Dahr Jamail continues to supply needed glimpses of life in Iraq (including the sobering election story, "Some Just Voted for Food"). And today's interview of a doctor in Fallujah is no exception. The behavior of American troops described in this post is incomprehensible to me:
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He pauses for a few deep breaths, then continues, “All I can say is that Fallujah is like it was struck by a tsunami. There weren’t many families in there after the siege, but they had absolutely nothing. The suffering was beyond what you can imagine. When the Americans finally let us in people were fighting just for a blanket.”
“One of my colleagues, Dr. Saleh Alsawi, he was speaking so angrily about them. He was in the main hospital when they raided it at the beginning of the seige. They entered the theater room when they were working on a patient…he was there because he’s an anesthesiologist. They entered with their boots on, beat the doctors and took them out, leaving the patient on the table to die.”
This story has already been reported in the Arab media.
The doctor tells me of the bombing of the Hay Nazal clinic during the first week of the siege.
“This contained all the foreign aid and medical instruments we had.
All the US military commanders knew this, because we told them about it
so they wouldn’t bomb it. But this was one of the clinics bombed, and
in the first week of the siege they bombed it two times.”
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Then Dahr gives the source of the images I hear are shooting all over the Middle East: families shot holding white flags:
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“During the second week of the siege they entered and announced that all the families have to leave their homes and meet at an intersection in the street while carrying a white flag. They gave them 72 hours to leave and after that they would be considered an enemy,” he says.
“We documented this story with video-a family of 12, including a relative and his oldest child who was 7 years old. They heard this instruction, so they left with all their food and money they could carry, and white flags. When they reached the intersection where the families were accumulating, they heard someone shouting ‘Now!’ in English, and shooting started everywhere.”
The family was all carrying white flags, as instructed, according to the young man who gave his testimony. Yet he watched his mother and father shot by snipers-his mother in the head and his father shot in the heart. His two aunts were shot, then his brother was shot in the neck. The man stated that when he raised himself from the ground to shout for help, he was shot in the side.
“After some hours he raised his arm for help and they shot his arm,” continues the doctor, “So after awhile he raised his hand and they shot his hand.”
A six year-old boy of the family was standing over the bodies of his parents, crying, and he too was then shot.
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I spent some time today discussing Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" to a brilliant young student trying to find a way to characterize, for her essay, the main character's burning of Vietnamese homes. I asked if she'd heard of My Lai, and we spoke of the role of trauma in the character's behavior. We didn't talk about the extent to which that kind of behavior had become systematic in Vietnam, become default: that wasn't her concern at that moment, or mine.
Only now, looking at Jamail's dispatch, do I wonder at the twisted machine now bouncing about the country. The layers of trauma and ill-bred policy decisions enfolded here are just wrapped too tightly for me to try to unravel at 3 a.m. And Fallujah's yesterday's news, of course. But I think it's a mistake to let all those images of purple Iraqi fingers erase the suffering that hasn't abated in that place.. And it's instructive, in this week when we've seen exposed further the machinery of torture and false confessions that created this war , to look at the rough beast we've created, that now slouches across the desert in our name.
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