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
Tuesday, March 15, 2005

I just read Sheila Provencher’s March 9th account from Baghdad “It Happens to Iraqis All the Time.” In it she relates how an Iraqi friend told her “You are very brave to be with us through all this. I feel that you are family.”

In the early morning hours as I try to become still and gather my thoughts, I too think that this is what it is all about. We are family.

About two weeks ago I had occasion to visit here in Amman with Maxine, who works full-time with CPT (Christian Peacemaker Team) and was just returning from Baghdad after several months there. And later with Michele upon her return from Iraq as part of a CPT delegation that went for a two-week period. They both told me the same thing, that they could no longer look into people’s eyes as they walked through the streets. “We have to keep our eyes down, and do not even have eye contact anymore” said Michele. “So many people have lost trust.” Upon hearing their words, I felt that I had been dealt a severe blow. We dare not allow the bonds of human friendship to break!, I thought. How fragile they have become.

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.

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.

By Cathy Breen
Amman, Jordan
March 18, 2005

Some six months into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, an Iraqi friend said to me in Baghdad as we were sitting at the kitchen table of the Voices apartment “The United States took the cotton out of our mouths that Saddam Hussein had put there. But they put it in their ears.” Now on the eve of the 2nd anniversary of “Shock and Awe,” I wonder if there is still hope that we might remove the cotton.

Two evenings ago, I found myself once again sitting at a table with 2 Iraqi friends and a woman from Lebanon-all working in human rights. Our conversation, which lasted for over 4 hours, would begin with accounts of current atrocities facing Iraqis, and later turn to stories of past horrors under Saddam’s regime. I returned home exhausted, acutely aware that I’ve never really grasped the extent of the suffering people endured under Saddam. Until that evening.