Journalists Tell of U.S. Falluja Killings

All is quiet in Falluja, or at least that is how it seems, given that the mainstream media has largely forgotten about the Iraqi city. But independent journalists are risking life and limb to bring out a very different story. The picture they are painting is of U.S. soldiers killing whole families, including children, attacks on hospitals and doctors, the use of napalm-like weapons and sections of the city destroyed.

One of the few reporters who has reached Falluja is American Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press Service. He interviewed a doctor who had filmed the testimony of a 16-year-old girl. “She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters. She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything. They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead,” Jamail relates.

Another report comes from an aid convoy headed up by Dr. Salem Ismael. He was in Falluja last month. As well as delivering aid he photographed the dead, including children, and interviewed remaining residents. Again his story does not tally with the indifference shown by the main media networks. “The accounts I heard…will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Falluja, but the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined,” he says. He relates the story of Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Julan district of Falluja: “Five of us, including a 55-year-old neighbor, were trapped together in our house in Falluja when the siege began. On November 9 American marines came to our house. My father and the neighbor went to the door to meet them. We were not fighters. We thought we had nothing to fear. I ran into the kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going to enter our house and it would be wrong for them to see me with my hair uncovered. This saved my life. As my father and neighbor approached the door, the Americans opened fire on them. They died instantly. Me and my 13-year-old brother hid in the kitchen behind the fridge. The soldiers came into the house and caught my older sister. They beat her. Then they shot her. But they did not see me. Soon they left, but not before they had destroyed our furniture and stolen the money from my father’s pocket.”

Journalist and writer Naomi Klein has also come under attack for insisting that U.S. forces are eliminating those who dare to count casualties. No less than the U.S. ambassador to the UK David Johnson wrote a letter to British newspaper The Guardian that published Klein’s work, demanding evidence, which she then provided. The first piece of evidence Klein sent to Johnson was that the hospital in Falluja was raided to stop any reporting of casualties, a tactic that was later repeated in Mosul:

“The first major operation by U.S. marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control. The New York Times reported that ‘the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties,’ noting that ‘this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents’ most potent weapons.’ The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers ‘stole the mobile phones’ at the hospital—preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world.”

As Dahr Jamail reports from his online diary “doctors are now technically forbidden to talk to the media or allow them to take photos in Iraqi hospitals unless granted permission from the Ministry of Health and its U.S.-adviser.” Allied to this are various reports of the U.S. using napalm and napalm-like weaponry in Falluja.

Jamail recounts: “Last November, another Falluja refugee from the Julan area, Abu Sabah, told me: ‘They (U.S. military) used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.’ “He explained that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burned peoples’ skin even when water was dumped on their bodies, which is the effect of phosphorous weapons, as well as napalm.”

The reports of the use of napalm in civilian areas are widespread, as are many other frightening allegations.

The attacks on the hospitals and medical facilities in Falluja are also in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions. But as Richard Perle, a senior adviser to U.S. President George Bush said at the start of the Iraq war: “The greatest triumph of the Iraq war is the destruction of the evil of international law.”

—Aljazeera, March 20, 2005