[Reader-list] Remember Iraq?

[Vivek Narayanan]

Remember Iraq? For those who haven't seen these two articles, one is a 
remarkable look at what actually happened in Falluja and another is 
about the even more disastrously stupid turn of US war policy in the 
dawning realization of the fact that most of the fighters left Falluja 
by the 9th day of the offensive.


V


CITY OF GHOSTS

On November 8, the American army launched its biggest ever assault on 
the Iraqi city of Falluja, considered a stronghold for rebel fighters. 
The US said the raid had been a huge success, killing 1,200 insurgents.

Most of the city's 300,000 residents, meanwhile, had fled for their 
lives. What really happened in the siege of Falluja? In a joint 
investigation for the Guardian and Channel 4 News, Iraqi doctor Ali 
Fadhil compiled the first independent reports from the devastated city, 
where he found scores of unburied corpses, rabid dogs - and a 
dangerously embittered population Watch an extract from the documentary 
<http://guardian.co.uk/guardianfilms/fallujah>

*Ali Fadhil *

*Tuesday January 11, 2005*

*Guardian*

* December 22 2004 *

It all started at my house in Baghdad. I packed my equipment, the camera 
and the tripod. Tariq, my friend, told me not to take it with us. "The 
fighters might search the car and think that we are spies." Tariq was 
frightened about our trip, even though he is from Falluja and we had 
permission from one group of fighters to enter under their protection. 
But Tariq, more than anyone, understands that the fighters are no longer 
just one group. He is quite a character, Tariq: 32 and an engineer with 
a masters degree in embryo implantation, he works now at a human rights 
institute called the Democratic Studies Institute for Human Rights and 
Democracy in Baghdad. He is also deeply into animal rights.

Foolishly, I took a pill to try to keep down the flu, which made me 
sleepy. It was 9am when we crossed the main southern gate out of 
Baghdad, taking care to stay well clear of American convoys. The 
southern gate is the scene of daily attacks on the Americans by the 
insurgents - either a car-bomb or an ambush with rocket-propelled grenades.

It took just 20 minutes from Baghdad to reach the area known as the 
"triangle of death", where the kidnapped British contractor Kenneth 
Bigley was held and finally beheaded in the town of Latifya. It is 
supposed to be a US military-controlled zone, but insurgents set up 
checkpoints here. As the road became more rural and more isolated, I got 
nervous that at any moment we would be stopped by carjackers and robbed 
of our expensive equipment. At a checkpoint a hooded face came to the 
window; he was carrying an old AK47 on his shoulder and looking for a 
donation towards the jihad. There were six fighters in total, all 
hooded. The driver and Tariq both made a donation; I was frightened he 
would search the car and find the camera, so I gave him my Iraqi 
doctor's ID card, hoping that would work. He apologised and asked that 
we excuse him.

Now, there was nothing ahead but the sky and the desert. It was 1.30pm 
and a bad time to use this road; we had been told that carjackers were 
particularly active at this time of day. Tariq pointed out four young 
men dressed in red, their two motorbikes parked by the side of the road. 
They were planting a small, improvised explosive device made out of a 
tin of cooking oil for the next American convoy to leave the base 
outside Falluja.

It was 3.30pm before we got to Habbanya, a tourist resort on a lake 
supplied with fresh water by the Euphrates, which was once controlled by 
Uday, Saddam's oldest son. It was here that Fallujans, who used to be 
wealthy as they supplied a lot of the top military for Saddam's army, 
came for holidays.

Now the place was freezing, and full of refugees. All the holiday houses 
were crammed with people, sometimes two families to a room. The first 
family we came across had been there since a month before the attack 
started. A man called Abu Rabe'e came up. He was 59 and used to be a 
builder; he said he had a message for our camera. "We're not looking for 
this sort of democracy, this attacking of the city and the people with 
planes and tanks and Humvees." He had also fled Falluja with his family. 
They were all living in a former mechanic's garage in Habbanya.

Most of the people we spoke to in Habbanya were poor and uneducated, and 
had fled Falluja in anticipation of the US attack. Some were in tents; 
others were sharing the old honeymoon suites where newlyweds used to 
come when this was a holiday resort. They squabbled among themselves to 
persuade me to film the conditions they were living in. There was still 
a fairground in Habbanya, but nothing was working. In the middle of the 
bumper cars an old lady had pitched a tent with bricks, where she was 
living with her son. I tried to talk to her but she told me to go away. 
There was no cooking gas in Habbanya, so the Fallujan refugees were 
cutting down trees to keep warm and cook food.

Then someone came up and said the resistance fighters had heard we were 
asking questions. We decided to put the camera away and go to a friendly 
village that our driver knew. It was also filled with refugees from 
Falluja.

One 50-year-old man, a major in the Iraqi Republican Guards under the 
former regime, took us in. There were four families squeezed into one 
apartment, all of them once wealthy. The major, like the others, was 
sacked after the liberation when the US disbanded the army and police. 
Now jobless, his house in Falluja was wrecked and he was a refugee with 
his five children and wife near the town where he used to spend his 
holidays. He was angry with the Americans, but also with the Iraqi 
rebels, whom he blamed, alongside the clerics in the mosques, for 
causing Falluja to be wrecked.

"The mujahideen and the clerics are responsible for the destruction that 
happened to our city; no one will forgive them for that," he said with 
bitterness.

"Why are you blaming them - why don't you blame the Americans and 
Allawi?" said Omar, the owner of the apartment.

"We told the mujahideen to leave it to us ordinary Fallujans, but those 
bloody bastards, the sheikhs and the clerics, are busy painting some 
bloody mad picture of heaven and martyrs and the victory of the 
mujahideen," said Ali, another refugee. "And, of course, the kids 
believe every word those clerics say. They're young and naive, and they 
forget that this is a war against the might of the machine of the 
American army. So they let those kids die like this and our city gets 
blown up with the wind."

I wanted to ask the tough old Republican guard why they had let these 
young muj have the run of the city, but I actually didn't have to. I 
remember being in Falluja just before the fighting started and seeing a 
crowd gathered around a sack that was leaking blood. A piece of white A4 
paper was stuck on to the sack, which read: "Here is the body of the 
traitor. He has confessed to acting as a spotter for American planes and 
was paid $100 a day."

At the same time as we were standing looking at the sack, I knew I would 
be able to buy a CD of the man in this sack making his confession before 
he was beheaded in any CD shop in Falluja. These were the people who 
controlled Falluja now - not old majors from Saddam's army.

* December 24 *

In the morning we went back towards Falluja and heard that there were 
queues of people waiting to try to get back into the city. The 
government had made an announcement saying that the people from some 
districts could start to go back home; they promised compensation. About 
midday we got a mile east of the city and saw that four queues had 
formed near the American base. They were mostly men, waiting for US 
military ID to allow them back home.

The men were angry: "This is a humiliation. I say no more than that. 
These IDs are to make us bow Fallujan heads in shame," one of them said.

I met Major Paul Hackett, a marine officer in the Falluja liaison base. 
He said that the US military was not trying to humiliate anyone, but 
that the IDs were necessary for security. "I mean, my understanding is 
that ultimately they can hang this ID card on a wall and keep it as a 
souvenir," he said.

They took prints of all my fingers, two pictures of my face in profile, 
and then photographed my iris. I was now eligible to go into Falluja, 
just like any other Fallujan.

But it was late by then, somewhere near 5pm (the curfew is at 6pm). 
After that anyone who moves inside the city will be shot on sight by the 
US military. Tomorrow, we would try again to get into the city.

*December 25 *

At around 8am, Tariq and I drove towards Falluja. We didn't believe that 
we might actually get into the city.

The American soldiers at the checkpoint were nervous. The approach to 
the checkpoint was covered in pebbles so we had to drive very slowly. 
The soldiers spent 20 minutes searching my car, then they bodysearched 
Tariq and me. They gave me a yellow tape to put on to the windscreen of 
the car, showing I had been searched and was a contractor. If I didn't 
have this stripe of yellow, a US sniper would shoot me as an enemy car.

By 10am we were inside the city. It was completely devastated, 
destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to 
be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through 
the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn't see a single 
building that was functioning.

The Americans had put a white tape across the roads to stop people 
wandering into areas that they still weren't allowed to enter. I 
remembered the market from before the war, when you couldn't walk 
through it because of the crowds. Now all the shops were marked with a 
cross, meaning that they had been searched and secured by the US 
military. But the bodies, some of them civilians and some of them 
insurgents, were still rotting inside.

There were dead dogs everywhere in this area, lying in the middle of the 
streets. Reports of rabies in Falluja had reached Baghdad, but I needed 
to find a doctor.

Fallujans are suspicious of outsiders, so I found it surprising when 
Nihida Kadhim, a housewife, beckoned me into her home. She had just 
arrived back in the city to check out her house; the government had told 
the people three days earlier that they should start going home. She 
called me into her living room. On her mirror she pointed to a message 
that had been written in her lipstick. She couldn't read English. It 
said: "Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it!"

"They are insulting me, aren't they?" she asked.

I left her and walked towards the cemetery. I noticed the dead dogs 
again. I had been told in Baghdad by a friend of mine, Dr Marwan Elawi, 
that the Baghdad Hospital for Infectious Diseases admits one case of 
rabies every week. The problem is that infected dogs are eating the 
corpses and spreading the disease.

As I was walking by the cemetery, I caught the smell of death coming 
from one of the houses. The door was open and the first thing I saw was 
a white car parked in the driveway and on top of it a launcher for an RPG.

I went inside, and the sound of the rain on the roof and the darkness 
inside made me very afraid. The door was open, all the windows were 
broken and there were bullet holes running down the hall to a bathroom 
at the end - as if the bullets were chasing something or somebody. The 
bathroom led on to a bedroom and I stepped inside and saw the body of a 
fighter.

The leg was missing, the hand was missing and the furniture in the house 
had been destroyed. I couldn't breathe with the smell. I realised that 
Tariq wasn't with me, and I panicked and ran. As I got out of the house 
I saw a white teddy bear lying in the rain, and a green boobytrap bomb.

Some of the worst fighting took place here in the centre of the city, 
but there was no sign of the 1,200 to 1,600 fighters the Americans said 
they had killed. I had heard that there was a graveyard for the fighters 
somewhere in the city but people said that most of them had withdrawn 
from the city after the first week of fighting. I needed to find one of 
the insurgents to tell me the real story of what had happened in the 
city. The Americans had said that there had been a big military victory, 
but I couldn't understand where all the fighters were buried.

After I saw the body I felt uncomfortable about sleeping in Falluja. The 
place was deserted and polluted with death and all kinds of weapons. 
Imagine sleeping in a place where any of the surrounding houses might 
have one, two or three bodies. I wanted out.

We went back to my friend the old Republican guard officer. I was so 
tired I could hardly take my clothes off to go to sleep but I couldn't 
sleep with the smell of death on my clothes.

*December 26 *

In the morning, I went back to find the cemetery and look for evidence 
of the fighters who had been killed. It was about 4pm before I got 
inside the martyrs' cemetery; people kept waylaying me, wanting to show 
me their destroyed houses and asking why the journalists didn't come and 
show what the Americans had done to Falluja. They were also angry at the 
interim President Allawi for sending in the mainly Shia National Guard 
to help the Americans.

At the entrance to the fighters' graveyard a sign read: "This cemetery 
is being given by the people of Falluja to the heroic martyrs of the 
battle against the Americans and to the martyrs of the jihadi operations 
against the Americans, assigned and approved by the Mujahideen Shura 
council in Falluja."

As I went into the graveyard, the bodies of two young men were arriving. 
The faces were rotting. The ambulance driver lifted the bones of one of 
the hands; the skin had rotted away. "God is the greatest. What kind of 
times are we living through that we are holding the bones and hands of 
our brothers?"

Then he began cursing the National Guard, calling them even worse things 
than the Americans: "Those bastards, those sons of dogs." It wasn't the 
first time I had heard this. It was the National Guard the Americans 
used to search the houses; they were seen by the Fallujans as brutal 
stooges. Most of the volunteers for the National Guard are poor Shias 
from the south. They are jobless and desperate enough to volunteer for a 
job that makes them assassination targets. "National infidels", they 
were also called.

I counted the graves: there were 74. The two young men made it 76. The 
names on the headstones were written in chalk and some had been washed 
away. One read: "Here lies the heroic Tunisian martyr who died", but I 
didn't see any other evidence of the hundreds of foreign fighters that 
the US had said were using Falluja as their headquarters. People told me 
there were some Yemenis and Saudis, some volunteers from Tunisia and 
Egypt, but most of the fighters were Fallujan. The US military say they 
have hundreds of bodies frozen in a potato chip factory 5km south of the 
city, but nobody has been allowed to go there in the past two months, 
including the Red Crescent.

Salman Hashim was crying beside the grave of his son, who had been a 
fighter in Falluja.

"He is 18 years old. He wanted to be a doctor or engineer after this 
year; it was his last year in high school." At the same grave, the boy's 
mother was crying and remembering her dead son, who was called Ahmed. "I 
blame Ayad Allawi. If I could I would cut his throat into pieces." Then, 
to the mound of earth covering her son's body, she said: "I told you 
those fighters would get you killed." The boy's father told her to be 
quiet in front of the camera.

On the next grave was written the name of a woman called Harbyah. She 
had refused to leave the city for the camps with her family. One of her 
relatives was standing by her grave. He said that he found her dead in 
her bed with at least 20 bullets in her body.

I saw other rotting bodies that showed no signs of being fighters. In 
one house in the market there were four bodies inside the guest room. 
One of the bodies had its chest and part of its stomach opened, as if 
the dogs had been eating it. The wrists were missing, the flesh of the 
arm was missing, and parts of the legs.

I tried to figure out who these four men were. It was obvious which 
houses the fighters were in: they were totally destroyed. But in this 
house there were no bullets in the walls, just four dead men lying 
curled up beside each other, with bullet holes in the mosquito nets that 
covered the windows. It seemed to me as if they had been asleep and were 
shot through the windows. It is the young men of the family who are 
usually given the job of staying behind to guard the house. This is the 
way in Iraq - we never leave the house empty. The four men were sleeping 
the way we sleep when we have guests - we roll out the best carpet in 
the guest room and the men lie down beside each other.

"Its Abu Faris's house. I think that the fat dead body belongs to his 
son, Faris," said Abu Salah, whose chip shop was also destroyed in the 
bombing.

It was getting dark and it was time to go, but I needed some overview 
shots of the city. There was a half-built tower, so I climbed it and 
looked around. I couldn't see a single building that hadn't been hit.

After a few minutes I got the sense that this wasn't a good place for me 
to be hanging around, but I had to pee urgently. I found a place on the 
roof of the building. While I was doing that a warning shot passed so 
close to my head that I ducked and didn't even wait to pull up my zip, 
but ran to the half-destroyed stairs to climb down the building. I felt 
as if the American sniper was playing with me; he had had plenty of time 
to kill me if he wanted to.

For the rest of the day people were pulling on me to come and see their 
houses. Again, they asked where all the journalists were. Why were they 
not coming to report on what has happened in Falluja? But I have worked 
with journalists for 18 months and I knew it would be too dangerous for 
them to come to the city, that they are seen as spies and could end up 
in a sack. So since I was the only one there with a camera, everyone 
wanted to show me what happened to their house. It took hours.

Back in Baghdad that night, I changed my clothes and decided to send 
them to the public laundry. I was worried about contaminating my family 
with Falluja. I was thinking that nobody was going to be able to live 
there for months. Then, I took a very long bath.

* December 27 *

I woke up at home in Baghdad around 9am. I had had enough of Falluja, 
but I still felt that I didn't understand what had happened. The city 
was completely devastated - but where were the bodies of all the dead 
fighters the Americans had killed?

I wanted to ask Dr Adnan Chaichan about the wounded. I found him at the 
main hospital in Falluja at midday. He told me that all the doctors and 
medical staff were locked into the hospital at the beginning of the 
attack and not allowed out to treat anyone. The Iraqi National Guard, 
acting under US orders, had tied him and all the other doctors up inside 
the main hospital. The US had surrounded the hospital, while the 
National Guard had seized all their mobile phones and satellite phones, 
and left them with no way of communicating with the outside world. 
Chaichan seemed angrier with the National Guards than with anyone else.

He said that the phone lines inside the town were working, so wounded 
people in Falluja were calling the hospital and crying, and he was 
trying to give instructions over the phone to the local clinics and the 
mosques on how to treat the wounds. But nobody could get to the main 
hospital where all the supplies were and people were bleeding to death 
in the city.

It was late afternoon when I drove out of Falluja and back to Baghdad, 
feeling that I had just scratched the surface of what really happened 
there. But it is clear that by completely destroying this Sunni city, 
with the help of a mostly Shia National Guard, the US military has 
fanned the seeds of a civil war that is definitely coming. If there are 
elections now and the Shia win, that war is certain. The people I spoke 
to had no plans to vote. No one I met in those five days had a ballot 
paper.

A week after I arrived in London to make the film for Channel 4 News, 
the tape of the final interview arrived by Federal Express. It was the 
interview with Alzaim Abu, who had led the fighters in the Shuhada 
district of Falluja and fought the Americans in the early battles in the 
city centre. We had been been trying to track him down for nearly three 
weeks. Then Tariq had got a call from him the night I had left for 
London saying that he would talk.

There was a lot of bullshit in the interview; lots of bravado about how 
many Americans they had killed and about never surrendering and how 
Fallujans would win. He said that there were a few foreign fighters in 
the city, but none in his units; mostly, they were Fallujans.

But one thing stood out for me that explained the empty graveyard and 
the lack of bodies. He said that most of the fighters had been given 
orders to abandon the city by November 17, nine days after the assault 
began. "The withdrawal of the fighters was carried out following an 
order by our senior leadership. We did not pull out because we did not 
want to fight. We needed to regroup; it was a tactical move. The 
fighters decided to redeploy to Amiriya and some went to Abu Ghraib," he 
said.

The US military destroyed Falluja, but simply spread the fighters out 
around the country. They also increased the chance of civil war in Iraq 
by using their new national guard of Shias to suppress Sunnis. Once, 
when a foreign journalist, an Irish guy, asked me whether I was Shia or 
Sunni - the way the Irish do because they have that thing about the IRA 
- I said I was Sushi. My father is Sunni and my mother is Shia. I never 
cared about these things. Now, after Falluja, it matters.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/


‘The Salvador Option’
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in
Iraq



WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 10:22 a.m. ET Jan. 9, 2005
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s
latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it
is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld
really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one
senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the
offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we
are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree,
succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John
Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option
that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s
battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early
1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S.
government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included
so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and
sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S.
conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths
of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages
scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central
America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to
Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams
to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents
and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to
military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear,
however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called
"snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for
interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would
lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be
carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense
department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’
s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own
intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by
Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib
interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any
operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code
of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert
operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special
presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under
cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered
them into action if they are captured or killed.)
Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate
Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the
involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering
missions. Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been
limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military
operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But,
according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for
years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence
missions.
Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA civilian
managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing
the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they
can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly
opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon
proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions
without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But
counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly, could be deemed to
fall within the Defense department’s orbit.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the
most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad
Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may
have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews
during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily
Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior
figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were
essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain
that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi
territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne
fruit so far."
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem
of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in
the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic
to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents
or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they
won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate
agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new
offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the
insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is
giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is
cost-free. We have to change that equation."
Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the
Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star
general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire
military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking
point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be
needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.
With Mark Hosenball
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.