Testimonies from Fallujah

Terrible, searing testimonies now coming out from inside Fallujah. If you can only read one, I suggest this one from a Russian (or, Turko-Russian?) doctor who’d been working in one of the city’s hospitals. (Not clear which.)
Look especially at the references he makes to the results of the extreme water shortage inside the city:

Together with Americans the flies invaded the city. They are millions. The whole city seems to be under their power. The flies cover the corpses. The older is corpse, the more flies are upon it. First they cover a corpse as by some strange rash. Then they begin to swarm upon it, and then a gray moving shroud covers the corpse. Flies swarm upon some ruins as gray monstrous shadows. The stench is awful.
The flies are everywhere. In the hospital wards, operating rooms, canteen. You find them even where they cannot be. In the “humanitarian” plastic bottle with warm plastic-stinking water. The bottle is almost full, simply someone opened it for a second and made a gulp, but this black spot is already floating there…
It is a general crisis with water. There are simply no clean sources. The local residents fetch water from the river, muddy, gray and dead. You can buy anything for water now. The sewage system is broken, the water supply is broken, and electricity is absent in the city.
I am afraid to imagine what will happen in two weeks. Hepatitis will take toll of thousands. They say already that people at the outskirts are in fever with the symptoms of typhus. But one cannot verify it. They prohibited moving in the city…

On the second day they simply started to demolish the city. Close explosions rocked the floor rocked under the feet. The plaster fell off the ceiling, the windowpanes burst. You could talk only by shouting because of the continuous gunfire. But the most terrible has begun already on the first day. The wounded started to come into the hospital like a flow. One of the doctors tuned in to BBC by his pocket radio. The news announcer mumbled something about the precision weapons and high professional level of soldiers, about collateral damage reduced to minimum.
I do not know in which place they employed their precision weapons, we had an endless stream of wounded children, women, and elders. Not dozens – hundreds! On the third day the medicines started to come to the end. Especially anesthetics and antibiotics. But the stream did not exhausted.
…
Observing Americans, I catch myself thinking that they are incredibly similar to Russian soldiers, whom I saw in Grozny in January 1994. The same infinite weariness, “burnt out” eyes. The same dull expression on the faces, when the conscience is tired to react to outer stimuli. The same repulsion from the outer world, “autism”. In the whole world they have now only them and the rest is wicked and evil…. Yes, to storm the cities is a nasty business. As Stalingrad, as Grozny, as Fallujah.
…
Yesterday Dr. Ahmed brought half a liter of iodine from somewhere in the bottle of Chivas Regal. He put is to the refrigerator, defrosted long ago. One of GIs opens the refrigerator, sees the bottle. Looking around his shoulder, he takes it out quickly. Apparently noticing that it is open, he turns away the cap and smells the liquid. After that he winced and, with already familiar ‘fuck’, throws it to the wall. The iodine splashes the treatment room by red shower. It smells by the sea and alcohol. GI goes away without a word. We do no speak, too. This iodine was the last one.
…
In the evening we receive the wounded teenager. He has two bullet wounds in his chest. By him is a woman – his mother and an old man. They shout, explaining something. I hear familiar “min faldik!” – please! – “Aunni!” – help!.. The teenager is taken to the operating room. He has no chances – we are practically without the medicines. And even if the operation will be successful, there will be nothing to carry out [post operational treatment]. Abdul Karim gloomily opens the pack of cigarettes. He just finished listening to the long confused explanations by the old man.
— After interrogations, the Americans give the usual detainees to our traitors … ? he calls the new Iraqi army by this word ? and those shoot them. This boy was executed together with three other men. Bastards…
The rumors about the shootings without trial become true. Many wounded tell that somebody was executed or finished off before their eyes. After all I saw these days I begin to believe it. The American army evidently has broken loose…
The surgeon comes out after an hour. The teenager has died. The crying mother is led away by the old Iraqi. He is her brother. The surgeon sits down on the sofa and closes his eyes.
— Aneh teben! ? I am so tired! …
During the five days, while the count was yet conducted, more than three thousand wounded passed through our hospital. These were the people who lived nearby. The people who could be delivered to us. Nobody knows how many people in the city are dead. Nobody will ever know…
…
And here I am going through the city and cannot say a word in shock. I cannot recognize the city. Only ten days ago it was an Iraqi town with its regular for centuries Arabic life. Boling bazaars, noisy streets. And here I am going through the empty dead city, between the ugly “pyramids” of destroyed buildings, broken streets, whole quarters wiped from the face of earth. The city is killed and dismembered by some monstrous maniac. Beelzebub – the lord of the flies. Under the flag of stars and stripes, where the stars look so alike to thick flesh flies.
I go and ask the skies again, like five years ago in bombed out Kosovo, will anybody ever answer for this barbarism? But the skies do not respond. Only a few US battle helicopters pass nearby my road towards the ruins of the city. The killings continue.

I also read the account by BBC correspondent Fadhil Badrani, whose earlier phoned-in interviews gave some glimpses into the terror being experienced by people inside the city.
That’s right: terror.
In the account he gave Wednesday of his exit from the city, I found the little part at the end about the destruction of his study/ library/ office space particularly poignant:

My old house, near the train station, is half destroyed. I had built an office to one side of it, which had a library with all my books, documents, professional certificates and newspapers.
All this is gone. It got bombed.

I imagined if this had happened to me. How can a person reconstitute himself as a writer having lost so many vital professional materials? Will the BBC still want to employ him if he has no access to these things?
The Nation‘s website has a well-done piece about the effect of the fighting on Fallujah’s medical facilities that also remarks on the effects of the earlier water cutoff:

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society has called the health conditions in and around Falluja “catastrophic.” One hospital staff member who recently left the city reports that there were severe outbreaks of diarrheal infections among the population, with children and the elderly dying from infectious disease, starvation and dehydration in greater numbers each day. Dr. [Sami] al-Jumaili, Dr. [Eyman] al-Ani and journalist [Fadhil] Badrani each stated that the wounded and children are dying because of lack of medical attention and water. In one case, according to Dr. al-Jumaili, three children died of dehydration when their father was unable to find water for them. The US forces cut off the city’s water supply before launching their assault.
“The people are dying because they are injured, have nothing to eat or drink, almost no healthcare,” said Dr. al-Ani. “The small rations of food and water handed out by the US soldiers cannot provide for the population.” For the thousands living in makeshift camps outside the city, according to Firdus al-Ubadi of the Red Crescent Society, hygiene and health conditions are as precarious as in Falluja. There are no oral rehydration solutions or salts for those who are dehydrated, she says.

Also shocking: the detailed description in this piece of the bombing of the city’s Central Health Center:

Although the US military has dismissed accounts of the health center bombing as “unsubstantiated,” in fact they are credible and come from multiple sources. Dr. Sami al-Jumaili described how US warplanes bombed the Central Health Centre in which he was working at 5:30 am on November 9. The clinic had been treating many of the city’s sick and wounded after US forces took over the main hospital at the start of the invasion. According to Dr. al-Jumaili, US warplanes dropped three bombs on the clinic, where approximately sixty patients–many of whom had serious injuries from US aerial bombings and attacks–were being treated.
Dr. al-Jumaili reports that thirty-five patients were killed in the airstrike, including two girls and three boys under the age of 10. In addition, he said, fifteen medics, four nurses and five health support staff were killed, among them health aides Sami Omar and Omar Mahmoud, nurses Ali Amini and Omar Ahmed, and physicians Muhammad Abbas, Hamid Rabia, Saluan al-Kubaissy and Mustafa Sheriff.
Although the deaths of these individual health workers could not be independently confirmed, Dr. al-Jumaili’s account is echoed by Fadhil Badrani, an Iraqi reporter for Reuters and the BBC. Reached by phone in Falluja, Badrani estimated that forty patients and fifteen health workers had been killed in the bombing. Dr. Eiman al-Ani of Falluja General Hospital, who said he reached the site shortly after the attack, said that the entire health center had collapsed on the patients.

As this article, by Miles Schuman notes:

These reports demand an immediate international response, an end to assaults on Falluja’s civilian population and the free passage of medical aid, food and water. Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has vowed to investigate “violations of the rules of war designed to protect civilians and combatants” in Falluja and to bring the perpetrators to justice… The bombing of hospitalized patients, forced starvation and dehydration, denial of medicines and health services to the sick and wounded must be recognized for what they are: war crimes and crimes against humanity.

(Thanks to commenter Christiane for sending that link.)
I note that the Iraqi Red Crescent was finally able, Thursday, to start delivering some urgently-needed aid inside Fallujah:

“Bodies can be seen everywhere and people were crying when receiving the food parcels. It is very sad, it is a human disaster,” Muhammad al-Nuri, a spokesman for the IRCS, told IRIN in Baghdad.
Al-Nuri added that according to their information, they believe there could be more than 6,000 dead in Fallujah and that it is difficult to move around inside the city due to dead bodies in the streets.
…The IRCS spokesman said they were still in need of urgent supplies, especially now they can offer assistance to the people of Fallujah.
Blankets and tents were needed along with cooking stoves, heaters and food parcels. Al-Nuri said that most of their supplies had been distributed to the people that fled Fallujah and were staying outside the town.
On Friday morning another convoy left Baghdad, with the head of the IRCS leading the delivery. “There are no houses left in Fallujah, only destroyed places. I really don’t know how the people will return to the city. No one will find their homes,” Dr Said Ismael Haki, the IRCS president told IRIN, following the delivery.
The International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman in Baghdad, Ahmed Rawi, told IRIN that as soon as the IRCS delivered aid to the city, it opened the doors for other organisations to help those in need in the city and that they would leave Baghdad with another convoy on Friday carrying food parcels, heaters and medical supplies.
The IRCS also raised concerns for some 50,000 families camped around Fallujah in tents with the onslaught of winter. “We won the first step in entering Fallujah. We will now work day and night to offer the people from the city food and shelter, but we need help from other organisations too. They should be allowed to enter the city,” al-Nuri added.

Stalingrad… Grozny… Fallujah.