By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
Baghdad
April 19, 2004

The scene is a small garden and pool surrounded by high walls and the incessant whine of a generator. The night is clear and even a little cool

“They should just wipe Fallujah off the map,” the man said.

I am with several friends including N, my translator A and an Australian woman named Donna Mulhearn who recently traveled into Fallujah to provide aid during the some of the worst fighting between the Coalition Forces and the Mujahadin. Donna was an eye-witness to the methods that the Coalition Forces are using to “wipe Fallujah off the map.”

David Martinez

The first thing you notice is the silence. An unnerving, horrible quiet without the sound of voices, car engines, children playing, or televisions. Even the birds are wise enough to have gone elsewhere. And yet we are in a small city in the middle of the day.

We passed the last mujaheedin patrol two blocks ago, and they waved us through when our escort told them what we were there for. To evacuate wounded, and to collect the dead.

We drop out of the truck and start walking, our passports held high in our otherwise empty hands. We leave our Iraqi driver and guide and enter the crushing quiet of the Kill Zone, the no man’s land between the rebels and the American forces, somewhere inside the town of Fallujah.

The team is made up of myself, a British woman, and an Iraqi woman. On the way in, I grab the Brit’s hand and squeeze it. “For luck,” I say, and I think I will remember the wink she gives me for the rest of my life.

On 7 April, the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held hearings on “A Review of the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program” (OFF). (1) The context was alleged OFF-related corruption. Among the witnesses was US Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador John Negroponte. Below is selective analysis, and later urls and select excerpts. Negroponte’s statements should be placed in the context of US/UK officials in the post-invasion period aggressively distorting the history of economic sanctions (hereafter “sanctions”) on Iraq. This history included the US/UK role in maintaining sanctions in the face of the credibly, overwhelmingly documented primary role that sanctions had played in Iraq’s humanitarian crisis.

By JASON KEYSER The Associated Press Sunday, April 18, 2004; 2:58 PM
www.washingtonpost.com

FALLUJAH, Iraq - A black-garbed Iraqi gunman slinked over a rooftop and shimmied down a palm tree, pausing for a few seconds to grab a rifle from a comrade. A few blocks away, on another rooftop, a Marine sniper squeezed a trigger and shot the man in the leg. A second shot into his chest killed him, throwing his body out of the tree. The man became Sgt. Sean Crane’s 11th kill in Fallujah.

The front lines in the siege of Fallujah are the realm of snipers, as riflemen on both sides of the fight seize the high points of the streetscape. The snipers have been operating even during an uneasy truce over the past week.

Lying flat-bellied on rooftops or leaning over rifles poking out of second-floor windows in darkened rooms, Marine snipers pick off gunmen darting across streets. And Iraqi riflemen fire at U.S. positions from buildings and mosque minarets.

Residents of Fallujah have lived in terror of the Marine snipers and have blamed them for civilian deaths, particularly during heavy fighting in the first week after the siege began April 5. Iraqis said it seemed that just stepping outside or looking out a window at the wrong time could draw sniper fire.

Haqi Ismail was shot dead by an American sniper just after leaving his house for prayers at a nearby mosque, said his cousin Ismail Hamada.

“His wife could not move forward to help him because she would have been killed too. She stood crying as he bled to death,” Hamada told The Associated Press in Baghdad, where he fled with his family.