By Jo Wilding

The US has asked the British government to send you north to free up forces for another offensive against Falluja. I’m writing to ask you to refuse any orders to deploy to Baghdad or other areas currently under US control.

I was an ambulance volunteer in Falluja during the April siege. I went because my friend Salam, a doctor, said US troops were stopping medical supplies getting in, cut off water, food, electricity and had closed down the main hospital and controlled the road to the smaller one with snipers.

Salam was evacuated with bullet wounds; a missile from a US plane destroyed the ambulance in front of his. He and his crew were under fire, pinned inside the vehicle while their colleagues burned in the other one. He thought the marines wouldn’t shoot us because we’d look like their brothers and sisters. He was right: in daylight we moved medical supplies, evacuated people from the second hospital and homes in the firing line, picked up sick and injured people.

We went to bring two sick women from a house in US territory. Outside a man of about 60 was lying face down in the road, shot through the back. You don’t need me to tell you what it looks or smells like when a man’s chest isn’t inside his body any more.

By Jo Wilding

We made a load of plans for the Boomchucka Clowns to go back to Iraq this autumn, compiled an info sheet for people who wanted to join the circus, planned for some fundraising, made a list of useful stuff and people to blag it off, agreed who was going to do what.

And then Ghareeb was dead; Ghareeb who took me to Falluja, who took countless foreigners to the places he thought we could make a difference, Ghareeb with the fiery temper that drove me nuts, who sometimes liked to exaggerate, who always loved to gossip – Ewa used to say a big bird told her everything, Ghareeb whose cigarette end lit the way through the pitch dark streets of Falluja, who drove the ambulance that was shot at with us in it, who I called Azzam in the stories from there, who doesn’t need a disguise any more, who seemed to know everyone, who’d fled his native Palestine after working for freedom there, making his home in Iraq instead, is dead.

Surely someone so big couldn’t die, but it seems like bullets don’t discriminate. He was driving with the convoy that included foreign journalists and activists and Italian Red Cross workers in late August. Enzo, a Red Cross volunteer, freelance journalist and blogger, was kidnapped and killed. Even though I spoke to him on the phone only a couple of weeks before and he was fine, all it took was a bullet and now he’s dead.

And then the two Simonas, Mahnoaz and Dr Raad were kidnapped, seized in broad daylight by unmasked, smart, well-fed men, apparently working on some kind of covert operation rather than the usual chaotic opportunistic roadside bandit episodes, and we knew there was no way the clowns could go back as planned.