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'I
treated people who had their skin melted'
By Dahr Jamail
11/15/05 "The
Independent" -- -- Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed
something unusual. Sitting in November last year in a refugee camp
in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up for the families who
fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of the city's Jolan
district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's heaviest
fighting.
"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom
cloud," he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs explode into
large fires that
continued to burn on the skin
even after people dumped water on the burns".
As an unembedded journalist, I spent hours talking to residents
forced out of the city. A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah,
on the outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the
siege "who had their skin melted".
He asked to be referred to simply as Dr Ahmed because of fears of
reprisals for speaking out. "The people and bodies I have seen were
definitely hit by fire weapons and had no other shrapnel wounds," he
said.
Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the Lebanese
Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), witnessed the first eight days of
the fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies
that were burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So they
definitely used fire weapons, especially in Jolan district."
Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips to Reuters, LBC
would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled some
tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US
soldiers.
Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military to conceal
the use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping some of
the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted
resident, Abdul Razaq Ismail.
Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004, said: "In the
centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which
have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are
left as they were."
He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it on to
trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used
"special munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed from
each blast site.
The author is an unembedded journalist reporting from Fallujah
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