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Fallujah Revisited
By Dahr Jamail
11/14/05 "ICH
" -- -- Nearly a year after they occurred, a few of the
war crimes committed in Fallujah by members of the US military have
gained the attention of some major media outlets (excluding, of
course, any of the corporate media outlets in the US).
Back on November 26, 2004, in a story I wrote for the Inter Press
Service titled 'Unusual
Weapons' Used in Fallujah',
refugees from that city described, in detail, various odd weapons
used in Fallujah. In addition, they provided detailed descriptions
such as “pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt
the skin even when water was thrown on the burns.”
This was also mentioned in a web log I’d penned nine days before, on
November 17, 2004, named
Slash and Burn where one of the descriptions of these same weapons by the same
refugee from Fallujah said, “These exploded on the ground with large
fires that burnt for half an hour. They used these near the train
tracks. You could hear these dropped from a large airplane and the
bombs were the size of a tank. When anyone touched those fires,
their body burned for hours.”
On December 9th of 2004 I posted
a gallery of photos , many of which are included
in the new RAI television documentary about incendiary weapons having been used in Fallujah.
Like the torture “scandal” of Abu Ghraib that for people in the west
didn’t become “real” until late April of 2004, Iraqis and
journalists in Iraq who engaged in actual reporting knew that US and
British forces were torturing Iraqis from nearly the beginning of
the occupation, and continue to do so to this day.
All of this makes me wonder how much longer it will take for other
atrocities to come to light. Even just discussing Fallujah, there
are many we can choose from. While I’m not the only journalist to
have reported on these, let me draw your attention to just a few
things that I’ve recorded which took place in Fallujah during the
November, 2004 massacre.
In my story “Fallujah
Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone”
published on December 3, 2004 there are many instances of war crimes
which will, hopefully, be granted the attention they deserve.
Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi journalist who worked for the Lebanese
satellite TV station, LBC and who was in Fallujah for nine days
during the most intense combat, said Americans grew easily
frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English.
“Americans did not have interpreters with them,” Fasa’a said, “so
they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak
English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and
[they] shot people because [the people] didn’t obey [the soldiers’]
orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of
English.” He also added, “Soldiers thought the people were rejecting
their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn’t
understand them.”
A man named Khalil, who asked not to use his last name for fear of
reprisals, said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were
waving white flags while they tried to escape the city.
“I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,”
said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, a resident of Fallujah. “This happened
so many times.”
Other refugees recounted similar stories. “I saw so many civilians
killed there, and I saw several tanks roll over the wounded in the
streets,” said Aziz Abdulla, 27 years old, who fled the fighting
last November. Another resident, Abu Aziz, said he also witnessed
American armored vehicles crushing people he believes were alive.
Abdul Razaq Ismail, another resident who fled Fallujah, said: “I saw
dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of the
American snipers. The Americans were dropping some of the bodies
into the Euphrates near Fallujah.”
A man called Abu Hammad said he witnessed US troops throwing Iraqi
bodies into the Euphrates River. Abu Hammed and others also said
they saw Americans shooting unarmed Iraqis who waved white flags.
Believing that American and Iraqi forces were bent on killing anyone
who stayed in Fallujah, Hammad said he watched people attempt to
swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. “Even then the
Americans shot them with rifles from the shore,” he said. “Even if
some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their
heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.”
Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein reported witnessing
similar events. After running out of basic necessities and deciding
to flee the city at the height of the US-led assault, Hussein ran to
the Euphrates.
“I decided to swim,” Hussein told colleagues at the AP, who wrote up
the photographer’s harrowing story, “but I changed my mind after
seeing US helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to
cross the river.”
Hussein said he saw soldiers kill a family of five as they tried to
traverse the Euphrates, before he buried a man by the riverbank with
his bare hands.
“I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see
some US snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim,” Hussein
recounted. “I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for
about five hours through orchards.”
A man named Khalil, who asked not to use his last name for fear of
reprisals, said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were
waving white flags while they tried to escape the city. “They shot
women and old men in the streets,” he said. “Then they shot anyone
who tried to get their bodies.”
“There are bodies the Americans threw in the river,” Khalil
continued, noting that he personally witnessed US troops using the
Euphrates to dispose of Iraqi dead. “And anyone who stayed thought
they would be killed by the Americans, so they tried to swim across
the river. Even people who couldn’t swim tried to cross the river.
They drowned rather than staying to be killed by the Americans,”
said Khalil.
Why should blatant lying from the military come as a surprise? Even
back in November of 2003, I wrote about how US forces claimed to
have been attacked by, and then killed 48 Fedayin Saddam in Samarra.
Then magically, overnight, they raised the number to 54. Upon
investigation of this, I found that 8 civilians had been killed in
the city, and
wrote about it here and
posted photos of it here .
However, why should any of us be surprised at this? When we have an
administration which led the country into an illegal war of
aggression and continues to lie about it, events like torturing and
the use of incendiary weapons on civilians are small change.
(c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail. All images, photos, photography and text
are protected by United States and international copyright law. If
you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to
include this copyright notice and a prominent link to the
http://DahrJamailIraq.com website.
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