In "Masters of War", Bob Dylan
sang, "Hide behind desks" but "we can see through your
masks". Now, applying their version of grassroots
democracy, the US has declared that Fallujah has been
"liberated". But the virtual ghost town is celebrating
with no cries of joy - with no cries at all: only with
the stench of tons of explosives, and the stench of
decomposing bodies.
Baghdad
sources close to the resistance
tell Asia Times Online that in essence the
Americans control only northern Fallujah and the main
boulevards; the resistance controls the narrow alleys,
and the southern part of the city. At night, anyone is a
target - either to the resistance or to American
snipers. What the resistance is stressing is the
Mesopotamian version of a rapper in urban black America:
"The man control the day; we control the night."
A hard rain's gonna fall What the
US has achieved with Fallujah reduced to a pile of
rubble and hundreds of thousands of new refugees
is unprecedented Sunni anger. A slow stream of
residents who managed to escape from Fallujah to Baghdad tell
of women and children killed by shrapnel or hit by US
bombs. According to trader Aamir Yusouf, who remains in
town after smuggling his family out, "there will be
nothing left of Fallujah by the time they finish".
Baghdad is swirling with rumors and conspiracy
theories and many people do not know the extent of the
horror in Fallujah - some blame the Arab media for
talking obsessively about Yasser Arafat and forgetting
about Iraq. Baghdad airport remains closed. A lot of
anger exploded at last Friday's prayers. At the
al-Jilani mosque, Sheikh Mahmoud al-Isawi said that "the
start of this war during the holiest nights of the month
of Ramadan proves how much they hate Islam and Muslims".
At the Umm al-Qura mosque, the headquarters of the
powerful Association of Muslim Scholars, Sheikh Mohammed
Bashar al-Faidi told a crowd of thousands that "all of
Iraq will turn in the next few days into one Fallujah
whether America likes it or not", adding that any
election under the occupation would be illegitimate.
Mosul remains under control of the resistance,
which is protecting banks, shops, hospitals, schools and
fire stations from looters. The US base in Mosul -
a former Saddam Hussein presidential palace - was looted
this weekend by local citizens, not by the resistance.
Now, apart from the Sunni triangle, even the Shi'ite
holy city of Najaf is also under martial law.
An
assistant cleric to Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi, the head
of the Fallujah mujahideen shura
(council) that controlled the city before Operation Phantom Fury,
said that "maybe [the Americans] will take it [Fallujah].
But it is not the end. There are 18 provinces in Iraq
and the resistance will continue to grow tougher ...
America has taken its last breath." This is something that
will never be reported in mainstream US media - which
keeps hammering the "humanitarian" approach of the US
onslaught. And it won't be reported in the Iraqi press
either, because under martial law everybody has to
parrot the interim government's position - this
operation is a major success - or else go to jail.
There were
unconfirmed reports last week that al-Janabi was killed
by US bombing, but the shura's cleric insisted that "the sheikh is still
in Fallujah leading the resistance".
Qasim
Dawud, interim Premier Iyad Allawi's version of US
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, said for his
part that more than 1,000 "Saddamists and terrorists"
had been killed, and 200 captured. Of those 200 only 14
are believed to be "foreign fighters", most of them
Iranians. The notion that Shi'ite Iranians would be
defending Sunni Fallujah is ludicrous - one more crude
neo-conservative plot to implicate Tehran. Later Allawi
talked of 400 captured - and a non-specified number of
foreigners being mostly Syrians, Saudis, Afghans and
Moroccans. As for the elusive, perhaps non-existent, Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, the alleged main reason for the US
razing Fallujah, Dawud said "he has escaped".
Dawud said that only "malignant pockets" remain
in Fallujah. That's not what the resistance and
independent observers are saying. Abu Saad al-Dlimi, the
spokesman of the Fallujah mujahideen shura, told
al-Jazeera that "US forces are still outside the
[northwestern] Julan neighborhood. US forces were not
able to gain one meter of this district." Haza al-Afify,
an Iraqi journalist inside Fallujah, confirmed to
al-Jazeera that "fighting is also raging in the
southern and southeastern neighborhoods, particularly
al-Shuhada and the industrial quarter". Al-Afify added
that "if these neighborhoods are mere pockets, Fallujah
will be harboring so many pockets".
Al-Dlimi
insisted that "if the US forces mean by calling the
neighborhoods of al-Askari, al-Shuhada, al-Sina'i,
al-Jughayfi, al-Wihdah and al-Jumhuriyah ... pockets [of resistance]
which they do not control thus far, I tell you
that Fallujah consists only of all these neighborhoods".
The resistance story contradicts the United
States' spin. Al-Dlimi said no more than 100 "martyrs" were
killed: with most victims "defenseless civilians,
including those who were run over by the US forces'
tanks".
The US won't be pleased by his
suggestion that "if [the Americans] say they have
wrapped up operations in Fallujah, we are telling them
to allow all satellite networks to enter the city ... so
the world can see what is really happening in the
streets of Fallujah".
On Saturday the
Iraqi Red Crescent sent seven trucks and ambulances,
53 volunteers and three doctors to Fallujah to
distribute food, blankets, water-purification tablets and medicine
to hundreds if not thousands of families caught in the
crossfire. But the US has prevented them from entering
the city: the Red Crescent was held at Fallujah's
general hospital, "captured" by the Americans early last
week, on the left bank of the Euphrates River. Abu Fahd,
one of the volunteers, said that "none of the injured
residents is being allowed to come to the hospital,
while those outside are not allowed to go into town".
The Iraqi Red Crescent knows as much
as anyone in contact with Fallujah that the city has
no medicine, no ambulances, no shelters, no power,
no water, practically no food, and that the wounded are
left to die while the streets are already littered
with the dead. But although the Americans now insist they control
80% of the city, they have blocked the Iraqi Red
Crescent because for them there are no Iraqi civilians
trapped inside. The Iraqi resistance is a shadow army:
the US military machine bombs it to oblivion, but
rarely sees it. The thousands of civilians caught in the
crossfire in Fallujah are also invisible - but they have
even been denied their existence.
The
horror faced by Fallujah's civilians has hardly begun to
emerge, although precision-strike democracy has started
to be denounced by some who managed to escape Fallujah
in these past few days.
Blood on the
tracks Not only "invisible" civilians are dead
and buried in Fallujah - but the Geneva Convention as
well. "Capturing" a major hospital and turning it into a
military target; preventing civilians and noncombatants
from escaping from, and forcefully returning them to, a
war zone: these are war crimes, according, among others,
to James Ross, senior legal advisor to Human Rights
Watch.
Add to these rules of engagement the
bombing of three small clinics - in one of them the
medical staff and the patients were killed;
highly-trained American snipers "shooting anything that
moves", according to eyewitness accounts in Fallujah to
families and friends in Baghdad; entire Fallujah
neighborhoods reduced to rubble by at least two weeks of
air strikes - killing residents even before Operation
Phantom Fury began; the bombing of the only telecom
center linking Fallujah to the rest of the world; and
the scandal of water to Tall Afar, Samarra and Fallujah
being cut off during US attacks in the past two months,
affecting up to 750,000 civilians - a case fully
documented by the Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq and a
serious contravention of international humanitarian law.
The .50-caliber machine-gun has became a
free-for-all (its use on human targets is specifically
forbidden by the Geneva Convention). Most private cars
in Fallujah have been destroyed (they could be used for
suicide bombings). And ambulances have been grounded.
Tangled up in war Dr Zafir al-Ani, an
Iraqi political scientist, in an extensive interview
with al-Jazeera, has laid out the extent of Sunni anger:
"There is now a general Iraqi agreement that resistance
is the only way ... I say that the Iraqi government is
pushing towards a real civil war in Iraq against the
Sunni and the pan-Arab current ... There are many
exclamation marks lingering over the stance of the
authority of holy Najaf regarding what is happening in
Iraq, at a time when the Association of Muslim Scholars
- and everyone remembers this - condemned and renounced
what happened to our brethren in Najaf, Karbala and Sadr
City. This authority is now also trying to quell the
Shi'ite pan-Arab current. Ayatollah al-Hasani was
detained because he called for boycotting the elections
[in January]. There have also been preparations for some
time to oppress the [Muqtada] al-Sadr current and to
contain dealings with the government through a few known
parties. The Iraqi government is oppressing the Shi'ite
pan-Arab current and the national Sunni current."
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