Massacre in Falluja

They encircled the city. No one was allowed to go in or come out. Food, water and medical supplies were cut off. Then, during the final days of the blessed month of Ramadan, they launched the operation; their command was not to let any able bodied Iraqi escape and to kill or capture all “insurgents”.

They entered the city, riding their impregnable tanks and humvees. That night, the recitation of the Qur’an during the taraweeh prayers was interrupted several times to encourage the residents of the city to take arms against the invaders. In response, the invading Marines blasted heavy metal music from the loudspeakers attached to their tanks and armoured vehicles. This made the whole scene unreal and surreal for the soldiers, they felt as if they were merely playing a video game.

But as soon as the first encounter took place in the dead of the night, the invading army realized it would not be easy. They pushed the Iraqi recruits to the front positions and assaulted a hospital on the northern side of the city. Within an hour, a number of Iraqi recruits had deserted, several marines were dead and the operation was halted. Then the top enlisted Marine in Iraq, Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent gave a “pep-talk” to a group of 2,500 Marines. “You’re all in the process of making history,” he said, “this is another Hue City in the making. I have no doubt, if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done - kick some butt." (AP, November 7 2004)

This allusion to Hue City reminds one of US war crimes in Vietnam. Then, the US army had moved to reoccupy Hue after Vietnamese forces had liberated it in the Tet Offensive of 1968. It was a massacre that left it as “a devastated and prostrate city,” as the Under Secretary of the Air Force, Townsend Hoopes, later described it. “Eighty per cent of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, and in the smashed ruins lay 2,000 dead civilians... Three quarters of the city’s people were rendered homeless and looting was widespread, members of the ARVN [U.S. backed South Vietnamese troops] being the worst offenders.”

This description by Townsend Hoopes written in a March 1968 memo which now forms part of the proceedings of the Tribunal for International War Crimes in Vietnam, was, however, not available to the world at the time when these crimes took place. Then, all details of the retake of the city were blocked by the US government; now Falluja has witnessed a repeat: there was a total blockage of news during the Ramadan massacre. Not a single reporter was allowed except for those who had been embedded, and they only reported what the US government wanted them to report: the nauseating rhetoric of war against insurgents.

The facts, as they are now emerging, are chilling: more than forty thousand US soldiers have taken part in this assault on Falluja. As the residents faced the wrath of the world’s best equipped army supported by the most advanced air force, street battles ensued during which women, children, and the old were killed and maimed at close range by the invaders.

Thus, as more than one billion Muslims busied themselves with preparations to celebrate the coming Eid, their brethren in faith in Falluja were besieged by a terror that surpassed the horror of the Tatarian violence in Baghdad in 1258. It was an operation in which the US soldiers bulldozed houses, shops, and other buildings that stood in their way. They bombed residences and mosques. They killed young children and old people. They entered the city like a plague. An undisclosed number of US soldiers were killed and hundreds were injured. The US military hospital in Germany, where the wounded soldiers were taken, had to make additional preparations for treating the wounded.

Every single US soldier who took part in this offensive has a record. He or she is part of an organized army, with provisions for financial compensations, treatment for the wounded, and proper burials for the dead. But no one is even counting the number of Iraqis who are dying. No one is interested in them as if they are not human beings; the US military spokespersons have been vaguely reporting “hundreds of deaths”, as if this refers to some abstract entity and not to real men, women, and children. Until now, the International Red Cross has not been allowed to enter the city. A few reports which have emerged depict Falluja as if it was a mass graveyard, with hundreds of unburied bodies rotting in the streets.

The Ramadan massacre in Falluja was not the first. In April 2004, a similar US invasion had left hundreds of civilian corpses on the streets of Falluja. Then as now, the US forces had placed the city under siege and subjected its residents to continuous bombardment. Independent journalists had reported that six hundred Iraqi corpses lay in the streets for days because they could not be taken to the local cemetery which lay outside the city surrounded by US soldiers. Eventually, the residents of Falluja had to dig up the city’s main football stadium to inter the bodies en masse there.

At that time, the US bid to take the city had failed. This time around, it has been able to dessimate the city and impose a regime of violence that duplicates methods used by Israeli army in Palestine: check posts at every intersection, bulldozers which level houses and shops, collective punishments, sealing of sections of the city for days, preventing water, food and medicine supplies, and night raids during which US soldiers enter houses and kill, maim and injure residents.

That Falluja has witnessed some of the worst war crimes since World War II is now a well-established fact; what remains puzzling is the lack of response from a world which is continuously witnessing horror after horror in this war which the world opposed through some of the largest protests ever witnessed in history. True enough, there have been some protests in the UK and Europe over the Falluja massacre, but they amount to little and what is more astonishing is the deadly silence that prevails all across the Muslim world as if world’s one billion Muslims have become so callous that nothing can move them anymore, not even a massacre like the one in Falluja.