- Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting
in November last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University,
set up for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident
of the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's
heaviest fighting.
-
- "They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like
a mushroom cloud," he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs
explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after
people dumped water on the burns".
-
- As an unembedded journalist, I spent hours talking to
residents forced out of the city. A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah,
on the outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the siege
"who had their skin melted".
-
- He asked to be referred to simply as Dr Ahmed because
of fears of reprisals for speaking out. "The people and bodies I have
seen were definitely hit by fire weapons and had no other shrapnel wounds,"
he said.
-
- Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the
Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), witnessed the first eight days
of the fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies
that were burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So
they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Jolan district."
-
- Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips
to Reuters, LBC would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled
some tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US soldiers.
-
- Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military
to conceal the use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping
some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted
resident, Abdul Razaq Ismail.
-
- Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004,
said: "In the centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire
homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed
are left as they were."
-
- He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load
it on to trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used
"special munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed
from each blast site.
-
- The author is an unembedded journalist who reported from
Fallujah/
-
- For version posted on The Indepenent website, click
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article327136.ece
-
- To read 'The fog of war: white phosphorus, Fallujah and
some burning questions' which the above piece accompanied in The Independent,
click
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article327094.ece.
-
- (c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.
-
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