BAGHDAD, 25 April 2004 — By the time Menem Latif Hussain returned to his house early in the afternoon on the third day of the battle for Fallujah there was little he could do. In the driveway by the front gate lay the body of his 16-year-old son Wisam.
The boy had suffered one injury, caused by a blow so powerful that the back of his skull had been torn away. It killed him instantly.
“He had been standing by the gate looking out. There had been bombing nearby. I don’t know whether it was a shell or a sniper that hit him,” said Hussain. “I gave my thanks to God, for he was a martyr. Then we buried him in the cemetery.”
When they returned to the house later that afternoon they found Wisam’s cousin Thair Ahmed, 18, was also missing. He had left that morning to cross town to check on his fiancée’s family. Hours later the family retrieved the young man’s body from where it lay in the street. He had been hit once, by a sniper’s bullet through the heart, and he too died where he fell. By then it was too dangerous to reach the cemetery.
“We buried him in a patch of dirt ground. There was no choice. Later we will take out his body and bury him properly,” said Hussain, 41. They were not the only deaths he saw that week. From his driveway he saw a girl aged 18, standing at the gate of a house opposite, shot dead by a sniper’s bullet. Her brother-in-law rushed to help her, and he too was shot dead, Hussain said.
At another time a house at the end of his street suffered a direct hit from a powerful bomb. “We ran to the house because they were my friends. In the garden I saw three men had been sitting on a bench. They were all dead; they had been cut in half by the bomb. My wife went crazy,” he said.
A few days later, Hussain fled Fallujah with his wife and four surviving children and dozens of other families. They now live under canvas in an Iraqi Red Crescent camp in Al-Khadra, western Baghdad. “We are peaceful people and they came and bombed us,” Hussain said. “From the start of the war it was like hell. Why did they come and kill our sons?”
For the past three weeks, some 2,000 troops from the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, supported by jet fighters and attack helicopters, have carried out the most ferocious urban street fighting in Iraq since the start of the war last year.
The battle has taken a horrific toll. Doctors in Fallujah say up to 600 people have died. The US military says more than 100 of its troops have been killed in combat in Iraq since April 1, many in the battle for Fallujah. More American soldiers have died in Iraq this month than in the entire war against Saddam Hussein a year ago.
Inside Fallujah, a city of 300,000, the Marines prevented access to the city’s only hospital for more than two weeks. Dozens of houses were destroyed, mosques were bombed and clerics turned a football ground beside the Euphrates into a crude cemetery.
Three weeks on, it is still almost impossible to get an independent account of the fighting. Access to the city is severely restricted: the marines still hold a cordon around Fallujah, and much of the city and many surrounding villages are crawling with Iraqi resistance fighters. But in interviews in Baghdad, more than a dozen civilians, doctors, clerics and politicians have begun to piece together the US military’s bloodiest battle in Iraq.
On the day that Wisam and Thair died, a US general in Baghdad said the aim of the new combat in Fallujah, codenamed Operation Vigilant Resolve, was to “take the fight to the enemy”.
The previous week four American contractors working for the Blackwater security firm were killed, the gruesome culmination of a yearlong guerrilla war against the US military in the Sunni areas west and north of Baghdad. Commanders promised an “overwhelming” response.
It began in secret on the night of Sunday, April 4, when the Marines surrounded Fallujah and moved into the industrial area on the eastern edge of the city. Troops set up command centers in factories and sent out snipers. On Monday morning, before he left for his brick factory in the industrial area, Tariq Zaidan, 48, had a call from the office. US troops had raided the building, arrested three of his security guards and seized his office.
“On Sunday night we had heard the helicopters and tanks and we knew something big was happening but we didn’t expect them to seize the city,” he said.
He spent the day at home waiting. “It was quiet and then at 9:00 p.m. the Americans tried to get inside the city. Every neighborhood started fighting against the Americans to defeat them.” Helicopters and fighter jets could be heard overhead across the city.
“Four houses in my block were destroyed. The house behind mine was hit with two rockets,” said Zaidan, who later fled with his family to Baghdad. “We didn’t go out, but from my gate I could see fighters carrying their weapons in the street and fighting the Americans. I saw them being killed and I saw their bodies in the street.”
On Thursday, Marines called in an F-16 air strike on a community center next to the Abdul Aziz Al-Samarrai Mosque, in the center of city. Residents said up to 40 people were killed and the troops then spent another six hours fighting a gun battle at the site. Doctors said the Iraqi death toll in the first three or four days had climbed above 300.
Doctors in the city said most of the dead were civilians, among them women and children. US commanders have refused to accept this, continuing to insist their targeting is precise. “What I think you will find is 95 percent of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting,” Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, of the US Marines, said during the fighting. “The Marines are trained to be precise in their firepower.”
As the fighting intensified, so aid convoys carrying medical supplies and food from Baghdad began to arrive. On Thursday, several doctors from the capital were also brought in along with four ambulances. Among them was a surgeon, aged 30, who spent five days treating the injured.
“I wanted to cry. It looked like a city of ghosts,” said the doctor, who was too frightened of the resistance fighters to give his name. “You didn’t see any cars, you didn’t see anything except the mujahedeen.
“We had a clinic with two operating rooms. It was the worst place in Iraq to deal with a patient,” he said in his hospital in Baghdad. “There were many civilians, there were women. I saw one woman who was pregnant and there was shrapnel in her abdomen from a shell. Her baby died.”
The city’s main hospital was closed by the Marines. Ibrahim Younis, the Iraq emergency coordinator for Medecins sans Frontieres, said that meant many wounded had died because of inadequate healthcare.
“The Americans put a sniper position on top of the hospital’s water tower and had troops in the single-storey building,” said Younis, who visited Fallujah during the fighting two weeks ago. “The hospital had four operating theaters, which could no longer be used. If they had been working, it would have saved many lives.”
He said MSF wanted an independent inquiry to determine why the US military used the hospital as a military position — a violation of the Geneva convention.
Most of those in Fallujah during the fighting described the mujahedeen in heroic terms. Some of the gunmen are led by clerics and are fighting as Islamists not, as the US military continues to insist, because they are former Baathists or foreign terrorists. Others are fighting on the basis of a tribal code or a desire to avenge the deaths of other Iraqis at the hands of US troops.
Only a handful, the young doctor included, were prepared to criticize the fighters. “The mujahedeen are brave and fear nothing,” he said. “But is it wise to do all these things? Who is responsible for those who died: The Americans for sure, but the mujahedeen too.”
The fighting has resonated across Iraq with the large majority, who feel a growing sense of frustration and disappointment with the past year’s occupation.
“There are a lot of people who don’t want the mujahedeen to fight because they have been forced out of their houses and their jobs,” said Sabah Noori Al-Jumaili, 49, a retired architect, who fled Fallujah after the first week. “But it is the fault of the Americans: It is people’s right to fight against occupation.”
Al-Jumaili was jailed under Saddam as a political prisoner for supporting an Arab nationalist party. He welcomed the fall of Saddam, but like many educated professionals in the Sunni community he has seen little reward from the occupation that followed.
“We fought for this country. Is this what we are fighting for?” he said. His family is now living in a former air raid shelter in Amariya, in western Baghdad, waiting for the chance to return to Fallujah.
Five days after the fighting began, US troops called a “unilateral suspension of offensive operations”. A delegation of politicians from the Iraqi Islamic party (IIP), a Sunni group on the governing council, entered Fallujah for talks and carloads of families began to pour out of the city along little used country back roads.
A much-violated cease-fire has held for two weeks as negotiations continue. Not all the negotiators are confident that the battle has forestalled more resistance.
“Using force in the way they used it in Fallujah made people fight,” said Hajim Al-Hassani, a member of the IIP. “It isn’t like these people were terrorists. They were normal people and they had children who were dying and so everybody started to fight.” Yesterday 20 Iraqi civilians began to dig through the rubble of houses looking for bodies buried by the bombing. But US commanders are still warning that resistance fighters have “days not weeks” to give up their heavy weapons or face a renewed onslaught from the marines still encircling Fallujah.