One of Ours

...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.

...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. [Pretty horrible if true. Is what she was told true?]

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. [Or could it have been a stray bullet?]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.

[...]

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 from 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.

[...]

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?

[...]

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 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.

[...]

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.[An 11 year-old boy with an AK-47? No wonder kids are being killed. What kind of parent lets an eleven year old carry an assault rifle in the middle of a battle?]

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 this 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 that anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body.

He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back. [In the middle of a battlefield. Unfortunate, but understandable.]

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.

[...]

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...

...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.

[...]

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[Pre-teen? Good god, another one.], and our eyes meet and stay fixed, his full of fire and fear...

...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...

...It’s a crime and it’s a disgrace to us all.

...The fate of Sadr - the angry 30-year-old who last week pledged to destroy the coalition’s campaign in Iraq - rests with a legal brief that was carefully compiled over the past year by a provincial Iraqi judge.

It is this brief that led to an arrest warrant being issued for Sadr and some of his supporters, provoking his Mahdi Army to take control of several southern towns last week, raising the deadly possibility of a united insurgency by Shi’ite and Sunni hardliners until more moderate Shi’ite leaders disowned him.

A detailed summary of the case against Sadr, which has been obtained...shows that the prosecuting judge, Raid Juhy, has laid a much wider range of charges against the radical cleric than was previously known...

...Prosecutors had announced that Sadr was charged with the murder last year of rival cleric Abdul Majeed al-Khoei, the alleged theft of religious funds from several mosques, and the murder by his guards of an Iraqi family.

But Sadr has also been charged with ordering several other murders, setting up illegal courts and prisons, inciting his followers to violence, and other breaches of the Iraqi penal code.

The barrage of charges and evidence amassed by Juhy, a Najaf-based judge, means that even if Sadr can distance himself from the killing of Khoei, he will still face serious problems in court.

The brief shows that the judge, who is responsible under Iraqi law for overseeing the gathering of evidence, has found eyewitnesses to back the charges that Sadr personally authorised the murder of Khoei, a moderate rival...

...Juhy has found an eyewitness who is willing to testify that Sadr, who saw Khoei as a threat to his ambitions, became aware of Khoei's visit and planned with his associates to kill him.

A second eyewitness says that when Sadr and a group of followers entered the mosque and saw Khoei's group, Sadr's followers said; "Just say the word, master, and we will attack."

The brief says: "Sadr replied, 'Just wait, just wait'."

A funeral procession then came into the mosque, and using this distraction, Sadr called to his followers to attack.

"(The) witness reported that Sadr said, 'By the will of God, attack'."

Sadr then left the mosque and returned to his office, whereupon his followers drew AK-47s from their robes and started firing in the direction of Khoei and his group in the Khaladaria, an area in which the offices of the mosque clerics are located.

Khoei's bodyguard was armed with a pistol and returned fire.

"During the course of the firefight Khoei suffered an injury to his hand, losing a couple of fingers. When the Khoei group ran out of ammunition, Riyadh Nouri, a key Sadr lieutenant, called out on a megaphone for a ceasefire," the brief says.

"He offered Khoei a hearing to defend himself in Sadr's nearby office. Khoei agreed, but as they emerged from the Khaladaria in the mosque, the Sadr mob descended upon them and began beating and stabbing them.

"At the entrance (of the mosque), Haider al-Kaliedar (Khoei's bodyguard) died from the knife attacks. At this point, Khoei and two of his group broke free and ran to the office of Sadr, suffering from many stab wounds and the beatings. Sadr refused to open the door to the office.

"At this point, a merchant from across the street came and collected the three persons, helping them into his shop. There Khoei passed out from his stabbing and gunshot wounds. Two clerics from the Sadr office came into the shop and tested Khoei's pulse.

"They then left and reported to Sadr. The mob gathered outside the shop and Sadr left his office.

"There is a (third) eyewitness who can testify that Sadr gave the direction to take him (Khoei) away and 'Kill him in your own special way'.

"Khoei was dragged from the shop and down the street by his feet, with his head banging on each of the stone steps down to the next street level. He was dragged up that street to about 50 metres from the entrance to the Imam Ali mosque, and there a Sadr follower produced an AK-47 and shot Khoei in the head.

"The other two persons who were left in the shop when Khoei was dragged out escaped to the coalition forces compound in Najaf and subsequently left the country."

It is those two survivors of the fight that the judge has flown to London to interview.

According to Kelly, 12 of Sadr's followers -- the stabbers and shooters -- were arrested soon after the killings, and warrants were issued in August for Sadr and several of his more senior followers.

Attempts to arrest those followers, and the closure of Sadr's newspaper for inciting violence, were met by his call for all Shi'ites to rise against the coalition forces...

Some believe that this period is a time of reformation before the state is built and sovereignty transferred. But it is important to mention that any reformation cannot be applied in this transitional period until two points are addressed: enhancing security and strengthening the political side. So, it is necessary not to open any file or anything that might hinder the political process that is being destroyed by the escalation practiced by the foreign forces and some Iraqis. Hence, we must have a critical look to diagnose the political and security gaps whose responsibility falls basically on the Occupation forces. We have warned against the collapse of security and police forces and pointed out that as long as these forces were based on remnants of the former regime, they cannot keep the peace. Moreover, the current circumstances should not be exploited; it has been noticed that many people have been appointed recently to change the correct balance on which the country's institutions must be based...

..."You said, 'Stay the course,' but what the U.S. is doing is bombing hospitals, bombing mosques, killing hundreds of civilians," Mr. Daum, 64, said. "Is that the criminal course you want to stay? It's an imperialist country fighting an imperialist war. At one time you opposed an imperialist war. I'm old enough to have done that myself."

Mr. Daum, who called himself a socialist, continued: "People hate George Bush. But by the end of your presidency, people will hate you for the same thing."

As several people in the audience hooted in support, Mr. Kerry answered: "I have consistently been critical of how we got where we are. But we are where we are, sir, and it would be unwise beyond belief for the United States of America to leave a failed Iraq in its wake. What we need to do is help transition to stability, that helps recognize people's rights. I'm sure you want to recognize people's rights."

"I want the Americans out!" Mr. Daum shouted.

"Yes, and I want the Americans out--" Mr. Kerry started.

"No you don't, you say, 'Stay the course'!" Mr. Daum shouted again.

"Stay the course of leaving a stable Iraq," Mr. Kerry said, finally winning a round of applause.

I would have preferred that Kerry be more emphatic about how irresponsible it would be to leave Iraq now. And I would also have preferred that Kerry not strive so hard to find common ground with someone so, er, irresponsible. (You can practically see Kerry trying to override his instinct to pander--and failing, if only briefly.) But Kerry did stick to his story under what looks like intense pressure, in a pretty hostile environment, and he deserves to be commended for it.

Re: the "truce." Go fuck yourself.

...Bill Clinton talked about God. Jimmy Carter talked about God. So did LBJ, JFK, Harry Truman, and FDR. Every Democratic president has talked about God. I sure hope Democrats aren't going off the rails now just because Bush mentioned God once in a one-hour press conference.

...Iraq isn’t Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.

It’s true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict.

And the stress Iraq places on our military is, if anything, worse. In Vietnam, American forces consisted mainly of short-term draftees, who returned to civilian life after their tours of duty. Our Iraq force consists of long-term volunteers, including reservists who never expected to be called up for extended missions overseas. The training of these volunteers, their morale and their willingness to re-enlist will suffer severely if they are called upon to spend years fighting a guerrilla war...

...When the commission releases its findings in late July, it is expected to conclude that both administrations failed on a wide array of military fronts, not just in the use of conventional force but in the sharing of intelligence and creation of special operations and technology to respond to the new threat posed by stateless terrorism.

Outright military action against terrorists would have to be ordered by the president. But critics fault military leaders for discouraging such actions and failing to present alternatives...

...It may call itself the Department of Defense, but the Pentagon really sees itself as the Department of Offense. It didn't used to be this way, of course. During the Cold War, the Pentagon poured resources into defensive programs like NORAD and the civil-defense system. But since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has adopted a near-exclusive focus on threats abroad, and devoted nearly nothing to domestic security efforts...The only time this changes is when Congress steps in to give the military specific direction to do something domestically, e.g. counter-drug exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act or authority to run the National Guard WMD-Civil Support Teams.

...I suppose it's probably a good thing to have the military so focused on the away game. As a civil liberties matter, we don't want our military getting too involved in the domestic intelligence or law enforcement area...Nonetheless, as a conceptual matter, we have a Department of Defense to protect the national security of the United States, and it seems somewhat odd that this department would play such a minimal role in domestic security operations. Especially when you consider that (1) more than half of the intelligence community agencies fall under DoD; (2) the bulk of the U.S. capability for chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological events resides in DoD; and (3) DoD agencies are leading the hunt for terrorists abroad, as well as the interrogations of captured terrorists, so they may have a lot of valuable information for the domestic anti-terrorism fight...

...So... have a Director of Central Intelligence, who by statute is supposed to be the principal intelligence officer for the United States. Yet, because the structure isn't working, we're going to create a new Director of National Intelligence and attempt to reform bureaucratic morass with... more bureaucracy? I understand the impulse to do something in response to 9/11...It may well be that we need to fix intelligence by creating a more responsive and efficient command and control structure for America's intelligence community. But I'm not convinced that this is the answer, because I see two major pitfalls in this proposal: (1) It threatens to create more bureaucracy, gumming up the system more; (2) It focuses too much at the top level rather than creating interconnectedness and collaborate relationships at the operator level, where the need is greatest...

...You cannot fight this type of enemy effectively with a conventional hierarchical bureaucracy. You will forever find yourself out-witted and two steps behind the threat; a prisoner of your own OODA loop and your own inflexibility...

...The thing is, we have an active, adaptive, dangerous enemy out there who's just waiting for us to drop our defenses. We can't afford the learning curve associated with a typical government reorganization, but that will cause a net decrease in America's security for the near term -- an operational window that Al Qaeda might use to strike. If we do this, we absolutely positively have to get it right the first time.

About a year ago I happened to talk with an acquaintance of mine, a teacher of Belles Lettres, and she expressed her distaste for American culture. She said it lacked depth. I replied that I had read several works by Americans and that I didn't find them superficial. At which she insisted, and I asked her if she had ever actually read anything written by an American, to which she replied "Not really". "Not really what? Almost, but not quite, or never?" I went on, feeling terribly nasty indeed, and stated quoting some well known authors. Henry David Thoreau? Herman Melville? Edgar Allan Poe? Henry James? Edith Wharton? "Not really, no." Not even oft quoted poets? Walt Whitman? Emily Dickinson? "Ehm, no."
Then she she said solemnly, "I don't need to know American culture to understand that it's worthless."

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of European anti-americanism. A mixture of ignorance, arrogance, and prejudice. I always thought that to judge a culture you need to know it, at least a bit. But no, why waste time when superciliousness can do your work for you?

I quote this episode because it illustrates a feeling quite common over here. Americans are superficial. They lack depth. They lack complexity. And so, no matter what they do, they're always wrong. Better sit gracefully on a fence than actually do something, it's so vulgar.

At least five of the fifty or so foreigners who have been kidnapped, have been killed, most of the others have been released. None of the kidnappers have been given their demands (usually that this country or that pull their troops out of Iraq.) One effect the kidnapping spree has had is to slow the economic reconstruction. The Iraqi economy had been experiencing double digit growth so far this year, but with so many of the foreign workers and technical experts afraid to travel, a lot of projects are stalled, or slowed down. The increase of attacks on truck traffic has slowed down delivery of building materials and equipment, which has disrupted construction schedules. This has been noticed by the population, and whatever enthusiasm there was for the "brave Iraqi resistance fighting the evil foreign occupation" is fading...

...The groups that are criminal gangs are inclined to get out of the revolution business if they take a beating. The political gangs (pro-Saddam, pro-Sadr, pro-al Qaeda) are less likely to give up the fight, but it is possible and that's why there has been a truce in Fallujah. The pro-Sadr Shia gangs are full of unemployed young guys who have been exposed to a lot of "blame the infidel" rhetoric by opportunistic Shia clerics. Other Shia clerics are trying to preach a different message ("let's rebuild Iraq and get you a job") that is making some headway.

The al Qaeda type gangs, and the foreign Arab nationalists, cannot easily be negotiated with...

...one item Iraqi negotiators in Fallujah are hammering away with is the identification of all the foreign terrorists in the town. The terrorist bombings are very unpopular in Iraq, if only because they kill mostly Iraqis. The Sunni Arab gangs have lost some more popularity when it was discovered in the last week that so many terrorist operations had set up shop in Fallujah.

The truce in Fallujah is slowly falling apart...

I've been visiting the BBC Arabic site in the last few days and I found a forum where people from many Arab countries –including Iraq- post their opinions about some hot topics, the main of those is Iraq and terrorism of course. I wasn't surprised to see that most Arabs (especially from Egypt, Palestine, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Syria) are forming one side of the debates while Iraqis and people from the rest of the gulf countries are taking the other side. But I was surprised when I found that the almost all the Iraqis who took part in the debates are on our side, maybe 95% of Iraqis expressed their rejection to the violent behavior of some Iraqis and condemned the terrorists attacks on both Iraqis and the coalition saying that the Arab world must stop supporting the terrorists and the thugs from inside Iraq. It's also surprising that many of those Iraqis live in areas that are recognized to have a public anti American attitude in general like A'adhamiya, Diyala and Najaf. I feel that those people are still afraid to voice their points of view in public in such hostile atmospheres but the internet is providing them freedom and safety to say whatever they believe in.
Here, I translated three of the posts made by Iraqis and for those who can read Arabic or have a way to translate web pages, here's the link.

"What's happening in Fallujah and Baghdad now is the doings of the enemies of Iraq and his people and I mean our "brother Muslims and Arabs" who fear that the fire might reach their kingdoms and let Iraqis go to hell. Iran is supporting Muqtada while our Arab brothers are sending us human bombs to kill our children and all this is in the name of Islam and Arab nationality and the satellite channels are tearing apart and distorting the reputation of every honest Iraqi patriot saying that he's a dirty American agent, so for god sake, enough of what you're doing to Iraq and Iraqis. We did nothing to harm you, so what is this all about?".
Zahawi-baghdad

"To put things clear, we should know who is supporting Sadr, they're a bunch of lost men who spent their lives serving in Saddam's army and he found no one else to support him. The solid truth is that those thugs need to be taught a lesson and this may be in various ways. Iraq must be saved from those men in any possible way".
Abdul Hussein – Hilla

"The martial show for the Mahdi army that Muqtada made is tearing apart the national unity and therefore Iraq needs the liberating forces to remain to prevent the country which was the origin of civilization from being ruled by fanatics who can see no far than their chins".
Saad Yaseen-Diyala.