Billy Joel & Cass Dillon Performing "Christmas In Fallujah"

Stark reality interjects itself into our Christmas good cheer with this new, implicitly anti-war song recently written by Billy Joel, reminding us of the great gulf between rhetoric and reality in the United States of America, particularly amongst our rulers. But we citizens have been conditioned to this for decades through the techniques of Madison Avenue, where toxic junk can be packaged as the Mona Lisa.

While we are congratulating ourselves on being a pious Christian nation today, untold suffering is going on for the people of Iraq, nevermind all the spin about the Surge. Hundreds of thousands have been slain, many more wounded, millions displaced. Oh yes, some refugees are returning from Syria and Jordan, but that is largely because they have run out of money or been kicked out.

Worst of all is the painful reality of Fallujah, the Guernica of our times, which the American military, financed by us as taxpayers, helped decimate a month and three years ago. You have only to scroll down a few posts from this one to gauge the human carnage wrought in that assault.

So "Christmas in Fallujah" is a splash of cold water in our faces lest we grow too complacent about Iraq, inundated with endless spin doctrines obscuring the truth.

The Third Anniversay of the First Attack on Fallujah (Cont'd)

To the left is a segment of Picasso's famous painting, Guernica, which is every bit as applicable to Fallujah today as an eternal testimony to the evils of war. This April has marked the third anniversay of the first of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget. It was first published by the Southern I in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link to which site you can access by clicking on this article's title above. Here is Part 4, which details the end of the first siege in May of 2004, and also marks the suspension of this series until the Fall, to then commemorate the final destruction of Fallujah by the Americans in the November assault:


Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 4: An Uneasy Truce

By Mac McKinney


Around noon on April 9, the Marines, at the direction of Paul Bremer, the top American official in Iraq, unilaterally suspended combat in Fallujah. The rationale was not only to relieve the hospitals in Fallujah, but also to facilitate meetings between the Iraqi Governing Council and both the local Sunni and insurgent leadership in Fallujah, as well as permit the delivery of crucial humanitarian supplies to its citizens, and to allow them to treat their wounded and bury their dead.

The Marines also allowed thousands of frightened women, children and elderly residents to now leave Fallujah for safer ground, as well as allowing, apparently, males of military age to leave, something they would not permit in later hostilities. Meanwhile, the bulk of Coalition forces pulled back to the outskirts of the city while local Fallujan leaders reciprocated the ceasefire to a degree, but fighting did not end completely. A sort of low-intensity, tit-for-tat combat routine developed, with guerrillas conducting hit-and-run raids on Marine positions and supply convoys, and the Marines counterattacking, patrolling and conducting smaller scale operations without the continuous air support. And Marine snipers were still actively engaged.

A large influx of aid from throughout Iraq now began flowing into the city, after passing through hastily setup Marine checkpoints. To quote form the Associated Press:

"Up to 100 vehicles have been ferrying aid into Fallujah every day since Friday, when U.S. forces halted major attacks on Sunni Muslim insurgents after five days of fierce fighting, (Marine 1st Lt. David) Denial said. U.S. forces have set up checkpoints on all roads leading to the city, 35 miles west of Baghdad.

"Iraqis, many outraged by the bloody Marine siege of the city, have been sending donations of food, fuel, medical supplies and other aid in convoys organized by relief organizations, religious groups and private individuals.

"But rebels have been exploiting the relative calm to smuggle in the supplies they will need if fighting resumes, Marines say. Inside the city, insurgents have been using ambulances to transport weapons between neighborhoods, Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said.......'We have to be careful because ambulances are being used for legitimate purposes, but we are also treating them with suspicion,' Byrne said.

"Troops at the roadblocks barred many military-aged men from entering, fearing they were coming to join the battle against Marines as the fight for Fallujah becomes an anti-American rallying cry......Most people waiting at the roadblocks to get into the city were there to bring much-needed supplies to Fallujah's residents.

"Jamah Abdullah, 42, an ambulance driver for the Red Crescent Society, said he had been into the city several times in the past few days delivering aid.

"'There are many people dead. Many wounded. Houses destroyed, damaged. I am doing this to help,' he said.

"More than 600 Iraqis, mostly civilians, have been killed in the past week of fighting in Fallujah and scores more wounded, according to Rafie al-Issawi, the head of the city's hospital. At least five Marines have been killed, the military says."
(From a report by Lourdes Navarro, Associated Press Writer, 4/12/2004)

Reporting From Inside Fallujah
The embedded, corporate media did not focus much on the suffering inside Fallujah during the siege other than via film footage shot by Al Jazeera, the independent Arab broadcasting organization the White House demonizes daily for presenting less than flattering news about the American occupation of Iraq. The rest of the reporting was under the umbrella of the American military and was somewhat limited, to say the least, reflecting the military's main talking-point that civilians were being respected and only "bad guys" being slain. Only embedded reporters were officially permitted in Fallujah at all and they were certainly not allowed to wonder around unattended in off-limits areas.

Embedded reporters are basically on a leash, figuratively speaking. To become embedded in the first place, they all have to sign a Pentagon form agreeing to have their reporting censored, "if necessary", by the military, which already plants subtle inhibitions in reporters' minds before they even pick up a mike or pen. So whether or not a command officially censors anything, reporters already basically know there are limits. Then there is the innate self-censorship many corporate reporters have to practice to meet the expectations of their editors and publishers as well, who may or may not want to confront or embarrass the official Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld cartoon versions of reality. If you work for Fox News, which has an obvious pro-Administration bias, you are not going to be interviewing many Iraqis who condemn the American occupation. This will usually not get through Fox's top-down censorship.

So how do we know anything about the other side of the story in Fallujah? Because it is, first of all, pretty hard to censor several hundred thousand people who want and need to tell their stories, for the truth will always out eventually, and secondly, because a few independent, unembedded reporters actually managed to sneak into the city either just before or during the siege. Two of these were Al Jazeera correspondent, Ahmed Mansur, and his cameraman, Laith Mushtaq, who both stole into the city on April 3, 2004. It was Mushtaq's shocking images that were being broadcast to the world during the first week of the siege. Predictably, this brought down the wrath of both Gen. Mark Kimmitt, official military spokesman in Iraq, who excoriated Mansur by name, and Secretary Rumsfeld, who waxed indignant at Al Jazeera's purported villainy as propagandists. One of the first conditions of the ceasefire, believe it or not, was that Mansur and Mushtaq leave the city, so antithetical were their images to the sanitized Pentagon version of events.

Just what did this team see? I quote Mansur from an interview with Amy Goodman of democracynow.org on February 22, 2006 regarding the situation within Fallujah on April 9, 2004, in the hours before any ceasefire was called:

"It was really a disastrous day for us. When we reached the heart of the city at the hospital, I almost lost my mind from the terror that I saw, people going in each and every direction. Laith was with me and also another colleague, and I felt like we need 1000 cameras to grab those disastrous pictures: fear, terror, planes bombing, ambulances taking the people dead. And I was shouting and yelling for Laith and my other colleague, and I was shouting, 'Camera! Camera!' so that we can take pictures here and there.....We were trying to move this picture to the whole world, and we felt that we were responsible for all these civilians being bombed from planes and who are threatened with death...."

Laith Mushtaq, in the same interview, recounted his very first camera shot during the siege:

"And the first shot I took with my camera...., it was for a human being....burned completely. He was a wounded person. His family was transferring him to a hospital, which was close to the U.S. forces position, and it had the Red Crescent symbol and the Red Cross, because they put him in a pickup... and that was under fire. And I saw this person, the wounded person is torched, fired, burned. Even smoke was coming out of him. I was unable to go and see that scenery.

"I left him to go alone, and I stood far, and my sight was really bad and terrible because on that day, when we went to the hospital, there was a lot of children in the hospital that were wounded. Some children were brought and their families were dead already....That day made a terrible shock to me and shocked me extremely. I covered many wars, but every time you cover a war and you see corpses and dead people and children, believe me, every child I looked at, I remember my younger daughter."



















Wounded girl in pain. Photo Source: (http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=siege_of_falluja&id=falluja_wounded_girl)

An independent journalist, author, blogger and sometimes educator at New York University, Rahul Mahajan, who runs the website, Empire Notes (www.empirenotes.org) as well, also made it into Fallujah with several compatriots during the tenuous ceasefire. He describes, in his April 12 Report from Fallujah - Destroying a Town in Order to "Save" it, dreadful scenes of carnage, of a bombed out power plant, an ambulance shot at while his friends delivered the wounded in it, of bleeding and dying civilians. To quote Rahul:

"During the course of the roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was seizing 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. I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and shredded thighs, with wounds that could have been made from a cluster bomb....."

Regarding George Bush's depiction of the insurgents, Rahul states:

"Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin (an Iraqi term for resistance fighters) are a small group of isolated 'extremists' repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children, old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others."
(http://www.empirenotes.org/fallujah.html )

Rahul also estimated that over 600 Iraqis had been killed, roughly 200 of them women, over 100 of them children, with many more wounded. According to the manager of Fallujah General Hospital's latest figures, 736 Iraqis died in the April siege, some 60% of those being women, children, and the elderly. Marine Corps casualties overall were around 40 slain during Operation Vigilant Resolve.

Formal Truce in May
The intense political pressure to end the bloodshed finally led the Marine Corps to announce a formal ceasefire in early May. By now the Marines had tacit control over roughly half of the city, but General Conway of the Corps decided to take a risk and agreed to a brokered deal to hand over authority to an acceptable former Iraqi general, Major General Muhammed Latif, who was to lead the Fallujah Brigade, a new formed force of some 1000 or so Iraqis tasked with securing Fallujah for the Coalition forces, disarming the insurgents, and preventing attacks on nearby American bases. A Traffic Control Point would also be established on the eastern side of the city, to be jointly manned by Marines and Iraqi National Guardsmen. So the Marines, in essence, stepped back from the city, to watch and wait. Operation Vigilant Response had drawn to an end.

Inside Fallujah, emotions now ran high as the ominous threat of daily death and destruction abated. Mosques began proclaiming victory over the occupiers. "Allahu Akbar", "God is great!" rang out. Celebratory banners were unfurled, the mujaheddin parading around in trucks. Politically, a new dynamic had emerged in the city. The tribal elders' Civil Management Council and Mayor's office were a thing of the past. A militant, Islamist atmosphere openly defiant of the Americans now vibrated throughout Fallujah, born of the harsh conditions of the siege. The new Fallujah Brigade faced a tremendous challenge in trying to bring this new dynamic under control. And yet the future of the city depended upon it.


Next issue in the Fall, Part 5:

Cruel November Approaches

The Third Anniversay of the First Attack on Fallujah (Cont'd)

A segment of Picasso's famous work, Guernica, expressing the horrors of war

This April marks the third anniversay of the first of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget. It was first published by the Southern I in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link to which site you can access by clicking on this article's title above. Here is Part 3:


Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 3: Protests Amid the Onslaught

By Mac McKinney

As the Marine Corps siege of Fallujah intensified, guerrilla assaults and general combat were already erupting not only in Anbar Province, but throughout Iraq, in an eerie historical parallel to the bloody British assault on Fallujah in 1920, which also fanned revolt throughout the country, worsening the overall British position. Fox News reported how on Tuesday, April 6, 12 Marines, their post overrun by an apparently large force, were slain in Ramadi, some 24 miles to the west of Fallujah. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,116262,00.html)

From the previous weekend on, violence had flared from Kirkuk and Mosul in the north, on into Baghdad and its suburbs in central Iraq, to Kut, Nasiriyah, Karbala and Amarah in the south. Most alarming to the American-led Coalition forces was the armed resistance of the young fire-brand Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, whose father was a famous martyr against Saddam Hussein, and whom the Americans had just declared an outlaw, issuing a murder warrant for his arrest, a warrant, with apologies to the movie Apocalypse Now, about as meaningless as issuing a traffic ticket in this carnage-filled land.

Al-Sadr, with his own large, very loyal and well-armed Shiite militia, was already declaring solidarity with the citizens of Fallujah, and began engaging not only US troops, but the less visible British, Italians, and Ukrainians as well throughout the south on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. A number of these troops were wounded, one Ukrainian slain. As usual, the Iraqis had far higher casualties, and a very rough estimate of the death toll throughout these three days was 30 Americans and over 130 Iraqi fighters slain, with, typically, no official attempt to count purely civilian casualties. Moreover, who was a civilian and who was a guerrilla were often indistinguishable, so body counts of "insurgents" have always to be taken with a grain of salt. Whatever the count, the American command now realized that they had underestimated the Iraqi response to Operation Vigilant Response. Undermanned commanders were finding themselves so hard-pressed that they began jerking rear-guard troops out of offices and messes right into combat. "This is not like any other firefight we've seen so far," an unnamed military source is quoted as saying by Fox. "There are bullets flying all over the place."

Al-Sadr was not the only one declaring solidarity with Fallujah. The eyes of the world had been turned on Fallujah ever since the slaying of the Blackwater military contractors on March 31, and what many observers had warned against and now saw actually transpiring was an outright siege of a civilian population as a retaliatory measure, a clear flaunting of the modern Geneva Conventions. The newest Conventions were drafted, after the tremendous slaughter of civilian populations as well as awful abuse of prisoners of war in World War II, to reign in and criminalize such cruelties.

A Matter of Linguistics
So now the Bush Administration and military commanders in Iraq were walking a legal and ethical tightrope, disclaiming that a campaign that obviously contained elements of vengeance and collective punishment against Fallujah was not what it appeared to be. So the assault on the city was phrased in terms of freeing Fallujah from Baathist and foreign insurgents, as if the insurgents were themselves an oppressive, occupying force, rather then largely indigenous defenders of their city. Thus we could have an unnamed squad leader with 1st Platoon, Company E, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, quoted as saying rather disjointedly, "We will win the hearts and minds of Fallujah by ridding the city of insurgents. We're doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy". (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/fallujah.htm)

So the military mindset proffered that the insurgents were somehow an alien force to the city's population, and not really their husbands, sons, uncles and brothers. But this was the same skewed rhetorical ideology employed in Vietnam decades ago, as we patronizingly told the nodding rice farmer by day that the Viet Cong were his mortal enemy, while as night fell, that same rice farmer recovered his hidden weapons and became the Viet Cong.

This linguistic artifice, however, did not alter the fact that the Marines were going to have to knock down half of the city to achieve their goals, given that they estimated the number of insurgents in Fallujah might be as high as 20,000 fighters. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/oif-vigilant-resolve.htm)

Did the Bush Administration really want to go in that direction, one fraught with ghastly historical parallels of armies besieging civilian populations to root out guerrilla resistance, such as the infamous destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in WW II? Almost exactly 61 years earlier than Operation Vigilant Resolve, commencing in April of 1943, German Nazi forces all but razed the entire Jewish Ghetto as they hunted down and killed or captured several thousand Jewish resistance fighters intermingled with hapless and equally doomed noncombatants, methodically reducing block after block to rubble with artillery, tank fire and the outright torching of buildings.

Another, more recent example of besieging a city to destroy the resistance is the extremely brutal Russian assault on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, Russia's breakaway republic, in 1995, an assault that saw almost the entire city destroyed and over 20,000 people slain. How eager were Marine Corps commanders to now follow in the infamous footsteps of the Russians and Germans? And did they have much choice anyway, given that the Bush Administration was calling the political and strategic shots?

Snipers
Vociferous critics, however, both within Iraq and internationally, did not want to give the Marine Corps such a gruesome opportunity. As the Marines renewed their assault on Wednesday, April 7th, slowly subduing the city one block at time with ongoing combinations of aircraft, helicopters, artillery and tank support for the grunts on the ground, such groups as the International Occupation Watch Center, Baghdad, were issuing international appeals for protests and initiatives against the siege, as disquieting reports of attacks on civilians flooded in. At the same time Marines had been taking command of the rooftops of secured buildings, building them up with sandbags to create sniper and mortar nests, and putting their snipers to work. Snipers soon became the mainstay of battle wherever the Marines fell into a static situation, the typical sniper averaging 31 kills during the siege. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/oif-vigilant-resolve.htm)

Recalling that it is often not easy to distinguish civilians from insurgents other then by an insurgent's hands wrapped around a weapon, we must poignantly ask, how many mistakes were made by young Marines peering at a moving body several hundred yards away through a rifle scope, Marines perhaps seething with anger because a buddy had just been shot?

Recall also that the city had not been evacuated to any extent, and that panicked residents by the hundreds, if not thousands, with entire neighborhoods now being caught in crossfires, strafings and explosions, were running and hiding for their lives. One resident, Abu Muher, who escaped to Baghdad, recounts that American warplanes were bombing the city heavily before he left and that, "There were so many snipers, anyone leaving their house was killed". (Vigilant Resolve by Dahr Jamail and Omar Khan - http://www.williambowles.info/media/2005/media_iraq.html)

There were also continuing reports that ambulances were being shot at by snipers, although the Marines, while not exactly denying this, claimed vociferously that ambulances were delivering weapons and ammo to the insurgents. Regarding ambulances, one eyewitness recounted:

"Three of my friends agreed to ride out on the one functioning ambulance for the clinic to retrieve the wounded. Although the ambulance already had three bullet holes from a U.S. sniper through the front windshield on the driver's side, the fact that two of them are westerners was the only hope that soldiers would allow them to retrieve more wounded Iraqis. The previous driver was wounded when one of the sniper's shots grazed his head.

"What I can report from Falluja is that there is no ceasefire, and apparently never was. Iraqi women and children are being shot by American snipers. Over 600 Iraqis have been killed by American aggression, and the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards. Ambulances are being shot by the Americans. And now they are preparing to launch a full scale invasion of the city". (Vigilant Resolve by Dahr Jamail and Omar Khan - http://www.williambowles.info/media/2005/media_iraq.html)

An Al Jazeera shot of child slain during the seige

(photo source: http://bitterfact.tripod.com/iraq/images/falluja/children_4.jpg)


What the above witness is referring to regarding a ceasefire is what eventually developed by April 9, for as the scope of combat, destruction and casualties steadily mounted, the hospitals in Fallujah continued to report all this to Baghdad and the outside world. Doctors at Fallujah General Hospital and the Jordanian Hospital were incensed with the awful bloodshed of men, women and children and the growing lack of medical resources to cope with the wounded and dying. They found even greater cause for alarm when Marines took up positions on the roads to the hospitals. To quote one doctor, "The Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital, they prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications". (Vigilant Resolve by Dahr Jamail and Omar Khan - http://www.williambowles.info/media/2005/media_iraq.html)

The Marines had effectively shut down these hospitals, allegedly because insurgents were firing on them from there, as Brigadier General Kimmit would later state, but this claim has been hotly disputed. Be that as it may, the International Occupation Watch Center now released a statement on April 8 which read in part:

"Falluja and Adaamiya are currently under siege, surrounded by Occupation Forces, in contravention of the Geneva Convention that prohibits holding civilian communities under siege. Hospitals do not have access to sufficient medical aid, essential medicine and equipment or blood supplies. In Falluja, the hospitals have been surrounded by soldiers forcing doctors to establish field hospitals in private homes. Blood donors are not allowed to enter; consequently, mosques in both Baghdad and Falluja are collecting blood for the injured. Water and electricity have been cut off for the past several days". (http://www.notinourname.net/war/solidarity-call-8apr04.htm)

Such statements, coupled with the stark civilian casualty reports, were now beginning to strongly impact members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, who began to openly criticize the siege, condemning it as disproportionate and indiscriminate. This, coupled with mounting international pressure, finally led Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to declare a unilateral ceasefire on April 9, in part to allow the reopening of the hospitals. The mauled and bleeding city had won a temporary respite.

*****

Next Chapter, Part 4:
An Uneasy Truce

The Third Anniversay of the First Attack on Fallujah (cont'd)

A segment of Picasso's famous painting, Guernica




http://www.robertsilvey.com/photos/uncategorized/fallujah1.jpg



This April marks the third anniversay of the first of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget. It was first published by the Southern I in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link to which site you can access by clicking on this article's title above. Here is Part 2.

Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times
Part 2: The Destruction Begins

By Mac McKinney

"Violence will prevail over violence, only when someone can prove to me that darkness can be dispelled by darkness." - Mahatma Gandhi

*****
The slaying of the four Blackwater contractors, whom some would call soldiers of fortune, for they were well-trained weapons experts, one an ex-Navy Seal, the others former Army Rangers, and certainly not simple construction or relief workers, did not play well back in the States. The corporate media became obsessed with their grizzly deaths, and newspaper editorials raged over the manner of their deaths. Comparisons with the traumatic incident in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993, when slain GIs were dragged through the streets, further enflamed emotions and rhetoric. What was rapidly becoming lost in the corporate media and public responses was any in-depth, impartial analysis of the event or the background in Fallujah. Little mention was made that a number of the city's civilians had been slain by American forces or that the Army had been engaging in hostile and aggressive street patrols for months, often employing violent, destructive entries into homes that resulted in the arrests and imprisonment of Fallujah's citizens, including prominent ones. That tensions between Americans and citizens were very high is painstakingly obvious. That many Fallujans felt humiliated, angry or vengeful further belabors the point. That this growing list of grievances compelled some citizens to join some facet of the now multi-dimensional Iraqi insurgency is not a giant leap in logic. However, official American pronouncements and communiqués basically denied the legitimacy of these grievances, constantly referring to those taking up arms as Baathists, terrorists and "other malcontents." I suppose British officers said something similar about American rebels some 230 years ago.

So now the clichéd image of Fallujah as a lawless hotbed of insurgent violence somehow unrelated to an increasingly brutal occupation began to dominate the news. The "they" of the original mob action of some one thousand plus people easily segued into a wider "they", i.e. the people of Fallujah in general. Remembering that over three hundred thousand people inhabited Fallujah at the time, this was a dangerous segue indeed. If a mob of a thousand people rioted in downtown Norfolk over some incident, would the media be so quick to say that the "people" of Norfolk had rioted, that Norfolk was a lawless and violent city, or furthermore that the city should be brought to heel? We must remember, furthermore, that the American Army had been in official control of Fallujah for months supposedly pacifying the population, before pulling out in the last few weeks. If Fallujah was now deemed anarchistic, what does that say about the character of the Army's administration for the past year? Had the Army been unable to contain a chaotic situation, or had their presence actually created or aggravated the situation?

Fallujah Calm

Ironically, Fallujah, upon Saddam Hussein's overthrow, was decidedly more peaceful than many other parts of Iraq before American troops arrived in April of 2003. Human Rights Watch, in a report on Fallujah dated June, 2003, (Violent Response: the US army in al-Falluja) describes how tribal and religious leaders had created a Civil Management Council to maintain order against the widespread looting and vicarious destruction that was sweeping through the rest of Iraq at the time. The Council, acting through the tribes and Sunni imams, was largely successful. Tribal fealty and respect were powerful in Fallujah. Recall that Fallujah was nicknamed the City of Mosques, denoting a strong religious foundation, and had had a storied history as a Jewish academic center in the Middle Ages, for Islam generally accepted the Jews culturally for generations. It was now a modern, teeming, industrial city, not some primitive, backwater junction. And when the US Army first entered Fallujah, the tribes even elected a staunchly pro-American mayor, Taha Bidaywi Hamed, to negotiate with them.

Nor was the city the purely Baathist, pro-Saddam citadel often alleged in the corporate media. Although that element was indeed strong, the above-mentioned report states that: "Human Rights Watch did not find overwhelming sympathy for Saddam Hussein following the collapse of his government. Many al-Falluja residents told Human Rights Watch that they considered themselves victims and opponents of his repressive rule." This is, perhaps, not surprising, given that the city is famous for its spirit of rebellion. Indeed, Fallujah is best known in the minds of Iraqis as the symbol of resistance against the early 20th Century Imperial British occupation of their land.

Lawrence of Arabia Speaks Out

At the end of World War I the British, cynically carving up the defeated Ottoman Empire with their gleeful French allies, took control of what became the state of Iraq. By early 1920, however, the British government found itself facing a growing revolt there. T.E. Lawrence, more famously known as Lawrence of Arabia, had himself warned England not to attempt heavy-handed Imperialist designs against the independence aspirations of the Arabs, whom Lawrence had fought alongside and grown to respect as valiant, proud and determined guerrilla fighters, a people not to be taken lightly or treated disrespectfully. The British, however, threw caution to the wind and dispatched the famous English explorer, Lt. Col. Gerard Leachman, to stop a local rebellion in Fallujah. Leachman, however, was slain just south of the city in a confrontation with the local tribal leader, Shaykh Dhari. Vengeful, the British ordered the Imperial Army and Royal Air Force to crush the rebellion, and the ensuing assault on Fallujah cost more than 10,000 Iraqi and 1,000 British lives. Although Fallujah was bloodied and battered, even more widespread rebellion by both Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites now ensued. By August of 1920, Lawrence would write disgustedly:

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster."

"......We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?" (Sunday Times, August 2, 1920)

This decades-old missive to the London Times could just as well be written today and be equally as timely and truthful, if not more so. The growing rebellion was ultimately only defused in 1922 through the strenuous efforts of a young Winston Churchill, who personally enlisted Lawrence's considerable aid in resolving the conflict.

This, then, was the legacy of Fallujah when American-led coalition forces invaded Iraq, proclaiming themselves as liberators but soon acting, fundamentally, as occupiers usually act, that is, arrogantly and brutally, not unlike the British in 1920. Is it surprising that many Fallujans now felt an obligation to renew this legacy against the latest army of occupation? And you certainly didn't have to be a Baathist to feel this way. Let us reflect a moment. If a hypothetical British army were to occupy Massachusetts today, imposing martial law, ransacking houses and shooting, beating and incarcerating citizens, would not the inhabitants of Boston feel the heritage of their own revolutionary ancestors weighing upon them in a similar vein?

Operation Vigilant Resolve Begins

An order of battle was now being drawn up by military headquarters in Iraq. That American authorities were about to retaliate against Fallujah for the Blackwater contractor slayings became increasingly obvious to the world and to the inhabitants of Fallujah. It must be noted that a number of citizens both in Fallujah and throughout Iraq were combat veterans of the long and bloody Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988 with a pyrrhic Iraqi victory, and that some of these veterans were now helping to organize a hasty defense of Fallujah, and they may not have necessarily considered themselves members of any insurgent or guerrilla faction, but simply defenders of their city.

On April 2, 2004 Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmit removed any lingering doubts about US intentions by vowing to hunt down the killers and retake Fallujah. The American-managed Coalition Provisional Authority's Iraqi Governing Council seconded these sentiments and authorized the Iraqi National Guard to participate. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force moved into various positions to begin a massive operation, not only in Fallujah, but throughout Anbar Province, part of the Sunni Triangle, to strike broadly at the insurgency.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, on or around April 4, 2004, Operation Vigilant Resolve was launched, originally publicized as a combined US Marine-Iraqi National Guard operation, but the recently created Iraqi units had little stomach for combat. Most, if not all, deserted, some declaring that they did not sign up to fight fellow Iraqis. So this became, essentially, a Marine Corps operation, combining infantry and armored divisions, artillery, and Marine and Navy air support. The Marines had at their disposal Navy F/A-18 Hornet carrier-based Fighter-Bombers equipped with 20-mm cannon for strafing and 500-pound GBU-12 laser guided bombs, as well as lethal AC-130 "Spectre" gunships, F-15 Fighters and Cobra Attack Helicopters.
(http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/oif-vigilant-resolve.htm)

The huge AC-130 gunship is fitted with a battery of Gatling guns and cannons capable of saturating an entire football field with heavy fire in mere seconds, and incorporates an ultra high-tech fire control and night vision system second to none in the world. An earlier model was first employed in the Vietnam War with devastating effect and was nicknamed, with blackest humor, "Puff, the Magic Dragon", the title of a popular children's song by Peter, Paul and Mary.

On the ground, the Marines sealed off and cordoned Fallujah into four quadrants and began to cautiously enter the city, their stated intention, in particular, to arrest the perpetrators of the Blackwater slayings and other attacks, if that was even remotely feasible, and in general, to engage and neutralize active enemies of American forces and the Coalition-created Iraqi government.

As the Marines slowly plodded ahead, explosions and gunfire could be heard on Monday, April 5, as skirmishes between the Marines and random Fallujan gunmen began to break out. Monday's attacks could well be considered probing actions by both sides. On Tuesday, things began to intensify dramatically as the Marines drove toward the center of the city, drawing increasingly heavy hostile fire. The Marines soon realized that they were facing an enemy experienced in Russian-style defense-in-depth tactics, most likely led by army veterans from the Iran-Iraq war. The Marines' advance now morphed into a fierce battle against guerrillas holed up in a residential neighborhood and laying down fire that included mortars and RPGs (Rocker Propelled Grenades), a firefight that lasted for hours, causing exasperated commanders to call in an AC-130 "Spectre" that duly sprayed Iraqi positions with a hailstorm of bullets. How many insurgents or hapless residents were caught in this deadly fusillade is not really known, but the fact that the command was even willing to deploy the AC-130 over a residential neighborhood would serve as a grim omen for the city.

Casualties were now beginning to mount on all sides, including among non-combatants. The hospitals in Fallujah were starting to see a steady stream of the wounded and dying. As night fell, the Marines pulled back from their forward-most positions and called in air strikes, American warplanes, according to a Fox News report, firing rockets that destroyed four houses, with a doctor claiming, the report continues, that 26 men, women and children were slain in this attack, another 30 wounded. Throughout the night in various parts of the city, Marine squads weaved in and out of buildings, engaging guerrillas sporadically and trying to stake out posts, while the heavy whirl of rotary blades could be heard overhead as Marine helicopters circled, hovered or darted about above the rooftops, laying down intermittent fire against perceived enemy positions.

As the night wore on and the first rays of sunlight began to illuminate the horizon, violence, which had yet to reach its apex in the City Of Mosques, was also beginning to erupt throughout Iraq, as if Fallujah had been but the fuse to ignite an even larger powder keg.

(Combat source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,116262,00.html)


Next article, Part 3:
Protests Amid the Onslaught

The Third Anniversay of the First Attack on Fallujah

Photo of destroyed Guernica after Nazi bombing, from http://www.search.com/reference/Bombing_of_Guernica



























Above, a photo of destruction in Fallujah during American assaults, from www.firedoglake.com

This April marks the third anniversay of the first of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget. It was first published by the Southern I in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link to which can be accessed by clicking on this article's above title.

Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 1: The City of Mosques

By Mac McKinney

On the afternoon of April 26, 1937 the Basque city of Guernica, Spain suddenly became the target of wave after wave of German Nazi and Italian Fascist aerial bombardment and strafing. Hitler and Mussolini had allied themselves with General Franco's Falangist forces against the Second Republic of Spain and had sent air squadrons and other assets to the Spanish front in solidarity. Spearheading the Luftwaffe contingent was the Condor Legion, equipped with Junkers bombers and fighter escorts well-suited for strafing.

Over a period of several hours Guernica was all but demolished, a fierce firestorm generated by the bombings completing the destruction of three quarters of the city's buildings. The death toll has never been accurately assessed, with estimates ranging from 120 to 10,000. The then Basque government put the total at 1650 minimum.

Motivation for the horrific attack was apparently to demoralize the Republicans and terrorize civilians. Guernica served no strategic importance. The bombing also occurred shortly after the capture and lynching of a German pilot in nearby Bilbao. So Nazi retaliation, always high in proportionate response, may have been another key factor.

Guernica is memorialized in history as the first city to be destroyed by air assault. Pablo Picasso went on to immortalize this terrible event with his famous and disconcerting painting, simply entitled "Guernica."

Fast forward some 66 years, past decade upon decade of ongoing, world-wide wars and destruction, to April of 2003 and the Iraqi city of Fallujah, in the Sunni triangle of Iraq, situated some 43 miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River. An historical city dating back to Babylonian times, Fallujah is known as the "City of Mosques", housing some 200 Islamic houses of worship. It was also an important center of Jewish academies for several centuries. When Operation Iraqi Freedom, the American-dominated invasion of Iraq began in March, 2003, the city's population was some 350,000.

American troops first entered Fallujah in April of 2003, quickly setting up their headquarters in the former Baath Party headquarters, which caused immediate local resentment. However, a Fallujah Protection Force composed of cooperating Iraqis was soon established to help maintain order. But things rapidly turned sour when an incident on April 28 revolving around curfew violations led to the deaths of 15 Iraqis from American gunfire.

The Army's 82nd Airborne Division spearheaded the patrolling of Fallujah and interestingly, a documentary, Operation Dreamland, was actually made, focusing on one patrol's daily routines and survival in Fallujah. The documentary shows how the air was tense and dangerous, while relations with civilians became increasingly abrasive, as the insurgency throughout Iraq and likewise Fallujah strengthened and spread. Killings of American soldiers started to take a toll, and heavily armed Americans patrols often included forced entries and weapons searches of Iraqi homes, with the males in the family often arrested, black-hooded and driven off for interrogation and/or imprisonment.

By March, 2004, the Army was ordered to abandon Fallujah, to be replaced by the Marine Expeditionary Force. However, March was a bad month for relations in Fallujah. On March 29, citizens protesting the American occupation of a school refused to disperse when ordered and were eventually fired upon by American forces. According to the BBC, 17 Iraqis died, the Army arguing that the protesters were armed, eye witnesses claiming they were not. Two days later, another protest occurred outside the old Baath party headquarters and mayor's office. Three more Fallujans were slain. And this was all transpiring while the Army was trying to pull out of the city. Obviously tensions between Americans and Fallujans were getting worse and worse.

That same day, March 31st, another, much more ominous event occurred. Four military contractors for Blackwater USA drove into Fallujah, apparently lost. They were attacked and slain, their bodies mutilated and burned and then ultimately hung from the nearby bridge over the Euphrates. A large crowd, estimated at over a thousand, congregated and participated to various degrees, jubilant at the Americans' death. This was videotaped by nearby journalists and eventually broadcast around the world. In the United States, cries of outrage and calls for retaliation were immediate and forceful.


Next article, Operation Vigilant Resolve:
The Destruction Begins