- Standing at the open slit trench, one of five in Falluja's
newest cemetery, Mustafa asks: 'Would they do this in New York or California?'
-
- A sign nearby reads 'The Olympiads, Champions of Champions',
the motto of Falluja's football team. This was their stadium, rows of cinderblock
seats overlooking a dusty field. Beside one of the 50-yard trenches, sit
a pair of Sunshine high-top sneakers, heavy with rotting blood and flies.
-
- Fresh red paint on slabs of cement portray the city's
recent history. 'Martyr, unknown, only bones', reads one grave marker.
Another 'Martyr, unknown, White Opal license 31297, Baghdad, Iraq,' and
in the same grave 'Shahida [female martyr], headless, found beside Saad
Mosque.'
-
- 'All these people were killed because of four dead American
soldiers,' says Mustafa before ducking into a corridor to a smaller enclosure
behind the field. This was the original makeshift cemetery before the dead
overflowed into the football pitch - we lose count after 100.
-
- 'Snipers,' says Mustafa when he hears shots. Above, US
jets fly low, followed by a loud explosion somewhere in the city. 'Bomb,'
says Mustafa.
-
- On Friday US Marines handed over control of Falluja to
Major General Jassem Mohammed Saleh, who headed Saddam's infantry, and
withdrew troops from positions close to the besieged city. Tanks left after
pulling down barbed wire defences around the soft drinks factory where
they had set up a base for the past three weeks.
-
- Saleh is to take over as head of what US officials are
calling the '1st battalion of the proposed Falluja Brigade' - a new force
to police the Sunni stronghold of 1,000 men, many of them former members
of Saddam's army and some insurgents.
-
- Mustafa Hamid, a 22-year old student in a nightshirt-like
dishdasha, wandered into the football field on Friday afternoon. Iraqi
police and soldiers stood in groups along the main road. But in the back
streets resistance fighters move about, one of them in a commandeered police
car. As Mustafa talked, a fighter rode up on a bicycle, a Kalashnikov over
his shoulder. Wrapping a scarf around his face, the young Mujahiddin, as
they call them now in Falluja, begins asking questions about foreigners.
-
- What will happen to fighters like this one is still unclear.
The resistance is an unknown, almost uncontrollable, collection of fighters
oblivious to the ceasefires that have come and gone. Perhaps Iraqi negotiators
and soldiers can control them, perhaps not.
-
- It is difficult to gauge the support of the people of
Falluja for men like him but after three weeks of fighting many complain
privately they are tired of the Mujahideen. But hatred of the Americans
seems universal.
-
- 'The Americans are killing people who had nothing to
do with the death of those four soldiers,' says Mustafa referring again
to the US security contractors killed and dismembered at the beginning
of April. The deaths were the ostensible reason for the attack on a city
which US army spokesman General Mark Kimmit famously described as 'not
getting it'.
-
- In fact, it was the US army that never really 'got' Falluja,
militarily or culturally. For over eight months, it has been beyond their
control, caught up in a cycle of violence that began on 28 April last year,
when 17 Iraqis were killed by US soldiers during a protest. Casualties
mounted after September, rising dramatically each time a new US army unit
arrived. By the time the Americans decided to assert themselves, local
tribes, religious leaders and, perhaps, foreign fighters, were well supplied
and waiting. Now the Americans have left a traumatised, angry city.
-
- There are no victories in Falluja. The Marines' initial
incursion into its industrial zone at the start of the fighting deprived
the resistance of weapon stocks, which were soon replenished. After more
than 20 years of Saddam's wars, Iraqis know how to fight, especially in
Falluja, birthplace of many of Iraq's army officers.
-
- Everybody we talked to in Falluja had stories about snipers.
In some neighbourhoods, stepping outside meant certain death. Residents
said Americans used the minarets towering over Falluja, known as 'the City
of Mosques'. The US army accused the resistance of doing the same.
-
- Like the graveyard, the hospital reveals a lot about
what has happened. At the beginning, the main hospital across the river
was cut off and doctors moved into three small clinics. During the initial
fighting, most wounded civilians came in with what Dr Mohammed Samarae
describes as 'multiple blast wounds - lost limbs, abdomens blown open,'
the result of shelling when much of the population were trapped in their
houses.
-
- 'After that, almost all the casualties were head and
chest wounds from snipers,' said Samarae. 'Ninety per cent of the injured
were civilians - children, old people, women - the fighters take their
medicine and leave. The characteristics of the wounds suggest they are
American-inflicted. We have had a lot of experience of American weapons
in the past year.'
-
- On Friday there had been no injuries, but the day before
three civilians were brought in with gunshot wounds. According to the records,
219 dead had been taken to the clinic as well as 471 wounded. Many bodies
are still uncollected, and others have been buried in gardens. Casualty
figures are often underestimated, by as much as 40 per cent, according
to Iraqis who carried out surveys following the war, because Islam requires
an immediate burial.
-
- Outside the hospital, Samarae points to the parking lot
which served as temporary morgue: 'Sometimes we had whole families lying
here.'
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1208097,00.html
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