FALLUJAH, Iraq, 7 June 2003 — Qassem Hasnawi watches the US soldiers roaring through Fallujah day after day with their armored vehicles and machine guns and only thinks about one thing — how much he wants to spill their blood. “Imagine how an Iraqi man feels when he sees a foreigner touching his sister,” he says in the brutal summer heat of his roadside stand, where he works 16 hours a day selling local cigarettes for around 40 cents a pack. “We can never accept it. I swear to God, I want to kill them all.”
About an hour west of Baghdad, the Sunni Muslim town is filthy, run-down and desolate. Children, shoeless and unwashed, beg in the streets or hustle drivers for a handout to “guard” their parked cars. Old men dressed in rags kneel on the pavement in diagonal lines, just to keep in the thin shadow cast by the electricity poles.
But in addition to the despair, Fallujah is simmering with rage two months into the US military occupation of Iraq. The hatred of the occupation has erupted in two deadly attacks in the last two weeks, the latest on Thursday when an assailant shot a rocket-propelled grenade at a convoy, killing one US soldier and wounding five.
In many ways, the city has become emblematic of the complex tangle of problems facing the US-led coalition. Ever since 16 people were shot dead here by US forces in April, the troops in Fallujah can do nothing right. Patrols come under regular fire from Iraqis armed with the flood of weapons available since Saddam Hussein was toppled, which in turn has left the soldiers edgy and much less friendly.
While the Americans say they want to let Iraqis run their own affairs as soon as possible, they have poured more than 1,000 extra troops in and around the city in the past few days to try to clamp down on the unrest. And although the coalition says it is waging a “hearts and minds” campaign to win over the public, the residents of Fallujah angrily insist that peace will come only once the US soldiers have packed up and left.
For the Americans, frisking women during house-to-house searches for weapons and attackers is a normal part of security. For the people of Fallujah, it is a horror beyond description. The word on the street is that US troops fly helicopters over the city at night just to spy on the women sleeping on rooftops to beat the heat indoors, and that they use binoculars to stare at them inside their houses. Residents also say US troops sometimes urinate in full view of women.
Meanwhile, around 100 members of a powerful tribe based in southern Iraq yesterday threatened retribution against US forces unless they immediately freed their chief, who was accused of harboring officials of Saddam Hussein’s deposed regime. “Unless Sheikh Mahdi Raham Sagban is released within two days, there will be retribution against the Americans, who should be aware that we have weapons and that we are one of Iraq’s most powerful tribes,” Mokhless Hamza Abdul Sattar Al-Bidri said during a demonstration in Baghdad.
