spoken out against the U.S. assault, instead stifling dissent at home on the administration's behalf." Bush meets today with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
For stories on Fallujah, see:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3619661.stm

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79CAAE90-3E7F-4815-B47D-46863A6...

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D334DDD4-F26F-483F-9AE4-E08BB9E...

[keithyboy]

3. just a kick!

People need to read this.

[opihimoimoi]

4. another kick

:kick:

[G_j]

5. and another..

:kick: