This article contains recent photos from inside Fallujah taken by CPT

With little option for a second sight, girls in Fallujah have to attend class in a building damaged in the U.S. lead raid on Fallujah. Fallujah, Iraq (photo: CPT)

By Sheila Provencher
Christian Peacemaker Teams
March 21, 2005

As we approached the cluster of tents in the Gebeil section of Fallujah on March 14, we didn’t know what to expect. We had been amazed that we even got inside the city through the tight security of three U.S. military checkpoints. We were also warned that if the word got around that there were Americans in the city, our lives could be in danger.

We had seen sections of Fallujah where the buildings were destroyed but still standing. But now our group of five CPTers and six Iraqis, several of them Shia, witnessed a vast area of the predominantly Sunni city where it looked like an earthquake had struck. There were piles of rubble where there had once been homes. Members of one of the displaced families greeted us warmly and invited us into their tent.

Event Flyer

Download Flyer for the Jose Couso, Killing the Witness event (PDF)

View “Hotel Palestine: Killing the Witness” which exposes the truth behind an attack on a media-filled hotel in Iraq as “a necessarily premeditated strike carried out for the purpose of silencing media not controlled by the US government, with the ultimate goal of depriving the public of access to the unvarnished, non-embedded reality of war.”

Javier Cuoso, brother of José Cuoso, will also speak at DePaul and describe how Jose was killed in Baghdad, their international struggle for justice against the impunity of the US government and military, and how the US government seeks to silence the media it does not control.

Purpose of Voices in the Wilderness:

Voices in the Wilderness was formed in 1996 to nonviolently challenge the economic warfare being waged by the US against the people of Iraq. Voices continues its work today, acting to end to the US occupation of Iraq. As US citizens, our key demands of our government include:

• An end to the US occupation of Iraq.
• The clean-up in Iraq of depleted uranium, cluster bombs and landmines and other unexploded weapons, with this clean-up fully funded by the US. A prohibition on any future use of such weapons.
• Respect for all human rights and worker rights in Iraq.
• Respect for Iraqi movement toward self-determination and renunciation of any effort to create a puppet government with strings attached to the US’ own national interest.
• Payment of restitution by the US government to Iraqis who suffered loss as a result of the past 14 years of economic and military warfare at the hands of the US.
• Reconstruction of Iraq funded by the US and its allies, but directed by and for the benefit of Iraqi citizens.
• Employment of Iraqis, not non-Iraqis, in the rebuilding of Iraq, with Iraqis being paid a living wage.
• Full health care for all, including US soldiers and Iraqis, who suffered physical or psychological injuries as a result of the US war against Iraq.
• Redirecting our country’s resources away from war-making and towards funding of the common good. The common good includes fully funded universal health care and education, including post-high school education. It also includes employment which pays a living wage.

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.