You want to know about WAR CRIMES? Falluah, the Guernica of Our Times, Part 7

Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 7: Fallujah Becomes Guernica

By Mac McKinney

"The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being. When he violates this sacred trust, he not only profanes his entire cult but threatens the very fabric of international society. The traditions of fighting men are long and honorable. They are based upon the noblest of human traits - sacrifice."

-General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur, 1946, confirming the death by hanging sentence imposed by a United States military commission on General Tomayuki Yamashita, convicted of failing to prevent Japanese Imperial troops under his command from committing massacres and outrages against prisoners of war and civilians in the last stages of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.

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After "capturing" Fallujah General Hospital and isolating its staff from the outside world, American forces continued to sweep into the city, pounding targeted areas with artillery and air power to soften them up, as well as cutting all electrical power by late Tuesday, 09 November 2004. Insurgent resistance varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, in some instances light, in others heavy, but fluid enough to reinforce some areas under attack that were hard-pressed. Even so, the best the Mujaheddin, playing David to the U.S. Goliath, could hope to do was to delay the inevitable against overwhelmingly superior firepower, logistics and technology.

By November 10, after two days of fighting, CENTCOM announced that they had taken about 70% of the city. The northwestern Jolan district was occupied with little resistance, as well as the main east-west highway. However, to the southwest, the Resala and Nazal neighborhoods were putting up a better fight. Coalition forces, generally going house to house, continued to target for assault or destruction all buildings that were deemed to be sheltering insurgents, whom we must recall are usually difficult to differentiate from civilians. Unfortunately, targets included many mosques, such as Al Tawfiq and Muhammadia , which were alleged to either be housing wounded fighters or serving as command centers and bunkers.

On November 12, Coalition forces continued to force the Mujaheddin into the southeast corner of the city while the Iraqi Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, declaring the situation in Fallujah a "big disaster", requested permission to enter the city, but received no official reply. By the following day, officials stated they had achieved control of most of the city and were beginning house-to-house clearing operations, claiming that a thousand or so insurgents had been slain and 200 captured.

By November 15, ground troops were still plodding on, house-to-house, aided by ongoing air strikes, artillery, tanks, and explosives experts. The Red Crescent was still not allowed into the city, so they turned their trucks toward the outlying villages where tens of thousands of Fallujans were encamped in tents in very desperate straits.

The following day CENTCOM declared victory in Fallujah, other than for isolated pockets of resistance, which would linger on with nagging persistence. According to GlobalSecurity.org: "As of 15 November 2004, 38 U.S. troops, six Iraqi soldiers and an estimated 1200 insurgents had been killed. Three of the U.S. fatalities were non-battle related injuries. Approximately 275 U.S. troops were wounded as well."
(http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/oif-phantom-fury-fallujah.htm )

Several senior military officers now began to predict that the insurgency in Iraq would soon collapse.

This, in a nutshell, was the sanitized version of events that was flowing from the corporate media in November. The Pentagon's embedded reporters were, as usual, kept on a tight leash regarding physical access to the city and were briefed regularly by military spokesmen on the "liberation of Fallujah". Moreover, there were no independent, live-reporting media crews within Fallujah during major hostilities, unlike the April siege. Still, the universe itself has eyes and ears, so to speak, and so the unvarnished, other side of the story, with powerful allegations, eventually began to surface, a tiny portion of which I am recounting here. Some of what follows has been corroborated, some of it not, so the reader must decide for himself the veracity of each eye-witness account.

Eye-Witnesses

Let us begin with information provided in this year's Project Censored book, "Censored 2006", that lists civilian suffering in Fallujah as the second biggest story ignored by the Establishment media in 2005. The following is recounted from the book's report, Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death Toll, and addresses, among other things, American house-to house searches:

"Burhan Fasa'a, an Iraqi journalist, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English. 'Americans did not have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people because they didn't speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and shot people because [the people] didn't obey [the soldiers'] orders, even just because the people couldn't understand a word of English.'

"Abu Hammad, a resident of Fallujah, told the Inter Press Service that he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. 'The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore. Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their head to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.' Furthermore, 'even the wound[ed] people were killed. The Americans made announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed.' Former residents of Fallujah recall other tragic methods of killing the wounded. 'I watched them [US Forces] roll over wounded people in the street with tanks ... This happened so many times.'

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