By Jo Wilding
May 2nd

There is life, again, on the streets of Falluja. There are hugs, there are greetings, there are children watching the town refill from gateways that look out onto the roads where we ran and rode with stretchers and bodies and terrified families. Boys waved at each other across rooves that have been, for the last month, the preserve of snipers. The patchwork of territories and no man’s lands is home again.

On the outskirts of Baghdad on Saturday afternoon a US army fuel tanker was burning furiously and at the checkpoint on the main highway beside the Hay Askeri [Military Quarter] district of Falluja, US soldiers were turning away an exhausted looking family crammed into a Kia, a small Chinese made minibus. Thus far you might not notice anything has changed. Their orders, in the last couple of minutes, were not to let the press in either. Gunfire sounded. They said there were still snipers over there, indicating the buildings of Hay Askeri, couldn’t say whether theirs or the Mujahedin’s.

The Iraqi soldiers wearing armbands of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps were new though, in camouflage uniforms and assorted shoes. Part of the security problem in the last year has been that the Coalition hasn’t properly equipped the Iraqi Police and army. It’s common to see the police in blue shirts, IP arm bands and their ordinary jeans and trainers, which makes it hard to tell a genuine checkpoint from an Ali Baba one.

The checkpoint was, apparently arbitrarily, only letting through 200 families in a day, of around 8000 thought to have left, so the thin dusty back roads that were our way in and out during the fighting were the main route for the returners. Saad came through earlier in the day to check that it was safe. There was no fighting on Friday or Saturday and no checkpoints this way, he said.

Seventeen family members were travelling back together in a pick up. They left 26 days ago, on the fourth day of fighting, because of the air strikes. They stayed, crowded, with relatives in Abu Ghraib. They turned off the road onto a dusty track beside the river, two men and a woman in the front, another man in the back holding up a white cloth, thirteen year old Hussein leaning on the bare pole behind the cab. One of the boys held his arms in the air in celebration as we drove into Falluja.