Children stand in front of their ruined home in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. (photo: CPT)

This article contains recent photos from inside Fallujah taken by CPT

By Cliff Kindy
Christian Peacemaker Teams
March 16, 2005

Mohammad told the CPTers on their way to Fallujah, “You have a 99% chance that you will be refused entry into Fallujah today.” Five CPTers, two persons from Muslim Peacemaker Team, two local human rights activists, and two Iraqi friends were at a factory outside of Fallujah, ready to enter the city. The prospects of entry were dim, as US soldiers had turned back representatives of the Ministry of Religion earlier that same day.

One Iraqi in the visiting group brought wheelchairs and medical supplies to the hospital and the one clinic still operating in Fallujah. The devastating assault on the city by the US last November had started with an attack on the hospital and its clinics, reportedly because those centers were the sources of reports on civilian casualties in the April 2004 attack on Fallujah, reports that turned public opinion against the attack.

The visitors entered without incident, perhaps because they brought medical supplies. The team pushed five wheelchairs from the city center across the Euphrates River Bridge, where only foot traffic is allowed to pass to the hospital. Next they visited the lone clinic left in the city that has a population of over 200,000 people.

By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Last night a dear Iraqi friend and I were visiting and just enjoying one another’s company. She was teaching me a new card game. The three children were off watching cartoons. She and her children go back and forth from Baghdad to Amman, risking the dangerous highway that connects these two cities. They are searching for a safe place to live. We know each other from pre and post-invasion times. I was a frequent guest in her home in Baghdad, always welcomed. Since she was little, my friend tells me, she has always wanted to visit the United States.

The children have lost a year of school. In a rare moment alone with my friend’s 12 year old daughter the other day—she was helping me with my Arabic study—I asked her “What do you dream?” I remembered back to when she was 10 years old; at that time she wanted to be a ballerina. Now two years later, unprompted she answers “I wish the soldiers would go home. I want Baghdad to be like New York….When American soldiers see people out at night, they kill them.” She told me that her 13 year old cousin, a girl, saw a woman shot in the head. “The insides of her head [she was struggling to find the words], was on the street! When an American soldier saw the dead people, he was drinking Pepsi, it was like he was happy.” I miss my school, she said.