D_Raay
11-18-2004, 12:50 PM
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FK18Ak03.html
"The people who are doing the beheadings are extremists ... the people slaughtering Iraqis - torturing in prisons and shooting wounded prisoners - are 'American heroes'. Congratulations, you must be so proud of yourselves today."
- Iraqi girl blogger Riverbend
Whom are you going to trust: Fallujah civilians who risked their lives to escape, witnesses such as Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, hospital doctors, Amnesty International, top United Nations human-rights official Louise Arbour, the International Committee of the Red Cross; or the Pentagon and US-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi?
On the humanitarian front, Fallujah is a tragedy. The city has virtually been reduced to rubble. Remaining residents, the Red Cross confirms, are eating roots and burying the dead in their gardens. There's no medicine in the hospitals to help anybody. The wounded are left to die in the streets - their remains to be consumed by packs of stray dogs. As Iraqresistance.net, a Europe-wide collective, puts it, "World governments, international organizations, nobody raises a finger to stop the killing." The global reaction is apathy.
Civilians? What civilians?
Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad confirm the anger across the Sunni heartland - even among moderates - against the occupation and Allawi has reached incendiary proportions. His credibility - already low before the Fallujah massacre - is now completely gone.
Allawi insists on the record that not a single civilian has died in Fallujah. Obviously nobody in his cabinet told him what Baghdad is talking about - the hundreds of rotting corpses in the streets, the thousands of civilians still trapped inside their homes, starving, many of them wounded, with no water and no medical aid. And nobody has told him of dozens of children now in Baghdad's Naaman hospital who lost their limbs, victims of US air strikes and artillery shells.
A top Red Cross official in Baghdad now estimates that at least 800 civilians have been killed so far - and this is a "low" figure, based on accounts by Red Crescent aid workers barred by the Americans from entering the city, residents still inside Fallujah, and refugees now huddling in camps in the desert near Fallujah. The refugees tell horror stories - including confirmation, already reported by Asia Times Online, of the Americans using cluster bombs and spraying white phosphorus, a banned chemical weapon.
The talk in the streets of Baghdad, always referring to accounts by families and friends in and around Fallujah, confirms that there have been hundreds of civilian deaths. Moreover, according to the Red Cross official, since September Allawi's Ministry of Health has not provided any medical supplies to hospitals and clinics in Fallujah: "The hospitals do not even have aspirin," he said, confirming many accounts in these past few days from despairing Fallujah doctors. The official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of US military reprisal.
Even submitted to media blackout - an al-Arabiya reporter, for instance, was arrested by the Americans because he was trying to enter Fallujah - the Arab press is slowly waking up to the full extent of the tragedy, not only on networks such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, but also in newspapers like the pro-American Saudi daily Asharq a-Awsat. Our sources say that most of Baghdad and the whole Sunni triangle is already convinced that the Americans "captured" Fallujah general hospital, bombed at least two clinics and are preventing the Red Crescent from delivering urgent help because as many bodies as possible must be removed before any independent observers have a chance to evaluate the real extent of the carnage.
Al-Jazeera continues to apologize for not offering more in-depth coverage, always reminding its viewers that its Baghdad bureau was shut down indefinitely by Allawi in August. But many in the Arab world saw its interview with Dr Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi of Fallujah's general hospital, invaded and "captured" by the marines. She confirmed that "we were tied up and beaten despite being unarmed and having only our medical instruments"; and that the hospital was targeted by bombs and rockets during the initial siege of Fallujah. When the marines came she "was with a woman in labor. The umbilical cord had not yet been cut. At that time, a US soldier shouted at one of the [Iraqi] National Guards to arrest me and tie my hands while I was helping the mother to deliver. I will never forget this incident in my life."
Crucially, Dr al-Muhannadi also confirmed that American snipers killed more than 17 Iraqi doctors who had mobilized to answer an appeal from Fallujah's doctors broadcast on al-Jazeera: information on the massacre has been circulating in Baghdad for days. Amnesty International, based on the account of a doctor at the scene, says that 20 Fallujah medical staff and dozens of civilians were killed when an American missile destroyed a clinic on November 9.
There is more to the article, it goes on to explain the counterinsurgency theories and details why they have failed in the past and will again in Iraq. Please click the link and read.
It is shameful to be an American right now...
"The people who are doing the beheadings are extremists ... the people slaughtering Iraqis - torturing in prisons and shooting wounded prisoners - are 'American heroes'. Congratulations, you must be so proud of yourselves today."
- Iraqi girl blogger Riverbend
Whom are you going to trust: Fallujah civilians who risked their lives to escape, witnesses such as Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, hospital doctors, Amnesty International, top United Nations human-rights official Louise Arbour, the International Committee of the Red Cross; or the Pentagon and US-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi?
On the humanitarian front, Fallujah is a tragedy. The city has virtually been reduced to rubble. Remaining residents, the Red Cross confirms, are eating roots and burying the dead in their gardens. There's no medicine in the hospitals to help anybody. The wounded are left to die in the streets - their remains to be consumed by packs of stray dogs. As Iraqresistance.net, a Europe-wide collective, puts it, "World governments, international organizations, nobody raises a finger to stop the killing." The global reaction is apathy.
Civilians? What civilians?
Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad confirm the anger across the Sunni heartland - even among moderates - against the occupation and Allawi has reached incendiary proportions. His credibility - already low before the Fallujah massacre - is now completely gone.
Allawi insists on the record that not a single civilian has died in Fallujah. Obviously nobody in his cabinet told him what Baghdad is talking about - the hundreds of rotting corpses in the streets, the thousands of civilians still trapped inside their homes, starving, many of them wounded, with no water and no medical aid. And nobody has told him of dozens of children now in Baghdad's Naaman hospital who lost their limbs, victims of US air strikes and artillery shells.
A top Red Cross official in Baghdad now estimates that at least 800 civilians have been killed so far - and this is a "low" figure, based on accounts by Red Crescent aid workers barred by the Americans from entering the city, residents still inside Fallujah, and refugees now huddling in camps in the desert near Fallujah. The refugees tell horror stories - including confirmation, already reported by Asia Times Online, of the Americans using cluster bombs and spraying white phosphorus, a banned chemical weapon.
The talk in the streets of Baghdad, always referring to accounts by families and friends in and around Fallujah, confirms that there have been hundreds of civilian deaths. Moreover, according to the Red Cross official, since September Allawi's Ministry of Health has not provided any medical supplies to hospitals and clinics in Fallujah: "The hospitals do not even have aspirin," he said, confirming many accounts in these past few days from despairing Fallujah doctors. The official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of US military reprisal.
Even submitted to media blackout - an al-Arabiya reporter, for instance, was arrested by the Americans because he was trying to enter Fallujah - the Arab press is slowly waking up to the full extent of the tragedy, not only on networks such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, but also in newspapers like the pro-American Saudi daily Asharq a-Awsat. Our sources say that most of Baghdad and the whole Sunni triangle is already convinced that the Americans "captured" Fallujah general hospital, bombed at least two clinics and are preventing the Red Crescent from delivering urgent help because as many bodies as possible must be removed before any independent observers have a chance to evaluate the real extent of the carnage.
Al-Jazeera continues to apologize for not offering more in-depth coverage, always reminding its viewers that its Baghdad bureau was shut down indefinitely by Allawi in August. But many in the Arab world saw its interview with Dr Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi of Fallujah's general hospital, invaded and "captured" by the marines. She confirmed that "we were tied up and beaten despite being unarmed and having only our medical instruments"; and that the hospital was targeted by bombs and rockets during the initial siege of Fallujah. When the marines came she "was with a woman in labor. The umbilical cord had not yet been cut. At that time, a US soldier shouted at one of the [Iraqi] National Guards to arrest me and tie my hands while I was helping the mother to deliver. I will never forget this incident in my life."
Crucially, Dr al-Muhannadi also confirmed that American snipers killed more than 17 Iraqi doctors who had mobilized to answer an appeal from Fallujah's doctors broadcast on al-Jazeera: information on the massacre has been circulating in Baghdad for days. Amnesty International, based on the account of a doctor at the scene, says that 20 Fallujah medical staff and dozens of civilians were killed when an American missile destroyed a clinic on November 9.
There is more to the article, it goes on to explain the counterinsurgency theories and details why they have failed in the past and will again in Iraq. Please click the link and read.
It is shameful to be an American right now...