One account
"Collective punishment", and criticism of Al-J for extensive coverage of casualtiesFalluja - an eyewitness account
14/4/2004
Helen Williams from Gwent has been in Iraq for the past month. She reports here from Fallujah where she is helping to deliver humanitarian aid.
Falluja. 12 April 2004. On Friday night Lee and Ghareeb called to see us asking if any of us wanted to go to Fallujah to try to take aid in and get people out. They told us how they had been back and fro the past three days, how so many people were dying there and about human rights abuses being perpetrated by the soldiers.
They said that there were long queues of families trying to leave, the soldiers were making their life hard, making them wait hours to cross checkpoints. They were not letting men of 'military age' cross. These men were taking their wives and children out and then returning to the city , in many cases, to fight. We heard how the hspitals were unable to cope with the huge numbers of casualties and how one had been bombed.
Ghareeb would be able to sort out a safe passage through for us if we managed to get through the American checkpoints. Julia, Jo, Wendy and myself agreed to go the next morning. We were due to leave early the next morning but we were waiting for $1000 of blood equipment to arrive.
The delivery was late because it was coming from the other side of Baghdad and there was a battle going on in Adhimaya, not far from our friend Issam's house. We had to decide whether to wait for it to arrive or go straightaway. If we waited, it would mean staying in Gurma (nearby resistance village to Fallujah - attacked last night), but if we went without it we were risking our lives to go with less aid.
In the end we opted to leave at 2 pm, with or without the blood equipment to give ourselves a chance of being able to return to Baghdad that night. We went in a long bus, about the size of the coaches we use at home in order to be able to fill it with refugees/injured people in Fallujah. If we could not get into Fallujah, our intention was to go to the maerican checkpoints to help refugees get through them - the soldiers were making life hard on the checkpoints, keeping progress slow and not allowing everyone to pass, especially any men of 'military age'.
Ghareeb, Lee and Aziz (the sheik's nephew from Gurma village) went in a car in front of the bus to sort out the checkpoints ahead of us. We made our way out of Baghdad and onto the highway to Fallujah. The highway was littered with burnt out vehicles - most were petrol tankers, but there were also many destroyed American military vehicles too.
We passed a huge convoy of American military lorries carrying containers with DHFM (Detention Holding Facility Material) inside and long lorries carrying wood with the same initials stamped on it - there must have been enough to build several detention holding facilities. Then we passed a lorry which was being looted by people from a local village. We drove by quickly. Then we came to the American checkpoints - there were long queues of traffic waiting to go through. We were lucky at both - they did not really bother to search our bags of the bus that much and they only body searched the males.
They said they were pleased to see friendly faces, speaking English! Indeed we had been friendly, teasing them about their suntans andt elling them to put plenty of lotion on - after all we wanted to get through! We left the highway at Abu Gharib, passing the huge tented prison there and then crossed country towards Fallujah.
The countryside here is stunning, a lush 'cartoon' green - peaceful and beautiful. We passed through Mujahadeen checkpoints with ease - please note Mujahadeen means 'freedom fighter', nothing more, nothing less. People were shouting good luck to us and blessing/thanking us for going to Fallujah. At one junction some boys threw bread and cake into the bus for us.
As we approached Fallujah on these back roads they deteriorated becoming no more than a bumpy dirt track, barely two cars wide. Coming the other way were cars full of families and their possessions and vehicles with signs on them reading 'Aid to Fallujah - from the people of Hilla/Nagaf/Ramadi' for example.
It seemed that all the people of Iraq, whether Shia, Sunni or Christian wanted to help Fallujah with whatever they could - water (there is no clean drinking water in Fallujah), blankets, food or medical aid - it was wonderful to see. As we approached Fallujah, we could see a mosque through the dust in the distance. More Mujahadeen lined the road.
At one point they stopped us and greeted us, smiling, waving and posing for photos with their weapons - mainly RPGs, AK47's and RPK's (machine guns). Then they started shooting into the air above the bus - the sound was deafening. We drove through Fallujah's deserted streets (apart from fighters and the odd group of children) - we had to duck at one point as we passed an American sniper position - to the hospital.
The hospital we went to was more of a clinic - Five beds in a row and a room at the back for the doctors. We unloaded the aid and Maky, the hospital manager who spoke English, told us of recent events there. He said how Fallujah badly needed more aid - they were running short of all sorts of medicine and hospital/surgical equipment - indeed the city was completely out of any pain relief or anaestetic.
He also told us about the American soldiers shooting at ambulances and he showed us their last ambulance shot at this morning - it had bullet holes in the front and back windows and on the roof, but it was still being used, there was no choice. And he told us about the horrific casualty numbers and the terrible injuries being sustained by people there.
Antother aid worker there repeated the same. We went into the hosptial. Suddenly a young boy was brought in. He had been shot in the head by an American sniper while his family had tried to leave their house waving a white flag. His parents were grief stricken, his father covered in his son's blood.
They told us to film their dying son, I hated to, but I took his photo and I have emailed it to Kevin so you can see what the Americans are doing in Fallujah. At the same time, a middle aged woman was brought in - she had been shot in the abdomen and chest - we could hear her lungs filled with blood as she tried to breath - she later died too - I have also sent her photo. She had come into the sight of a sniper and he had indiscrimainatley shot her - a woman in her chadoor, not a fighter, no gun in hand.
We felt shocked and so sad - it was horrible. We then decide to split into groups of three - one boy, one girl and one translator in each. We were going to accompany vehicles to collect injured people around the city. Unfortunately there was only one available vehicle - a mujahadeen pick up truck.
Jo, Dave and Raina set off, passports held aloft. They were going to another hospital to get an injured man - no-one could go into the hospital because of American snipers all around it and this man had been shot by one. It was a dangerous venture, but they went and when they got there they shouted to the snipers who did not shoot.
Sadly the man was already dead, lying in the street. They brought him to the hospital. Then they went again, this time in the already damaged ambulance with Ghareeb driving. The hospital had received a call about a pregnanat woman in difficulty about to give birth. As they approached the house the ambulance came under heavy sniper fire - Jo said there were red flashes going past her head, the bullets were so close.
They shot out a tyre and then Ghareeb burst two more escaping from the scene. Thankfully they were all uninjured - but now we have the proof - The American army shoot at ambulances - no wonder they don't sign up to the Internatgional Criminal Court.
So many injured people were being brought to the hosptial - many of them resistance fighters with horrific injuries - gunshot wounds and blood everywhere. We met a small boy, he wa actually 15 years old and he had volunteered to drive his dad's small van - a makeshift ambulance, with signs written in red on white sheets taped to the side of the vehicle.
We were struck by his bravery. We also met another small boy, he was an 11 year old mujahadeen fighter, masked by his yeshmack and holding his AK47 - the gun was almost as tall as him. It was a tragedy - how scarred by these events will this young boy be when he grows up - if he survives?
He and his family probably thought he would have as much chance surviving if he fought as if he did not - it was a very sad sight.
At 7pm Fallujah was under curfew. The mosque called out warning everyone that curfew had just begun and to be careful. Then some missiles were fired at positions not far away. The mosque started again, this time calling on everyone to fight the enemy and resist. It finished with calls of 'Allah Akbar' - God is great.
Everyone around joined in including all the Mujahadeen fighters, holding their guns aloft and firing into the air. It was something I will never forget - I found it so moving.
During the day the doctors in the hospital had been fighting to save one particular man's life - they had brough him back to life with CPR but with no life support machines or anything like it they had to keep working on him, keeping his legs held up in the air. Each time we passed we would hope and pray he would make it.
Just after curfew he died - we knew because a friend came outside crying uncontrollably. Seeing these brave fighting men break down and cry just adds to the tragedy that it Fallujah.
We now had to make a decision whether to stay in Fallujah or try to leave during the curfew. Ghareeb told us that the road was secure for us and we could try to get back to Bagdad. We discussed it and there seemed little point in risking it and we decided to stay.
We could have stayed in the hospital but felt we would get in the way and so we were taken to a nearby house for the night. Before we left some missles landed not far away - we tried to work ourt how far from the time between the flash and the boom - it was not much time - we reckoned on about one klilometre away.
Not long after we saw the results. A car sped up to the hospital door containing two badly burnt men - one was burnt all over his body - the smell oif his burning flesh was unbearable. We cannot even begin to imagine his pain - and the hosptial, as I mentioned before, had no pain relief for him.
We made our way in the darkness to the house. Suddenley we heard a plane above us - it dropped flares over us. At first we thought we were being bombed and we took cover against a wall, Raul managing to fall and twist his ankle in the panic. Two lots of flares dropped over us so we had to hurry - after all we were walking in the streets after curfew.
The house we were taken to for the night belonged to the father of the 15 year old ambulance driver. He and his brother were the cutest boys I have ever seen - they kept bringing us water and chai all eveng. The house was lovely, very posh and we were given lovely food to eat - all of it veggie, most of it vegan (for those of you who like to know these details).
Us vegans had bread, beans and date jam and sesame biscuits. A missile landed not too far away and we opened the windows to stop them shattering should there be any more close hits.
None of us slept much in the night - I don't know if that was due to bombs or mosquitos, or one of the men snoring in the next room, but I was glad when morning came. It was so peaceful in the morning - we were in a pleasant suburb with lots of trees - the birds were singing - it was surreal. We had breakfast and left.
The peace did not last long and as we made our way through the streets we could hear fighting in the distance - we kept alongside walls in single file along the roads. As we approached the hospital we could see more and more families in the area around it. There were women and men with their children all looking for transport and a way out of the city before the bombardment that everyone was sure would come today.
More and more injured people arrived - and many more fighters - thankfully some were able to walk. Jo, Dave and Raina left to do one last pick up before we left. They went to a house where the unarmed father had been shot dear by a sniper - he was surrounded by his wife and children - crying in anguish and grief.
They brought the body to the hospital. They shouted to the Americans not to shoot - the soldiers were surprised to see them. they told them to get out of Fallujah as air strikes would begin soon (but they could not say when) and they siad they woulo start to sweep up the main road carrying out house searches for weapons.
Meanwhile we were taken to the hospital morgue - they wanted us to take photos/films of the dead.
The nearest body is 18 year old Hussam, the next one (in the middle) was a 21 year old called Mohammed and the furthest one was another Hussam - I don't know his age, but they uncovered his bloody injured body and he looked in his twenties.
While we were there his brother arrived to collect his body. During the night 12 people had died in this small hospital - that is not including those we saw die the day before.
We were loading up the bus with injured peole when a very excited Mujahadeen fighter came across the road - he had just shot and killed an American sniper (we later heard about it on the news) and he was overjoyed. It is hard to see death greeted with such happiness and celebration, but seeing the suffering and cruelty endured by the people in Fallujah, I came some way to understanding it.
We took about eight injured people including the badly burnt man, some young fighters with bullet wounds, another young man with a shot arm and cut up eye and face, another with a bullet hole in his neck and one with a broken leg. And two women with gunshot wounds - one of them very close to death.
As the burnt man was taken onto the bus, the hosptial security man could take no more - he just broke down in tears and sat down for a while. Soon I saw him up and about again continuing his work.
The road out of Fallujah was made safe for us and we set off. The streets were deserted except for the fighters in their positions ready for the American onslaught of their city.
As we drove out across the desert we could see American tanks and humvees charging back and fro - not quite sure what they were doing but they were raising plenty of dust. We joined the traffic leaving Fallujah and we were pleased to see that pick up trucks of aid were still going the other way into the city. (It has been repored on the news today that there are 3000 people from fallujah out in this dusty desert).
We passed the Mujahadeen checkpoints and the villages and made it back to the main highway. As we approached the first American checkpoint, all the Westerners on board moved to the front of the bus so they would be seen first. The car with Lee, Ghareeb and Dave stopped and they got out and walked up to the soldiers, their hands up. They spoke to the Americans and returned and we moved forward slowly in the bus (we approach all American checkpoints slowly and with caution!)
The soldiers did not search the bus, they just stepped on, had a quick look and gave us humvee escort to the next checkpoint - somehting we certainly did not want and which, in fact, put us in more danger. At the next checkpoint, those of us who could walk had to get off the bus with our passports.
Another eyewitness accountMedia and Falloojeh...
There has been a lot of criticism about the way Al-Arabia and Al-Jazeera were covering the riots and fighting in Falloojeh and the south this last week. Some American spokesman for the military was ranting about the "spread of anti-Americanism" through networks like the abovementioned.
Actually, both networks did a phenomenal job of covering the attacks on Falloojeh and the southern provinces. Al-Jazeera had their reporter literally embedded in the middle of the chaos- and I don't mean the lame embedded western journalists type of thing they had going at the beginning of the war (you know- embedded in the Green Zone and embedded in Kuwait, etc.). Ahmed Mansur, I believe his name was, was actually standing there, in the middle of the bombing, shouting to be heard over the F-16s and helicopters blasting away at houses and buildings. It brought back the days of 'shock and awe'...
I know it bothers the CPA terribly to have the corpses of dead Iraqis shown on television. They would love for Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia to follow Al-Hurra's example and show endless interviews with pro-occupation Iraqis living abroad and speaking in stilted Arabic. These interviews, of course, are interspersed with translated documentaries on the many marvels of... Hollywood. And while I, personally, am very interested in the custom leather interiors of the latest Audi, I couldn't seem to draw myself away from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia while 700+ Iraqis were being killed.
To lessen the feelings of anti-Americanism, might I make a few suggestions? Stop the collective punishment. When Mark Kimmett stutters through a press conference babbling about "precision weapons" and "military targets" in Falloojeh, who is he kidding? Falloojeh is a small city made up of low, simple houses, little shops and mosques. Is he implying that the 600 civilians who died during the bombing and the thousands injured and maimed were all "insurgents"? Are houses, shops and mosques now military targets?
What I'm trying to say is that we don't need news networks to make us angry or frustrated. All you need to do is talk to one of the Falloojeh refugees making their way tentatively into Baghdad; look at the tear-stained faces, the eyes glazed over with something like shock. In our neighborhood alone there are at least 4 families from Falloojeh who have come to stay with family and friends in Baghdad. The stories they tell are terrible and grim and it's hard to believe that they've gone through so much.
I think western news networks are far too tame. They show the Hollywood version of war- strong troops in uniform, hostile Iraqis being captured and made to face "justice" and the White House turkey posing with the Thanksgiving turkey... which is just fine. But what about the destruction that comes with war and occupation? What about the death? I don't mean just the images of dead Iraqis scattered all over, but dead Americans too. People should *have* to see those images. Why is it not ok to show dead Iraqis and American troops in Iraq, but it's fine to show the catastrophe of September 11 over and over again? I wish every person who emails me supporting the war, safe behind their computer, secure in their narrow mind and fixed views, could actually come and experience the war live. I wish they could spend just 24 hours in Baghdad today and hear Mark Kimmett talk about the death of 700 "insurgents" like it was a proud day for Americans everywhere...
Still, when I hear talk about "anti-Americanism" it angers me. Why does American identify itself with its military and government? Why is does being anti-Bush and anti-occupation have to mean that a person is anti-American? We watch American movies, listen to everything from Britney Spears to Nirvana and refer to every single brown, fizzy drink as "Pepsi".
I hate American foreign policy and its constant meddling in the region... I hate American tanks in Baghdad and American soldiers on our streets and in our homes on occasion... why does that mean that I hate America and Americans? Are tanks, troops and violence the only face of America? If the Pentagon, Department of Defense and Condi are "America", then yes- I hate America.
April 11th
Falluja
Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that’s not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people and a few possessions, heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people inside still inside Falluja.
The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I’m on the bus is that a journalist I knew turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja, he’d been bringing out children with their limbs blown off, the US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were being stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.
He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the american checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we’d travel on. We’d take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave.
I’ll spare you the whole decision making process, all the questions we all asked ourselves and each other, and you can spare me the accusations of madness, but what it came down to was this: if I don’t do it, who will? Either way, we arrive in one piece.
We pile the stuff in the corridor and the boxes are torn open straightaway, the blankets most welcomed. It’s not a hospital at all but a clinic, a private doctor’s surgery treating people free since air strikes destroyed the town’s main hospital. Another has been improvised in a car garage. There’s no anaesthetic. The blood bags are in a drinks fridge and the doctors warm them up under the hot tap in an unhygienic toilet.
Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces. Ummi, my mother, one cries. I hold her until Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about ten is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Falluja.
The lights go out, the fan stops and in the sudden quiet someone holds up the flame of a cigarette lighter for the doctor to carry on operating by. The electricity to the town has been cut off for days and when the generator runs out of petrol they just have to manage till it comes back on. Dave quickly donates his torch. The children are not going to live.
“Come,” says Maki and ushers me alone into a room where an old woman has just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched up. Another in her leg is being dressed, the bed under her foot soaked with blood, a white flag still clutched in her hand and the same story: I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I was hit by a US sniper. Some of the town is held by US marines, other parts by the local fighters. Their homes are in the US controlled area and they are adamant that the snipers were US marines.
Snipers are causing not just carnage but also the paralysis of the ambulance and evacuation services. The biggest hospital after the main one was bombed is in US territory and cut off from the clinic by snipers. The ambulance has been repaired four times after bullet damage. Bodies are lying in the streets because no one can go to collect them without being shot.
Some said we were mad to come to Iraq; quite a few said we were completely insane to come to Falluja and now there are people telling me that getting in the back of the pick up to go past the snipers and get sick and injured people is the craziest thing they’ve ever seen. I know, though, that if we don’t, no one will.
He’s holding a white flag with a red crescent on; I don’t know his name. The men we pass wave us on when the driver explains where we’re going. The silence is ferocious in the no man’s land between the pick up at the edge of the Mujahedin territory, which has just gone from our sight around the last corner and the marines’ line beyond the next wall; no birds, no music, no indication that anyone is still living until a gate opens opposite and a woman comes out, points.
We edge along to the hole in the wall where we can see the car, spent mortar shells around it. The feet are visible, crossed, in the gutter. I think he’s dead already. The snipers are visible too, two of them on the corner of the building. As yet I think they can’t see us so we need to let them know we’re there.
“Hello,” I bellow at the top of my voice. “Can you hear me?” They must. They’re about 30 metres from us, maybe less, and it’s so still you could hear the flies buzzing at fifty paces. I repeat myself a few times, still without reply, so decide to explain myself a bit more.
“We are a medical team. We want to remove this wounded man. Is it OK for us to come out and get him? Can you give us a signal that it’s OK?”
I’m sure they can hear me but they’re still not responding. Maybe they didn’t understand it all, so I say the same again. Dave yells too in his US accent. I yell again. Finally I think I hear a shout back. Not sure, I call again.
“Hello.”
“Yeah.”
“Can we come out and get him?”
“Yeah,”
Slowly, our hands up, we go out. The black cloud that rises to greet us carries with it a hot, sour smell. Solidified, his legs are heavy. I leave them to Rana and Dave, our guide lifting under his hips. The Kalashnikov is attached by sticky blood to is hair and hand and we don’t want it with us so I put my foot on it as I pick up his shoulders and his blood falls out through the hole in his back. We heave him into the pick up as best we can and try to outrun the flies.
I suppose he was wearing flip flops because he’s barefoot now, no more than 20 years old, in imitation Nike pants and a blue and black striped football shirt with a big 28 on the back. As the orderlies form the clinic pull the young fighter off the pick up, yellow fluid pours from his mouth and they flip him over, face up, the way into the clinic clearing in front of them, straight up the ramp into the makeshift morgue.
We wash the blood off our hands and get in the ambulance. There are people trapped in the other hospital who need to go to Baghdad. Siren screaming, lights flashing, we huddle on the floor of the ambulance, passports and ID cards held out the windows. We pack it with people, one with his chest taped together and a drip, one on a stretcher, legs jerking violently so I have to hold them down as we wheel him out, lifting him over steps.
The hospital is better able to treat them than the clinic but hasn’t got enough of anything to sort them out properly and the only way to get them to Baghdad on our bus, which means they have to go to the clinic. We’re crammed on the floor of the ambulance in case it’s shot at. Nisareen, a woman doctor about my age, can’t stop a few tears once we’re out.
The doctor rushes out to meet me: “Can you go to fetch a lady, she is pregnant and she is delivering the baby too soon?”
Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window.
We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.
I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you?
How dare you?
Azzam grabs the gear stick and gets the ambulance into reverse, another tyre bursting as we go over the ridge in the centre of the road , the sots still coming as we flee around the corner. I carry on singing. The wheels are scraping, burst rubber burning on the road.
The men run for a stretcher as we arrive and I shake my head. They spot the new bullet holes and run to see if we’re OK. Is there any other way to get to her, I want to know. La, maaku tarieq. There is no other way. They say we did the right thing. They say they’ve fixed the ambulance four times already and they’ll fix it again but the radiator’s gone and the wheels are buckled and se’s still at home in the dark giving birth alone. I let her down.
We can’t go out again. For one thing there’s no ambulance and besides it’s dark now and that means our foreign faces can’t protect the people who go out with us or the people we pick up. Maki is the acting director of the place. He says he hated Saddam but now he hates the Americans more.
We take off the blue gowns as the sky starts exploding somewhere beyond the building opposite. Minutes later a car roars up to the clinic. I can hear him screaming before I can see that there’s no skin left on his body. He’s burnt from head to foot. For sure there’s nothing they can do. He’ll die of dehydration within a few days.
Another man is pulled from the car onto a stretcher. Cluster bombs, they say, although it’s not clear whether they mean one or both of them. We set off walking to Mr Yasser’s house, waiting at each corner for someone to check the street before we cross. A ball of fire falls from a plane, splits into smaller balls of bright white lights. I think they’re cluster bombs, because cluster bombs are in the front of my mind, but they vanish, just magnesium flares, incredibly bright but short-lived, giving a flash picture of the town from above.
Yasser asks us all to introduce ourselves. I tell him I’m training to be a lawyer. One of the other men asks whether I know about international law. They want to know about the law on war crimes, what a war crime is. I tell them I know some of the Geneva Conventions, that I’ll bring some information next time I come and we can get someone to explain it in Arabic.
We bring up the matter of Nayoko. This group of fighters has nothing to do with the ones who are holding the Japanese hostages, but while they’re thanking us for what we did this evening, we talk about the things Nayoko did for the street kids, how much they loved her. They can’t promise anything but that they’ll try and find out where she is and try to persuade the group to let her and the others go. I don’t suppose it will make any difference. They’re busy fighting a war in Falluja. They’re unconnected with the other group. But it can’t hurt to try.
The planes are above us all night so that as I doze I forget I’m not on a long distance flight, the constant bass note of an unmanned reconnaissance drone overlaid with the frantic thrash of jets and the dull beat of helicopters and interrupted by the explosions.
In the morning I make balloon dogs, giraffes and elephants for the little one, Abdullah, Aboudi, who’s clearly distressed by the noise of the aircraft and explosions. I blow bubbles which he follows with his eyes. Finally, finally, I score a smile. The twins, thirteen years old, laugh too, one of them an ambulance driver, both said to be handy with a Kalashnikov.
The doctors look haggard in the morning. None has slept more than a couple of hours a night for a week. One as had only eight hours of sleep in the last seven days, missing the funerals of his brother and aunt because he was needed at the hospital.
“The dead we cannot help,” Jassim said. “I must worry about the injured.”
We go again, Dave, Rana and me, this time in a pick up. There are some sick people close to the marines’ line who need evacuating. No one dares come out of their house because the marines are on top of the buildings shooting at anything that moves. Saad fetches us a white flag and tells us not to worry, he’s checked and secured the road, no Mujahedin will fire at us, that peace is upon us, this eleven year old child, his face covered with a keffiyeh, but for is bright brown eyes, his AK47 almost as tall as he is.
We shout again to the soldiers, hold up the flag with a red crescent sprayed onto it. Two come down from the building, cover this side and Rana mutters, “Allahu akbar. Please nobody take a shot at them.”
We jump down and tell them we need to get some sick people from the houses and they want Rana to go and bring out the family from the house whose roof they’re on. Thirteen women and children are still inside, in one room, without food and water for the last 24 hours.
“We’re going to be going through soon clearing the houses,” the senior one says.
“What does that mean, clearing the houses?”
“Going into every one searching for weapons.” He’s checking his watch, can’t tell me what will start when, of course, but there’s going to be air strikes in support. “If you’re going to do tis you gotta do it soon.”
First we go down the street we were sent to. There’s a man, face down, in a white dishdasha, a small round red stain on his back. We run to him. Again the flies ave got there first. Dave is at his shoulders, I’m by his knees and as we reach to roll him onto the stretcher Dave’s hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out.
There’s no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately. They couldn’t have known we were coming so it’s inconceivable tat anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body.
He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back.
We cover his face, carry him to the pick up. There’s nothing to cover his body with. The sick woman is helped out of the house, the little girls around her hugging cloth bags to their bodies, whispering, “Baba. Baba.” Daddy. Shaking, they let us go first, hands up, around the corner, then we usher them to the cab of the pick up, shielding their heads so they can’t see him, the cuddly fat man stiff in the back.
The people seem to pour out of the houses now in the hope we can escort them safely out of the line of fire, kids, women, men, anxiously asking us whether they can all go, or only the women and children. We go to ask. The young marine tells us that men of fighting age can’t leave. What’s fighting age, I want to know. He contemplates. Anything under forty five. No lower limit.
It appals me that all those men would be trapped in a city which is about to be destroyed. Not all of them are fighters, not all are armed. It’s going to happen out of the view of the world, out of sight of the media, because most of the media in Falluja is embedded with the marines or turned away at the outskirts. Before we can pass the message on, two explosions scatter the crowd in the side street back into their houses.
Rana’s with the marines evacuating the family from the house they’re occupying. The pick up isn’t back yet. The families are hiding behind their walls. We wait, because there’s nothing else we can do. We wait in no man’s land. The marines, at least, are watching us through binoculars; maybe the local fighters are too.
I’ve got a disappearing hanky in my pocket so while I’m sitting like a lemon, nowhere to go, gunfire and explosions aplenty all around, I make the hanky disappear, reappear, disappear. It’s always best, I think, to seem completely unthreatening and completely unconcerned, so no one worries about you enough to shoot. We can’t wait too long though. Rana’s been gone ages. We have to go and get her to hurry. There’s a young man in the group. She’s talked them into letting him leave too.
A man wants to use his police car to carry some of the people, a couple of elderly ones who can’t walk far, the smallest children. It’s missing a door. Who knows if he was really a police car or the car was reappropriated and just ended up there? It didn’t matter if it got more people out faster. They creep from their houses, huddle by the wall, follow us out, their hands up too, and walk up the street clutching babies, bags, each other.
The pick up gets back and we shovel as many onto it as we can as an ambulance arrives from somewhere. A young man waves from the doorway of what’s left of a house, his upper body bare, a blood soaked bandage around his arm, probably a fighter but it makes no difference once someone is wounded and unarmed. Getting the dead isn’t essential. Like the doctor said, the dead don’t need help, but if it’s easy enough then we will. Since we’re already OK with the soldiers and the ambulance is here, we run down to fetch them in. It’s important in Islam to bury the body straightaway.
The ambulance follows us down. The soldiers start shouting in English at us for it to stop, pointing guns. It’s moving fast. We’re all yelling, signalling for it to stop but it seems to take forever for the driver to hear and see us. It stops. It stops, before they open fire. We haul them onto the stretchers and run, shove them in the back. Rana squeezes in the front with the wounded man and Dave and I crouch in the back beside the bodies. He says he had allergies as a kid and hasn’t got much sense of smell. I wish, retrospectively, for childhood allergies, and stick my head out the window.
The bus is going to leave, taking the injured people back to Baghdad, the man with the burns, one of the women who was shot in the jaw and shoulder by a sniper, several others. Rana says she’s staying to help. Dave and I don’t hesitate: we’re staying too. “If I don’t do it, who will?” has become an accidental motto and I’m acutely aware after the last foray how many people, how many women and children, are still in their houses either because they’ve got nowhere to go, because they’re scared to go out of the door or because they’ve chosen to stay.
To begin with it’s agreed, then Azzam says we have to go. He hasn’t got contacts with every armed group, only with some. There are different issues to square with each one. We need to get these people back to Baghdad as quickly as we can. If we’re kidnapped or killed it will cause even more problems, so it’s better that we just get on the bus and leave and come back with him as soon as possible.
It hurts to climb onto the bus when the doctor has just asked us to go and evacuate some more people. I hate the fact that a qualified medic can’t travel in the ambulance but I can, just because I look like the sniper’s sister or one of his mates, but that’s the way it is today and the way it was yesterday and I feel like a traitor for leaving, but I can’t see where I’ve got a choice. It’s a war now and as alien as it is to me to do what I’m told, for once I’ve got to.
Jassim is scared. He harangues Mohammed constantly, tries to pull him out of the driver’s seat wile we’re moving. The woman with the gunshot wound is on the back seat, the man with the burns in front of her, being fanned with cardboard from the empty boxes, his intravenous drips swinging from the rail along the ceiling of the bus. It’s hot. It must be unbearable for him.
Saad comes onto the bus to wish us well for the journey. He shakes Dave’s hand and then mine. I hold his in both of mine and tell him “Dir balak,” take care, as if I could say anything more stupid to a pre-teen Mujahedin with an AK47 in his other hand, and our eyes meet and stay fixed, his full of fire and fear.
Can’t I take him away? Can’t I take him somewhere he can be a child? Can’t I make him a balloon giraffe and give him some drawing pens and tell him not to forget to brush his teeth? Can’t I find the person who put the rifle in the hands of that little boy? Can’t I tell someone about what that does to a child? Do I have to leave him here where there are heavily armed men all around him and lots of them are not on his side, however many sides there are in all of this? And of course I do. I do have to leave him, like child soldiers everywhere.
The way back is tense, the bus almost getting stuck in a dip in the sand, people escaping in anything, even piled on the trailer of a tractor, lines of cars and pick ups and buses ferrying people to the dubious sanctuary of Baghdad, lines of men in vehicles queuing to get back into the city having got their families to safety, either to fight or to help evacuate more people. The driver, Jassim, the father, ignores Azzam and takes a different road so that suddenly we’re not following the lead car and we’re on a road that’s controlled by a different armed group than the ones which know us.
A crowd of men waves guns to stop the bus. Somehow they apparently believe that there are American soldiers on the bus, as if they wouldn’t be in tanks or helicopters, and there are men getting out of their cars with shouts of “Sahafa Amreeki,” American journalists. The passengers shout out of the windows, “Ana min Falluja,” I am from Falluja. Gunmen run onto the bus and see that it’s true, there are sick and injured and old people, Iraqis, and then relax, wave us on.
We stop in Abu Ghraib and swap seats, foreigners in the front, Iraqis less visible, headscarves off so we look more western. The American soldiers are so happy to see westerners they don’t mind too much about the Iraqis with us, search the men and the bus, leave the women unsearched because there are no women soldiers to search us. Mohammed keeps asking me if things are going to be OK.
“Al-melaach wiyana, “ I tell him. The angels are with us. He laughs.
And then we’re in Baghdad, delivering them to the hospitals, Nuha in tears as they take the burnt man off groaning and whimpering. She puts her arms around me and asks me to be her friend. I make her feel less isolated, she says, less alone.
And the satellite news says the cease-fire is holding and George Bush says to the troops on Easter Sunday that, “I know what we’re doing in Iraq is right.” Shooting unarmed men in the back outside their family home is right. Shooting grandmothers with white flags is right? Shooting at women and children who are fleeing their homes is right? Firing at ambulances is right?
Well George, I know too now. I know what it looks like when you brutalise people so much that they’ve nothing left to lose. I know what it looks like when an operation is being done without anaesthetic because the hospitals are destroyed or under sniper fire and the city’s under siege and aid isn’t getting in properly. I know what it sounds like too. I know what it looks like when tracer bullets are passing your head, even though you’re in an ambulance. I know what it looks like when a man’s chest is no longer inside him and what it smells like and I know what it looks like when his wife and children pour out of his house.
It’s a crime and it’s a disgrace to us all.
