- One of the least reported aspects of the U.S. occupation
of Iraq is the oftentimes indiscriminate use of air power by the American
military. The Western mainstream media has generally failed to attend to
the F-16 warplanes dropping their payloads of 500, 1,000, and 2,000-pound
bombs on Iraqi cities -- or to the results of these attacks. While some
of the bombs and missiles fall on resistance fighters, the majority of
the casualties are civilian -- mothers, children, the elderly, and other
unarmed civilians.
-
- "Coalition troops and Iraqi security forces may
be responsible for up to 60% of conflict-related civilian deaths in Iraq
-- far more than are killed by insurgents, confidential records obtained
by the BBC's Panorama programme reveal." As the BBC reported recently,
these numbers were compiled by Iraq's Ministry of Health, in part because
of the refusal of the Bush and Blair administrations to do so. In the case
of Fallujah, where the U.S. military estimated 2,000 people were killed
during the recent assault on the city, at least 1,200 of the dead are
believed
to have been non-combatant civilians.
-
- "Some of my friends in Fallujah, their homes were
attacked by airplanes so they left, and nobody s found them since,"
said Mehdi Abdulla in a refugee camp in Baghdad. His own home was bombed
to rubble by American warplanes during the assault on Fallujah in November
-- and in Iraq today, his experience is far from unique.
-
- All any reporter has to do is cock an ear or look up
to catch the planes roaring over Baghdad en route to bombing missions over
Mosul, Fallujah and other trouble spots on a weekly - sometimes even a
daily basis. It is simply impossible to travel the streets of Baghdad
without
seeing several Apache or Blackhawk helicopters buzzing the rooftops. Their
rumbling blades are so close to the ground and so powerful that they leave
wailing car alarms in their wake as they pass over any neighborhood.
-
- With its ground troops stretched thin and growing haggard
-- 30% of them, after all, are already on their second tour of duty in
the brutal occupation of Iraq - U.S. military commanders appear to be
relying
more than ever on airpower to give themselves an edge. The November assault
on Fallujah did not even begin until warplanes had, on a near-daily basis,
dropped 500-1000 pound bombs on suspected resistance targets in the
besieged
city. During that period, fighter jets ripped through the air over Baghdad
for nights on end, heading out on mission after mission to drop their
payloads
on Fallujah.
-
- "Airpower remains the single greatest asymmetrical
advantage the United States has over its foes," writes Thomas Searle,
a military defense analyst with the Airpower Research Institute at Maxwell
Air Force Base in Alabama. "To make airpower truly effective against
guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait for the joint force commander or
the ground component commander to tell us what to do. Rather, we must
aggressively
develop and employ airpower's counterguerrilla capabilities."
-
- "Aggressively employ airpower's capabilities"
-- indeed they have.
-
- "Even the Chickens and Sheep Are
Frightened"
-
- "The first day of Ramadan we went to the prayers
and, just as the Imam said Allahu Akbar ("God is great"), the
jets began to arrive." Abu Hammad was remembering the early stages
of the November Fallujah campaign. "They came continuously through
the night and bombed everywhere in Fallujah. It did not stop even for a
moment."
-
- The 35 year-old merchant is now a refugee living in a
tent on the campus of the University of Baghdad along with over 900 other
homeless Fallujans. "If the American forces did not find a target
to bomb," he said, "they used sound bombs just to terrorize the
people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give you a picture
of how panicked everyone was." As he spoke in a strained voice, his
body began to tremble with the memories, "In the morning, I found
Fallujah empty, as if nobody lived in it. It felt as though Fallujah had
already been bombed to the ground. As if nothing were left."
-
- When Abu Hammad says "nothing," he means it.
It is now estimated that 75% of the homes and buildings in the city were
destroyed either by warplanes, helicopters, or artillery barrages; most
of the remaining 25% sustained at least some damage as well.
-
- "Even the telephone exchange in Fallujah has been
flattened," he added between quickening breaths because, as he
remembers,
as he makes the effort to explain, his rage grows. "Nothing works
in Fallujah now!"
-
- Several men standing with us, all of whom are refugees
like Hammad, nod in agreement while staring off toward the setting sun
to the west, the direction where their city once stood.
-
- Throughout much of urban Iraq, people tell stories of
being terrorized by American airpower, which is often loosed on heavily
populated neighborhoods that have, in effect, been declared the bombing
equivalents of free-fire zones.
-
- "There is no limit to the American aggression,"
comments a sheikh from Baquba, a city 30 miles northeast of the capital.
He agreed to discuss the subject of air power only on the condition of
anonymity, fearing reprisals from the U.S. military.
-
- "The fighter jets regularly fly so low over our
city that you can see the pilots sitting in the cockpit," he tells
me, using his hand to measure the skyline and indicate just how low he
means. "The helicopters fly even lower, so low, and aim their guns
at the people and this terrifies everyone. How can humans live like this?
Even our animals, the chickens and sheep are frightened by this. We don't
know why they do this to us."
-
- "My Whole House Was Shaking"
-
- The terror from the air began on the first day of the
invasion in March, 2003.. "On March 19th at two AM, we were
sleeping,"
Abdulla Mohammed, father of four children,, says softly as we sit in his
modest home in Baghdad. "I woke up with a start to the enormous blasts
of the bombs. All I could do was watch the television and see that
everything
was being bombed in Baghdad."
-
- Near his home, a pile of concrete blocks and twisted
support beams that once was a telephone exchange remains as an ugly
reminder
of how the war started for Baghdadis. "I was so terrified. My whole
house was shaking," he continues, "and the windows were breaking.
I was frightened that the ceiling would fall on us because of the
bombs."
-
- Nearly two years later, he still becomes visibly upset
while describing what it felt like to live through that first horrific
"shock and awe" onslaught from the air. "It was unbelievable
to see things in my house jump into the air when the bombs landed. They
were just so powerful." He pauses and holds his hands up in a gesture
of helplessness before he says, "Nowhere felt safe and there was
nothing
we could do. People were looking for bread and vegetables so they could
survive in their homes, but they didn't know where to go because nowhere
was safe."
-
- He lives with his wife and sons in central Baghdad, but
at a location several miles from where the heaviest bombings in the Bush
administration's shock-and-awe campaign hit. Nevertheless, even at that
distance in the heavily populated capital, it was a nightmare.
"Everyone
was so terrified. Even the guards who were on the streets left for their
homes because everything was being destroyed," he says. "The
roads were closed because there were so many explosions."
-
- "My family was shivering with fear," he adds,
staring at the floor. "Everyone was praying for God to keep the
Americans
from bombing them. There was no water, no electricity, and all we had were
the extra supplies that we had bought before."
-
- Like the sheikh from Baquba, he and his family continue
to live in fear of what American warplanes and helicopters might at any
moment unleash. "Now, there are always helicopters hovering over my
neighborhood. They are so loud and fly so close. My sons are afraid of
them. I hear the fighter jets so often."
-
- He suddenly raises his hushed voice and you can hear
the note of panic deep within it. "Even last night the fighter jets
were so low over my home. We never know if they will bomb." After
pausing, he concludes modestly, "We can only hope that they
won't."
-
- "Even the Mosques Quit Announcing Evening
Prayers"
-
- There is no way to discuss American reliance on air power
in a war now largely being fought inside heavily populated cities without
coming back to Fallujah. While an estimated 200,000 refugees from that
city continue to live in refugee tent camps or crowded into houses (with
up to 25 families crammed under a single roof), horrendous tales of what
it was like to live under the bombs in the besieged city are only now
beginning
to emerge.
-
- Ahmed Abdulla, a gaunt 21 year-old Fallujan, accompanied
most of his family on their flight from the city, navigating the perilous
neighborhoods nearest the cordon the American military had thrown around
their besieged city. On November 8, he made it to Baghdad with his mother,
his three sisters (aged 26, 20, and 18), and two younger brothers (10 and
12). His father, however, was not permitted to leave Fallujah by the U.S.
military because he was of "fighting age." Ahmed was only allowed
to exit the besieged city because his mother managed to convince an
American
soldier that, without him, his sisters and younger brothers would be at
great risk traveling alone. Fortunately, the soldier understood her plea
and let him through.
-
- Ahmed's father told the family that he would instead
stay to watch over their house. "The house is all we have, nothing
else," commented Ahmed despondently. "We have no land, no
livestock,
nothing."
-
- Recounting an odyssey of flight typical of those of many
Fallujans, Ahmed told me his father had driven them in the family car
across
winding, desert roads out the eastern side of the city, considered the
quietest area when it came to the fighting. They stopped the car a
kilometer
before the American checkpoints and walked the rest of the way, holding
up white "flags" so the soldiers wouldn't mistake them for
insurgents.
"We walked with our hands up, expecting them to shoot at us
anytime,"
said Ahmed softly, "It was so bad for us at that time and there were
so many families trying to get out."
-
- Those inhabitants still trapped in the city had only
two hours each day to emerge and try to find food. Most of the time their
electricity was cut and water ran in the faucets only intermittently.
"Every
night we told each other goodbye because we expected to die," he said.
"Every night there was extremely heavy bombing from the jets. My house
shook when bombs hit the city, and the women were crying all of the
time."
In his mind he still couldn't shake the buzzing sound of unmanned
surveillance
drone aircraft passing overhead, and the constant explosions of the
"concussion
bombs" (or so he called them) that he claimed the Americans fired
just to keep people awake.
-
- "I saw a dead man near our home," he explained,
"But I could barely see his face because there were so many flies
on him. The flies were so thick and I couldn't bear the smell. All around
his body, his blood had turned the ground black. I don't know how he
died."
-
- The sighting of such bodies, often shot by American
snipers,
was a commonplace around the city. They lay unburied in part because many
families dared not venture out to one of the two football stadiums that
had been converted into "Martyr Cemeteries." Instead, they buried
their own dead in their gardens and left the other bodies where they
lay.
-
- "So we stayed inside most of the time and prayed.
The more the bombs exploded the more we prayed and cried." So Ahmed
described life inside Fallujah as it was being destroyed. Each night in
the besieged city seemed, as he put it, to oscillate between an eerie quiet
and sudden bursts of heavy fighting. "Even the mosques quit announcing
evening prayers at times," he said. "And then it would be so
quiet -- except for the military drones buzzing overhead and the planes
of the Americans which dropped flares."
-
- It was impossible, he claimed, to sleep at night because
any sound -- an approaching fighter jet or helicopter -- and immediately
everyone would be awake. "We would begin praying together loudly and
strongly. For God to protect us and to take the fighting away from our
city and our home."
-
- Any semblance of normalcy had, of course, long since
left the environs of Fallujah; schools had been closed for weeks; there
were dire shortages of medicine and medical equipment; and civilians still
trapped in the city had a single job -- somehow to stay alive. When you
emerged, however briefly, nothing was recognizable. "You could see
areas where all the houses were flattened. There was just nothing
left,"
he explained. "We could get water at times, but there was no
electricity,
ever."
-
- His family used a small generator that they ran sparingly
because they could not get more fuel. "We ran out of food after they
Americans started to invade the city, so we ate flour, and then all we
had was dirty waterso eventually what choice did we have but to try to
get out?"
-
- "Why do the Americans bomb all of us in our
homes,"
asked Ahmed as our interview was ending. And you could feel his puzzlement.
"Even those of us who do not fight, we are suffering so much because
of the U.S. bombs and tanks. Can't they see this is turning so many people
against them?"
-
- "I Saw Cluster Bombs Everywhere"
-
- Fifty-three year-old Mohammad Ali, who is living in a
tent city in Baghdad, was one of those willing to address the suffering
he experienced as a result of the November bombings. Mohammad is a bear
of a man, his kind face belying his deep despair as he leans on a worn,
wooden cane. He summed up his experience this way: "We did not feel
that there was an Eid [the traditional feasting time which follows Ramadan]
after Ramadan this year because our situation was so bad. All we had was
more fasting. I asked God to save us but our house was bombed and I lost
everything."
-
- Refugees aren't the only people ready to describe what
occurred in Fallujah as a result of the loosing of jets, bombers, and
helicopters
on the city. Burhan Fasa'a, a gaunt 33 year-old journalist is a cameraman
for the Lebanese Broadcasting Company. He was inside the city during the
first eight days of the November assault. "I saw at least 200 families
whose homes had collapsed on them, thanks to American bombs," he said.
"I saw a huge number of people killed in the northern part of the
city and most of them were civilians."
-
- Like so many others I've talked with who made it out
of Fallujah, he described scenes of widespread death and desolation in
what had not so long before been a modest-sized city. Most of these
resulted
from bombings that - despite official announcements emphasizing how
"targeted"
and "precise" they were - seemed to those on the receiving end
unbearably indiscriminate.
-
- "There were so many people wounded, and with no
medical supplies, people died from their wounds," he said. He also
spoke of cluster bombs, which, he -- and many other Fallujan witnesses
-- claim, were used by the military in November as well as during the
earlier
failed Marine siege of the city in April. The dropping of cluster bombs
in areas where civilians live is a direct contravention of the Geneva
Conventions.
-
- "I saw cluster bombs everywhere," he said
calmly,
"and so many bodies that were burned -- dead with no bullets in
them."
-
- A doctor, who fled Fallujah after the attacks began and
is now working in a hospital in a small village outside the city, spoke
in a similar vein (though she requested that her name not be used):
"They
shot all the sheep. Any animals people owned were shot," she said.
"Helicopters shot all the animals and anything that moved in the
villages
surrounding Fallujah."
-
- "I saw one dead body I remember all too well. My
first where there were bubbles on the skin, and abnormal coloring, and
burn holes in his clothing." She also described treating patients
who, she felt certain, had been struck by chemical and
white-phosphorous-type
weapons. "And I saw so many bodies with these strange signs, and none
of them with bullet holes or obvious injuries, just dead with discoloring
and that bubbled skin, dark blue skin with bubbles on it, and burned
clothing.
I saw this with my own eyes. These bodies were in the center of Fallujah,
in old Fallujah."
-
- Like Burhan, while in the city she too witnessed many
civilian buildings bombed to the ground. "I saw two schools bombed,
and all the houses around them too."
-
- "Why Was Our Family Bombed?"
-
- I was offered another glimpse of what it's like to live
in a city under attack from the air by two sisters, Muna and Selma Salim,
also refugees from Fallujah and the only survivors of a family of ten,
the rest of whom were killed when two rockets fired from a U.S. fighter
jet hit their home. Their mother, Hadima, 65 years old, died in the attack
along with her son Khalid, an Iraqi police captain, his sister Ka'ahla
and her 22 year-old son, their pregnant 45 year-old sister Adhra'a, her
husband Samr, who had a doctorate in religious studies, and their four
year-old son Amorad.
-
- Muna, still exhausted from her ordeal, wept almost
constantly
while telling her story. Even her abaya, which fully covers her, could
not hide her shaking body as waves of grief rolled through her tiredness.
She was speaking of her dead sister Artica. "I can't get the image
out of my mind of her fetus being blown out of her body," said Muna.
Artica was seven months pregnant when, on November 10, the rockets struck.
"My sister Selma and I survived only because we were staying at our
neighbor's house that night," she said, sobbing, still unable to
reconcile
her survival with the death of most of the rest of her family in the fierce
pre-assault bombing of the city.
-
- "There were no fighters in our area, so I don't
know why they bombed our home," cried Muna. "When this happened
there were ongoing full-scale assaults from the air and tanks were
attacking
our city, so we slipped out of the eastern side of Fallujah and came to
Baghdad."
-
- Selma, Muna's 41 year-old sister, recounted scenes of
destruction in the city -- houses that had been razed by countless air
strikes and the stench of decaying bodies that swirled through the air
borne on the area's dry, dusty winds.
-
- "The rubble from the bombed houses covered up the
bodies, and nobody could get to them because people were too afraid even
to drive a bulldozer!" She held out her hands as she spoke, as if
to ask her God how such things could happen. "Even walking out of
your house was just about impossible because of the snipers."
-
- Both sisters described their last months in Fallujah
as a nightmarish existence. It was a city where fighters controlled the
area, medicine and food were often in short supply, and the thumping
concussions
of U.S. bombs had become a daily reality. Rocket-armed attack helicopters
rattled low over the desert as they approached the city only adding to
the nightmarish landscape.
-
- "Even when the bombs were far away, glasses would
fall off our shelves and break," exclaimed Muna. Going to market,
as they had to, in the middle of the day to buy food for their family,
both sisters felt constant fear of warplanes roaring over the sprawling
city. "The jets flew over so often," said Selma, "but we
never knew when they would drop their bombs."
-
- They described a desolate city of closed shops and mostly
empty streets on which infrequent terrorized residents could be spotted
simply wandering around not knowing what to do. "Fallujah was like
a ghost town most of the time," was the way Muna put it. "Most
families stayed inside their houses all the time, only going out for food
when they had to." Like many others, their family soon found that
it needed to ration increasingly scarce food and water, "Usually we
were very hungry because we didn't want to eat our food, or drink all of
the water." She paused, took a deep breath undoubtedly thinking of
her dead parents and siblings, and added, "We never knew if we would
be able to get more, so we tried to be careful."
-
- I met the two sisters in the Baghdad home of their uncle.
During the interview, both of them often stared at the ground silently
until another detail would come to mind to be added to their story. Unlike
Muna who was visibly emotional, Selma generally spoke in a flat voice
without
affect that might indeed have emerged from some dead zone. "Our
situation
then was like that of so many from Fallujah," she told me. "None
of us could leave because we had nowhere to go and no money."
-
- "Why was our family bombed?" pleaded Muna,
tears streaming down her cheeks, "There were never any fighters in
our area!"
-
- Today fighting continues on nearly a daily basis around
Fallujah, as well as in many other cities throughout Iraq; and for
reporters
as well as residents of Baghdad, the air war is an omnipresent reality.
Helicopters buzz the tops of buildings and hover over neighborhoods in
the capital all the time, while fighter jets often scorch the skies.
-
- Below them, traumatized civilians await the next
onslaught,
never knowing when it may occur.
-
- Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has been
reporting from Iraq since November, 2003. He writes for the Sunday Herald
in Scotland, Inter Press Service, The NewStandard internet news site and
the Ester Republic among other publications. He is the special
correspondent
in Iraq for Flashpoints Radio, as well as reporting for Democracy Now!,
the BBC, Irish Public Radio, Radio South Africa, Radio Hong Kong, and many
other stations throughout the world.
-
- Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail.
- All Rights Reserved
-
-
- Commentary By Tom Engelhardt
- http://www.tomdispatch.com
- 2-4-5
-
- There is something thoroughly inspiring when people,
under the threat of death, turn out to vote in a country that has become
an armed camp. The urge of a long oppressed people to take back their
lives,
to act, is always moving and powerful. Certainly, the Iraq vote, as
presented
in the media here in the U.S., has also provided a boost to the Bush
administration
at home at a useful moment. "It ought to give heart to the American
people that the effort we've made to help the Iraqi people get to this
day was well worth it -- that the Iraqi people have justified the faith
we put in them," commented National Security Advisor Stephen J.
Hadley.
(As in Vietnam, though, such boosts in the midst of a disastrous war are
unlikely to be long lasting.)
-
- The meaning of the vote in Iraq is another question
entirely.
It's not just a matter of the actual turnout -- how high in Shiite and
Kurdish Iraq, how low in Sunni areas of the country, or what the
irregularities
were -- but of what exactly Iraqis were turning out for. Were they, for
instance, voting not for George Bush's version of freedom, but to end the
American occupation itself, as unembedded reporter Dahr Jamail suggests
at his blog? Was it to grasp that will o' the wisp, a land that will not
be a "republic of fear" in a place where "the only
institutions
with real power are the US and UK military," as BBC reporter Rageth
Omaar recently suggested in the British Guardian? Was it to end centuries
of Sunni dominance and establish Shiite dominance (and so possibly cause
a civil war); or, in Kurdish areas of the north, to establish the basis
for future independence (and a possible Turkish intervention)?
-
- And then there's that other question: Whatever Iraqis
thought they were voting for at polling places where, due to security
concerns,
most didn't even know the names of the candidates, what exactly are they
going to get from this election? Was it even possible, as Brian Whitaker
asked in the Guardian, to achieve anything like a genuine democracy when
the Bush administration has paid so little "attention to the slow
and laborious business of creating the civil institutions that make
elections
meaningful"? Or was it, as Pepe Escobar suggested in the Asia Times,
a means of further embedding American power in the country? ("[O]nly
the naïve may believe that an imperial power would voluntarily abandon
the dream scenario of a cluster of military bases planted over virtually
unlimited reserves of oil.") Or might the Bush administration not
even mind a post-election descent into something approaching civil war,
as James Carroll of the Boston Globe suggested in a devastating column
on the election and George Bush?
-
- And what will be possible for a future Iraqi government
in a land still occupied by a foreign army and a foreign power whose
"advisers"
are now emplaced in every important ministry, whose bases or "enduring
camps" are now gargantuan, permanent structures, whose officials
control
much of the money that will be available to any new administration which
will also face a fierce home-grown insurgency not about to go away any
time soon? Still, Iraqis at the polls represented at least one modestly
hopeful face of Iraq. (Tomdispatch will carry more reports on the election
in the near future.)
-
- Over a week ago, President Bush offered an official
American
face to the world when, in his inaugural speech, he plunked for the
messianic
global spread of "freedom" (as defined by his administration),
essentially by force of (or the threat of) arms. But how different the
face of America we see and the faces we turn to the rest of the
world.
-
- Two Faces of America
-
- Just the other day, on the front page of the New York
Times, reporters David Johnston, Neil A. Lewis, and Douglas Jehl revealed
that federal appeals court judge Michael Chertoff, the Bush
administration's
designee for head of the Homeland Security Department, spent parts of
2002-03
-- he was then the head of the Justice Department's criminal division --
advising the Central Intelligence Agency "on the legality of coercive
interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture
statute." More specifically, among the techniques he evidently
green-lighted
because they did not involve "the infliction of pain" (as
narrowly
defined in pretzled torture memos developed in the office of White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales), he indicated that one technique "C.I.A.
officers could use under certain circumstances without fear of prosecution
was strapping a subject down and making him experience a feeling of
drowning."
Water torture is, of course, an ancient interrogation technique and was
used by numerous oppressive regimes in the last century. It now goes under
the rubric of "waterboarding" (which sounds much like the
harmless
daredevil sport of surfboarding).
-
- Read Dahr Jamail's Piece
- http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2166
-
- More writing, photos and commentary at
- http://dahrjamailiraq.com
-
- (c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail. All images and text are
protected
by United States and international copyright law. If you would like to
reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to include this copyright
notice and a prominent link to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other
use of images and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use
on another website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr
Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
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