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US marines walk past the bodies of 3 victims in Fallujah (AFP).
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“Listen,
listen, the warplanes,” Abu Mohammed cried. I could hear the
planes over the phone. “They are over us, over the house,
almost 10 meters away.” Tonight is the last night of Ramadan,
and tomorrow is the first day of the Islamic feast `Eid Al-Fitr.
Abu Mohammed is currently in Al-Amiriyah neighborhood in
Baghdad, with his family, and 4 other families who fled Fallujah
a few months ago.
“We
are 45 people in one house,” his daughter Inas said. She
complained about the difficulty of living with so many people in
a very small house. But her aunt Umm Waddah is grateful that she
could find a place to stay in. “At least we are better off
than the Fallujans currently living in tents, or on Baghdad’s
streets with no place at all to shelter them.”
Those
in
Baghdad
might be better off than Fallujans still locked inside their
hometown, which is currently being razed to the ground by the US
Army. Everything is being wiped out. “The residential areas,
our houses, they are all destroyed. They bombed the hospital,
the clinics, the doctors, the infrastructure, everything,” Abu
Mohammed said.
Even
the animals, the trees—the snipers spread all over Fallujah
shoot at any motion they spot. “They shoot at the animals
moving in the streets, the trees waving their leaves in the
wind,” describes Umm Omar, who managed to leave Fallujah
yesterday.
Her
nephew was killed a week ago, but his body still lies on the
street. “They haven’t even let us pull his body to the
house.” She couldn’t help crying. Death is overwhelming. An
old man they originally didn’t know died in her house. They
found him bleeding at the door. Taking him inside didn’t help
a lot. Phones don’t work; and if they worked, there are no
more doctors in Fallujah anyway, as they were all expelled by US
and Iraqi forces and weren’t let back in. So the strange old
man bled for three days until he died inside the house.
Umm
Waddah left Fallujah after her neighbors’ house was
destroyed and the remains of their bodies scattered to
her roof.
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Houses
are full of injured civilians left to bleed to death; the
streets are full of dead bodies, which lie there until US tanks
roll over them.
“Inside
the house, everything is shaking because of the strength of the
raids from airplanes very low in the sky. If we run outside, the
planes are right over us,” says Umm Usama, who left Fallujah
two weeks ago.
Another
Fallujan woman, Umm Waddah, left Fallujah after a
US
rocket destroyed the house opposite to hers, and the remains and
flesh of its inhabitants’ bodies scattered to her house’s
roof. The next day, she and her family ran off to
Baghdad. She prays that her old neighbors, the Ghanems, rest in peace.
And
she asks, “What have we done? Our women and children got
killed, our youth got killed, our houses got demolished; why?”
The interim Iraqi government’s politicians and US Army
spokesmen say that they are after “terrorist Abu Musab
Al-Zarqawi” who, they believe, is hiding in Fallujah along
with his followers, “the insurgents.”
“What
Zarqawi? Where is Al-Zarqawi? Is he a ghost?” asks Umm Usama.
“There is no Zarqawi in Fallujah, no Arab fighters as they
claim.” In the name of Al-Zarqawi 1200 people have been killed
in Fallujah—according to the American military, which
describes the victims as “insurgents” and “guerillas.”
Eyewitnesses say the dead are civilian residents.
US
army describes the victims as “insurgents.”
Eyewitnesses say they are civilians. |
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“Our
neighbor’s house was raided; they killed her and two other
women, two men, and two children—eight people—in the name of
Al-Zarqawi.” One of the women was in her seventh month of
pregnancy. Her fetus got out of her body and stayed alive for 6
hours then died, according to the neighbors and relatives who
retrieved the bodies from under the rubble.
They
were normally asleep at
3:30 a.m.
when the rocket fell on their house, flattened it, and killed
them all—the mother Hazima Mohsen, her two sons, two
daughters, her daughter in law, and three grandsons.
One
of Hazima’s daughters, Mona, was “lucky” enough to escape
to
Baghdad
days before her family was killed in the name of Al-Zarqawi. To
her, Al-Zarqawi is like the weapons of mass destruction claim.
“They came up with the weapons of mass destruction lie to
invade Iraq, and they have come up with Al-Zarqawi lie to wipe
out Fallujah,” she says.
Twenty
months since the invasion and massive destruction of
Iraq
have revealed that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.
The Iraq Survey Group Report, a CIA report released on October
6, reiterated what has been stated in one report after another:
Iraq
did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the
US
invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce
them.
“And
there is no Zarqawi in Fallujah. This is a false, baseless
claim,” Mona argues.
They
also claim they are liberating
Iraq, all of which has been already “liberated,” except for
Fallujah, which US forces have retreated from in April, 2004,
following a previous
tragedy in the very town. They are, once again, trying to
subdue it and bring to it “democracy and freedom,” as they
brought them to the rest of Iraq.
“We
now hate the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’; they are a
curse on our people,” Amer Al-Zawbaey said with intense
bitterness. Amer is the Baghdadi man hosting Abu Muhammed’s
family and four other Fallujan families in his house.
As
I listened to the sound of American war planes outside
Amer’s house in
Baghdad, I could hear children in
Cairo
playing with fireworks to celebrate the ‘Eid. |
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The
claim of democratizing and liberating
Iraq
was a pretext for the March 20 invasion, which has resulted in
the massive destruction of the country and unprecedented losses
for its people. Almost daily car bombs go off in Iraq. More than 100,000 extra deaths
have taken place since the US-led invasion, and the risk of death by violence for
civilians in
Iraq
is now 58 times higher than before the invasion (The Lancet,
according to research conducted by scientists from the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the
US
city of
Baltimore). Moreover, unemployment rate has reached 70%, according to a
study by the college of economics in Baghdad University.
“[Given
this tragic situation], whoever believes that
America
has invaded and occupied
Iraq
to bring democracy and freedom is either stupid or in
cooperation with the
US
against the Iraqis,” says Monther Yaakoub, another Fallujan in
Baghdad.
As
I listened—over the phone—to the sound of American war
planes and tanks outside Amer’s house in Baghdad, where tens
of Fallujans sought shelter, I could hear the noise of children
in Cairo playing with fireworks to celebrate the end of Ramadan
and welcome `Eid Al-Fitr that was to start the next morning in
Egypt—and in Iraq. I remembered Mona’s children: “During
the continuous air strikes at night in Fallujah, my kids would
wake up at night and scream, ‘Mama, our house has fallen,
mama; our house has fallen. Where will we go?”
Finally,
I
am obliged to fulfill my promise to the Fallujans I spoke with
and get their calls across through this article: Abu Mohammed calls
upon the Western media to cover the horrific situation they are
living in. Umm Waddah calls upon the Arabs, who view the Iraqi
tragedy on Arab TVs, to act and help their brothers and sister
in Iraq. And Umm Usama asks us to pray for Fallujah, and for
Iraq.
Sara
Khorshid is staff writer for IslamOnline. She holds a BA
in Political Science from
Cairo
University. You can reach her at sarakhorshid@islam-online.net.
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