|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Civil & Human Rights : International Relations : Iraq |
|
Defiant US says Falluja Dead Were Rebels -- Hospital Reports They Were Mostly Women and Children |
Current rating: 0 |
by Rory McCarthy in Baghdad and Julian Borger in Washington
(No verified email address) |
13 Apr 2004
|
|
600 dead in besieged Iraqi city - but marine commander claims victims mostly insurgents |
The United States last night robustly defended its controversial siege of Falluja which has cost the lives of more than 600 people over the past week, by claiming most of those who died were militants picked off with precision by US marines.
As a tense ceasefire held in the turbulent city west of Baghdad and an international hostage crisis persisted across Iraq, the US marine commander in charge of the siege of Falluja claimed 95% of those killed were legitimate targets.
The death toll in Falluja has sparked widespread international concern and has led to condemnation by the US-appointed Iraqi governing council.
Yesterday, the director of the town's general hospital, Rafie al-Issawi, said the vast majority of the dead were women, children and the elderly.
But when asked about the victims numbers, US marine Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne said: "What I think you will find is 95% of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting. The marines are trained to be precise in their firepower ... The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the marines are very good at what they do," he said.
The figure of 600 was gathered from four clinics around the city and from Falluja general hospital, which have all been taking in bodies, said al-Issawi. Bodies were also being buried in two football fields. "We have reports of an unknown number of dead being buried in people's homes without coming to the clinics," Mr Issawi said.
Asked about the number of Iraqi casualties in Falluja, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the US military in Iraq, repeated that marines were "tremendously precise" in their operations and suggested any civilian deaths were caused by insurgents hiding among them.
At least 50 US soldiers have also been killed over the past week, with another 10 over the Easter weekend. Nearly a third of Falluja's 200,000 population fled the city during the weekend lull in fighting.
A British civilian, Gary Teeley, who was kidnapped in the southern city of Nassiriya, was released yesterday, and there were reports last night that eight other foreign hostages including three Pakistanis and two Turks had been freed.
Several other foreigners, including one US contractor and three Japanese civilians, were still being held by their captors.
The bodies of two dead westerners dressed in civilian clothes were shown on Arabic television. Reports from Bonn suggested they were German private security guards.
US officials persevered with ceasefire talks with Sunni militants despite the shooting down of a US Apache helicopter over the western Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, killing its two-man crew.
The US civilian administrator, Paul Bremer, appealed for insurgents in Falluja to hold their fire long enough for members of the Iraqi governing council to enter the Sunni stronghold for negotiations. But he insisted: "We will not negotiate over hostages."
The ceasefire calls also appeared to be aimed at freeing US troops and resources for a parallel running battle with radical Shia militias, after it became evident that US-led coalition troops were being overwhelmed by the two-front conflict. It emerged yesterday that an entire Iraqi battalion had refused to fight with US troops and had returned to barracks, torpedoing any prospects of the US pulling out any of its 135,000 troops and passing on their duties to an Iraqi force.
Mr Bremer confirmed that the 620-strong battalion of newly trained Iraqi soldiers had refused to fight after members of the unit were attacked while passing through a Shia district of Baghdad.
According to Major General Paul Eaton, who is overseeing their training, the Iraqi soldiers had told him: "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis."
The report quoted an unnamed senior US officer as saying as many as a quarter of the new Iraqi security forces had "quit, changed sides, or otherwise failed to perform their duties".
Mr Bremer played down the significance of the issue yesterday. "I don't think it's a significant portion at all," he told ABC television.
The surge in fighting has led to calls for an increase in the numbers of US troops in Iraq. "It's obvious that we're paying a heavy price, I think, for not having had enough troops there from the beginning," said John McCain, a Republican senator.
President George Bush insisted that political sovereignty would be handed over by a June 30 deadline.
"Obviously I pray every day there's less casualty. But I know what we're doing in Iraq is right," the president said, after spending Easter Day with troops in Texas. Tony Blair made a similar pledge of resolve yesterday.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk |
Related stories on this site:
Report from Fallujah -- Destroying a Town in Order to Save it
|
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
|
Fallujah and Baghdad -- Eyewitness Accounts |
by IPA
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Apr 2004
|
WASHINGTON - April 12 -
* RAHUL MAHAJAN, rahul (at) empirenotes.org, www.empirenotes.org
Currently in Baghdad, Mahajan was just in Fallujah. He is regularly posting to a blog at the above web page. Mahajan is author of the book 'Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond'. Mahajan said today: "During the course of roughly four hours at a small clinic in Fallujah, I saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth when they brought her in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding.... Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian NGO InterSOS, had been pressed into service as the manager of the clinic, since all doctors were busy, working around the clock with minimal sleep.... He told us about ambulances being hit by snipers, women and children being shot. Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah had become, he said: 'I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization.' ... Nothing could have been easier than gaining the goodwill of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. People I interviewed vehemently denied that they were Saddam supporters and expressed immense anger and disappointment at American conduct.... Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small group of isolated 'extremists' repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further from the truth. To Americans, 'Fallujah' may still mean four mercenaries killed, with their corpses then mutilated and abused; to Iraqis, 'Fallujah' means the savage collective punishment for that attack, with current reports of 600 Iraqis killed, including estimates of 200 women and over 100 children.... When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed."
* NAOMI KLEIN [via Christina Magill, clmagill (at) shaw.ca], www.nologo.org
Klein is just back from Iraq. Her most recent article is "Fury Ignites Solidarity in Iraq" in the April 9 edition of the Los Angeles Times, in which she wrote: "Before U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer III provoked [Muqtada] Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Al Mahdi army was not fighting coalition forces; it was doing their job for them. After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority still hasn't managed to get the traffic lights working or to provide the most basic security for civilians. So in Sadr City, Sadr's so-called 'outlaw militia' can be seen engaged in such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding factories.... I saw charred cars, which dozens of eyewitnesses said had been hit by U.S. missiles, and I confirmed with hospitals that their drivers had been burned alive.... And Thursday, I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of the Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of what was Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City. A few hours earlier, witnesses said, U.S. tanks broke down the walls of the center after two guided missiles pierced its roof.... For months, the White House has been making ominous predictions of a civil war breaking out between the majority Shiites ... and the minority Sunnis.... But this week, the opposite appeared to have taken place...." Klein is author of the book 'Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate'.
* LAMIS ANDONI, LamisAndoni (at) yahoo.com, www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR022803.htm
Andoni has covered the Mideast for various publications for two decades; she has been banned in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and was blacklisted in Jordan during the 1980s. She is currently a lecturer at the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been monitoring the Arab media. Andoni said today: "Fallujah clearly unmasks the reality of Bush's call for 'democracy' in the Middle East. Collective punishment of the Iraqi population underscores the fallacy of U.S. government claims about its motives.... The submissive Arab regimes, afraid of the U.S. government's wrath, are largely colluding with the Bush administration. They have not spoken out against the U.S. assault, instead stifling dissent at home on the administration's behalf." Bush meets today with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
For stories on Fallujah, see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3619661.stm
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79CAAE90-3E7F-4815-B47D-46863A64A7E6.htm
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D334DDD4-F26F-483F-9AE4-E08BB9E53567.htm
www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0412-01.htm
http://www.accuracy.org/ |
