The Pentagon does not bother to count its victims and has imposed a regime of strict censorship, abetted by the self-enforcement of the corporate media. However, from the few reports coming out of the besieged city, it is absolutely clear that the basic purpose of the US campaign is to reduce it to rubble, killing and terrorizing as many inhabitants as possible.
Residential buildings, hospitals and mosques have all been bombed, and American troops are engaging in a house-to-house search of whatever remains. Tens of thousands of civilians remain in Fallujah, a medium-sized city near Baghdad that is normally home to 300,000 people.
A New York Times reporter “embedded” with US troops described the onslaught: “Just before the marines began to push south into Falluja, the American bombardment intensified, and heavy artillery could be heard pounding positions in or near the city every few minutes. An entire apartment complex was ground to rubble. A train station was obliterated in a hail of 2,000-pound bombs. All electrical power in the city was cut off about 5 p.m.”
The account passes over without comment the destruction of an apartment complex and train station—both civilian structures.
**US planes bombed a government health clinic that had been treating wounded insurgents and civilians in the center of Fallujah, killing both patients and staff.
Bakr al-Dulaimi told Al Jazeera that the bombings targeted everything in the city including the hospital, houses and cars. “Al Dulaimi said the hospital’s staff, doctors and patients have all fallen victim to the assault.” **
“Residents said smoke was rising from the whole city as it shook to constant explosions. Civilians were huddled in their homes and there was no word on casualties…An AFP [Agence France-Presse] reporter in Jolan [a district of Fallujah] said one building in every 10 had been flattened. As US-led troops closed in on the neighborhood overnight, at least four 2,000 pound (900-kilogram) bombs were dropped on the city’s northwest.”
“My son got shrapnel in his stomach when our house was hit at dawn, but we couldn’t take him for treatment,” said Abbud, a schoolteacher. “We buried him in the garden because it was too dangerous to go out.”
On Monday, the US took control of Fallujah’s main hospital outside the city center in order to prevent doctors there from reporting on the level of civilian casualties. Sami al-Jumaili, a doctor at the hospital who managed to escape arrest by American troops, told Reuters that there were very few medical supplies and clinics open to treat the injured.
Patients in the hospital were handcuffed and dragged out of their rooms for examination by troops. The US puppet, Prime Minister Allawi, has reportedly said that forces entering the hospital had “captured four foreigners and killed 38 persons.”
No one is being permitted to leave the city as the US military carries out the slaughter. A ring of US and British soldiers has been set up around the city. US Colonel Michael Formica told the Associated Press that this was necessary to prevent any insurgents from escaping dressed in civilian clothing.
“My concern now is only one: not to allow the enemy to escape,” he said. “I do not want these guys to get out of here. I want them killed or captured as they flee.”
The US actions in Fallujah are not only a moral outrage, they are a direct violation of international law, which prohibits indiscriminate attacks on civilian centers. According to Additional Protocol 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, “Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”
The Geneva Conventions were adopted in the aftermath of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in occupied Europe, wholesale attacks on civilian populations like the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto and the wiping out of the Czech village of Lidice. Now Washington is reviving the very methods that the world formally repudiated 55 years ago.
Washington’s pretense—dutifully parroted by the US media—that these actions are being taken to ensure democracy and allow for peaceful elections in January is an absurdity.
These actions are being carried out in the face of enormous opposition from the vast majority of the Iraqi population, an opposition that the attack on Fallujah will only intensify.
According to media reports, upwards of 500 of the Iraqi troops—out of a total of 2,000 mobilized for the operation—disappeared before it began. A senior officer in the Iraqi police abandoned his post after learning of the plans for the invasion of Fallujah, presumably in order to inform the resistance.
The Association of Muslim Scholars, a group of leading Sunni clerics, denounced the invasion, appealing to “all those who live with a conscience around the world” to oppose the “massacres and elimination war” in Fallujah. The group called for a boycott of the January elections, saying that any such elections would be held “over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah and the blood of the wounded.”
US massacres civilians in Fallujah
**The masscre of civillians by the amerikkkan terrorist pigs and the stooge allawi will not be forgotten. This is a complete sham the Geneva convention and Human rights that these hypocritical Westerners harp on about is nothing but fancy words in reality because on the ground the amerikkans are nothing but brainless thugs who will get what they deserve when they are booted out of iraq because they have started fires across the whole country!
The hypocrites from the west who say we liberating the iraqis from saddam have no leg to stand on because they are even more sadistic and sick in the head than saddam hussien ever was!
If this is what treatment the amerikkans give to iraqis no wonder they enjoy living under the dictator saddam hussien even more!**
