"In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false."
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| rock and roll means fuck "In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false." |
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Tuesday, April 13, 2004 fucking bloody hell. i found this via counterspin. go read it all. read every last word. Dispatches From Iraq From: Wendell Steavenson Subject: Fallujah Stories Monday, April 12, 2004, at 12:47 PM PT My driver, Mousab, a sweet shy man with a smile like an adorable 4-year-old's, got a call from his cousin in Fallujah. The call was short, the line fizzy, and they were abruptly cut off. His cousin told him that they had tried to send his mother and the children out of the city ("Somehow, I don't know, they don't have a car"), and could he try to come and collect them? Mousab set off the next day from Baghdad at 10 a.m. He took the main highway that goes to Fallujah and Ramadi. Still in the city, among the suburbs, he saw a tank burning and a Humvee on fire. There were explosions. He saw another car; it was also going to Fallujah, and they joined up and got off the highway and tried to find back roads, dirt roads between villages. Soon they came to a mujahideen checkpoint. They stopped. "Who are you? Where are you going?" "We are going to Fallujah." "To Fallujah? For jihad?" "No, we are going to help people there." "Do you need weapons? Do you need someone to show you the way in?" Mousab and the other car declined the offer and drove another two or three hours to Gurma. There was fighting in Gurma. Mousab saw the blackened carcass of a helicopter and a Humvee on fire. There were large numbers of mujahideen there and American helicopters overhead firing rockets. .... He could not get into Fallujah, and he drove back to Gurma, ate some lunch, and set out to try again. The fighting was still going on. Iraqis on the road told him it was too dangerous to go forward, that the Americans were targeting every vehicle, any kind of car. The explosions were continuous. He came across a man in a car with his family. The man asked him to take his family—five women and a multitude of small children—to relatives in Gurma. The women did not want to leave their father. They were crying, "We want to stay with you, we would rather die together." For half an hour this conversation continued, and then the father left them, promising to follow in a couple of hours. He walked back to his own car. Before he got to the car he was shot in the head. Mousab, telling me this, looked down at the ground. "His brain was everywhere. The women were screaming. I got them into the car." There were hundreds of cars in Gurma—families, people trying to get out of Fallujah. The family Mousab had ferried found their relatives. Mousab stayed a few hours in the house of a stranger, and then in the small hours he set off for Baghdad in a convoy of refugees. The mujahideen said it was safer then, there was less bombing. They drove on back roads with their headlights off. There were mujahideen fighters all the way into the city. Mousab saw them outside Khadamiya, a Shiite neighborhood to the west. One had his face covered with a red and white scarf, the others just standing there with their rocket-propelled grenades. The American spin suggests a cordoned-off Fallujah full of small arms fire. I've been talking to people who have been in and out of Fallujah over the past few days, mostly friends of mine trying to take medical supplies in or to get relatives out. The Americans don't control the main highway—their supply convoys are constantly getting hit—and they have not sealed the town effectively. They do not seem to control any tract of country between Baghdad and Ramadi, and every day attacks on the western edges of Baghdad creep closer into the center of the city. The streets in Baghdad are emptier and emptier, the unease is palpable. On Saturday I drove out to the western suburb of Ghaziliya (a town on the way to Fallujah) and saw a tank on fire under an underpass. There were two Bradley fighting vehicles a few hundred yards away craning the surrounding neighborhoods with their gun turrets. Two helicopters circled overhead, like poised dragonflies in the muddy afternoon blue sky haze. .... Three brothers and a neighbor drove their families out of Fallujah on Saturday night. I found them in a relative's house in Baghdad, angry ("We saw them shooting families with children"; "There was a cease-fire but they continued to attack us"). They were family men with their wives and dozens of children crowding shyly around, listening to their fathers talk. "Just tell the truth," they told me. "Because we can see CNN and BBC are full of lies." They held up a weighty pointed piece of steel and said it was an armor-piercing bullet fired at their car. .... The brothers were strong and clear and proud. They did not exaggerate what they were saying or inject it with polemic. Ali stroked his little son Ahmed's head, teasing him, telling me proudly, "He is always pointing his hand in the air like a gun!" The men were going back to fight. "The Americans," Ali seemed sure, "will not leave Iraq without violence. The only way is by violence. All their excuses and reasons are false." 
note: this picture is not from fullujah, it's from baghdad, but i think you get the idea... we are in deep, deep shit, kids. we are creating something of a kandahar west in fallujah. americans won't be safe there for a generation at least. we are also seem to be giving the iraqis something of an arab valley forge or bunker hill: Fallujah Gains Mythic Air Siege Redefines Conflict for Iraqis in Capital BAGHDAD, April 12 -- The U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah, designed to isolate and pursue a handful of extremists in a restive town, has produced a powerful backlash in the capital. Urged on by leaflets, sermons and freshly sprayed graffiti calling for jihad, young men are leaving Baghdad to join a fight that residents say has less to do with battlefield success than with a cause infused with righteousness and sacrifice. "The fighting now is different than a year ago. Before, the Iraqis fought for nothing. Now, fighters from all over Iraq are going to sacrifice themselves," said a Fallujah native who gave his name as Abu Idris and claimed to be in contact with guerrillas who slip in and out of the besieged city three and four times daily. .... "Our brothers who went to Fallujah and came back say: 'Oh, God, it is heaven. Anyone who wants paradise should go to Fallujah,' " Abu Idris said. i guess all nations need their founding myth, their own creation narrative. i just wish we could have given them one that wasn't quite so bloody. mission of burma: "wounded world" "burn their cities and scorch the earth below..." posted by downtown | 1:43 AM |
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Cost of the War in Iraq
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