There is a book out called Don't Shoot the Clowns. The author was in Fallujah with a traveling circus.
Send in the ClownJo Wilding's unembedded reports from Fallujah brought home the horror of the American assault on the city. But when she wasn't blogging, she was wearing stilts and trying to cheer up Iraq's traumatised children. She tells Emine Saner why she risked her life for total strangers.
This image from Jo Wilding's book, Don't Shoot the Clowns, shows her in costume entertaining children south of Baghdad. Photograph: New InternationalistThe writer, director and academic Jonathan Holmes has written a new play, Fallujah, which draws heavily on Wilding's experiences, among others.
Wilding and her friends Jenny, David, Ahrar and Donna were leaving Fallujah when their car was fired at by US marines. They were forced to turn back into the path of the mujahideen, and one of the rebel fighters jumped into their car and directed them to a nearby Jeep. Forced to get out of the car, some were tied up and the group was separated, but all were driven to the same house, where they were individually interviewed and watched by armed guards.
...."They had been in Fallujah delivering supplies - disinfectant, needles, bandages, food, water - to a hospital in the US-controlled part of the city and were using an ambulance to bring injured people to a makeshift hospital in a small clinic in another area of the city. There, with no anaesthetic and where bags of blood were kept in a fridge and warmed up under the hot tap in a bathroom, a young boy was brought in. "He had been shot in the head. His family had been trying to get into the car to flee and they (US soldiers) shot him. I think they had just been told to shoot at anyone. Certainly they had been told that ambulances had been carrying weapons and I know from my own experience that they were shooting at ambulances." Wilding says she was in an ambulance on their way to get to a pregnant woman who had gone into labour too soon, when marines shot at the ambulance, through the windscreen. A tyre was shot out and the ambulance driver screeched back in reverse to the hospital. With the ambulance out of action, they never reached the woman.
Here is an audio I found of Jo Wilding.
http://www.ourmedia.org:80/node/265421All this was before the massive November 2004 assault we made on that city. There was really no negative coverage by our media. They either did not cover it or made it sound positive.
I wonder if we will ever know what we really did there. Or what we are still doing. What have they done there in our name.
This is from the Quaker Friends Network.
The Invasion of Falluja: A Study in the Subversion of TruthFalluja should go down in history as a case study on how truth is subverted, co-opted, buried, and ignored.
The first US-led siege of Falluja, a city of 300,000 people, resulted in a defeat for Coalition forces. Prior to the second siege in November, its citizens were given two choices: leave the city or risk dying as enemy insurgents. The people of Falluja remembered the siege of April all too well. They remembered being trapped when Coalition forces surrounded and blockaded the city and seized the main hospital, leaving the population cut off from food, water, and medical supplies. Families remembered the fighting in the streets and the snipers on the rooftops, which prevented movement by civilians. They remembered burying more than 600 neighbors -- women, children, and men -- in makeshift graves in schoolyards and soccer fields.
And the most terrible part was that males between 15 and 45 were considered the enemy and denied safe passage. Guilty until proved innocent.
Under threat of a new siege, an estimated 50,000 families or 250,000 people fled Falluja. They fled with the knowledge that they would live as refugees with few or no resources. They left behind fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, as males between the ages of 15 and 45 were denied safe passage out of the city by US-led forces. If the displaced families of Falluja were fortunate, they fled to the homes of relatives in the surrounding towns and villages or to the city of Baghdad -- homes that were already overcrowded and overburdened after 20 months of war and occupation. Many families are forced to survive in fields, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings without access to shelter, water, electricity, food or medical care and alongside tens of thousands of displaced and homeless people already living in the rubble of Baghdad.
This paragraph if taken at face value means the death tolls could have been massive. Heartbreaking. How did they treat the estimated 50,000 remaining in the city...the ones they were assuming to be enemy combatants. What were they doing in our name.
What of the estimated 50,000 residents who did not leave Falluja? The US military suggested there were a couple of thousand insurgents in the city before the siege, but in the end chose to treat all the remaining inhabitants as enemy combatants.
And from the Guardian, more outrages. Probably only half the story as apparently journalists were not permitted in.
Civilian cost of battle for Falluja emergesThe horrific conditions for those who remained in the city have begun to emerge in the last 24 hours as it became clear that US military claims of 'precision' targeting of insurgent positions were false. According to one Iraqi journalist who left Falluja on Friday, some of the civilian injuries were caused by the massive firepower directed on to city neighbourhoods during the battle.
'If the fighters fire a mortar, US forces respond with huge force,' said the journalist, who asked not to be named.
The city had been without power or water for days. Frozen food had spoiled and people could not charge their cellphones. 'Some people hadn't prepared well. They didn't stock up on tinned food. They didn't think it would be this bad,' he said.
At the main hospital, cut off from the rest of the city, doctors have reportedly been treating the injured with nothing but bandages, while the Red Crescent says people have been bleeding to death for lack of medical attention.
This was directed at a city in a country which had not been a threat to us, which we had bombed for over 11 years. No one says how many we killed, the articles just infer and make implications. But then we don't do "body counts."
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
