‘Cleaning up’ in Fallujah

In connection with military operations, there are two distinct kinds of “cleaning up” that go on. One is the “mopping up” operations that the advancing armies themselves do to secure the areas they’ve taken (a phase that can segue over into “ethnic cleansing”.) Personally I hate all these uses of household-management terminology in connection with what is almost always a very brutal phase of the fighting.
And then, there’s the real “cleaning up” that needs to be done in the battlefield, once the armies have finished their business.
A small team from the ICRC was able to get into Fallujah yesterday– many days after the hostilities there supposedly ended. According to a Reuters report from Geneva, on Friday morning ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal,

    expressed concern about civilians in Falluja, where sewage is flowing in the streets and hundreds of bodies apparently lie in a warehouse since a U.S. assault.

I don’t know if there are still bodies in the streets in Fallujah. I imagine there are still, certainly, bodies in many of the destroyed or not-destroyed houses that US troops have busted into over the past month.
Dahr Jamail has an extraordinary, and extremely upsetting, album of photos of bodies in Fallujah. Absolutely sit down and say a prayer before you look at it.
Here’s what he says about these photos:

    Two weeks ago someone was allowed into Fallujah by the military to help bury bodies. They were allowed to take photographs of 75 bodies, in order to show pictures to relatives so that they might be identified before they were buried. These pictures are from a book of these photos. They are being circulated publicly around small villages near Fallujah where many refugees are staying.

There are 58 photos. I haven’t looked at them all yet. The first one is titled “Dead boy holding a white surrender flag”, and it goes on from there. Some of the bodies appear to be in houses, some in streets. Quite a number have had the flesh of the extremities already eaten by dogs. At least one of the pics shows a body with the feet sawn off by something (possibly a tank?)


Imagine if one of the people pictured was your son, sister, brother, dad, or aunt?
As I’ve said before, it’s probably hard to figure out whether it’s better to know that a loved one has suffered such a fate, or not to know.
Anyway, back to the ICRC press conference…
The Reuters report said:

    A team of seven ICRC Iraqi staff, including engineers, entered Falluja on Tuesday for the first time since the assault by 10,000 U.S. troops backed by Iraqi units began on Nov. 8.
    U.S. estimates say some 1,600 rebels, including foreign Islamists and Iraqi Sunni Arab nationalists, were killed in the city in the volatile western Anbar province.
    “Our team was told by the U.S. army that there are several hundred dead bodies in a warehouse in the city,” Westphal told Reuters, adding that the ICRC team was unable to see the site.
    “Obviously it is something we will follow up with a view to ensure that any human remains are properly identified and families are informed,” he said.
    ICRC officials also saw “sewage flowing in some streets,” according to the spokesman. Raw sewage and a lack of clean water can pose a public health threat, including diarrhoeal diseases.
    “We are looking at how to help with the rehabilitation of the water supply and sewage system,” Westphal said.

So if the US Army knows that “several hundred” bodies have been warehoused in that single location– I’m hoping it’s a refrigerated warehouse but fear it probably isn’t– then what prevents them from either

    (a) arranging for a handover of these bodies to civilian bodies outside outside of the city who could help identify them, notify the relatives, and arrange for as proper and expeditious a burial as possible, or at least,
    (b) allowing an ICRC team in to photograph the bodies and start planning for their eventual removal and burial?

Could the reason be that the US military are embarrassed about the condition of these bodies– and perhaps, about the proportion of them that seem not to be the bodies of fighters– and therefore don’t want the ICRC to see them at all?
I’m weeping inside of me. What can we do about this? How can we explain to that majority of US citizens that seems still to support this war the depths of depravity to which it has led?

17 thoughts on “‘Cleaning up’ in Fallujah”

  1. You can’t. The more atrocities that happen, the more denial they’ll come up with. To break the feedback loop would take media exposure that doesn’t exist anymore.

  2. Fallujah Photos

    This Helena Cobban post has a link to photos of some of the dead. I’m linking to this post instead of the photos directly so you’ll have a little context on their origins….

  3. Since Bushco went to great lengths to link Saddam with 9/11 in the minds of soldiers, this is all about revenge. How else is the continuing brutalization of the Iraqi people explained in any other way?
    These are war crimes.

  4. Bad taste. Haram. Indecent. Human bodies are off-limits for press and blog exploitation, even if the deceased were plausible combatants. If you support Geneva Conventions, then you indeed must not use corpses in your press or propaganda.
    Soldiering is an inherently awful thing, which is precisely why people shroud it, like death in general, with so much hoary myth and piety. However, there’s more than that at stake here.
    Your http://dahrjamailiraq.com source states:
    “Two weeks ago someone was allowed into Fallujah by the military to help bury bodies. They were allowed to take photographs of 75 bodies, in order to show pictures to relatives so that they might be identified before they were buried.”
    If so, then why are the pictures posted on the Web, rather than shared in private to returning Fallujans?
    Dahr Jamail will publish anything that inflames anti-American sentiment, even bodies of corpses. The site is replete with every nasty thing seen, heard, or invented: Americans compared to Nazis, insurgents compared to anti-fascist patriots, allegations that the US causes the street bombings to foment war between Sunni and Shia. The site presents the American occupation as THE problem in Iraq.
    It is one thing to say Americans have done things wrong, or that the slated elections need revision or follow-up in order to protect the Sunni minority, but another thing simply to pile up recrimminations against the US.
    The BLOG says nothing constructive about how valid elections might be held or of how security might be restore so that the US could leave. In essence, it is pure anti US incitement.
    As someone else has written,
    “Many bloggers are complaining from a liberal point of view about the downsides of the use of force. They are completely uninterested in the activities of the Baathist and radical Sunni guerrillas holed up in Fallujah. They are uninterested in whether these guerrillas terrorized the local population.”
    http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/fallujah-report-and.html
    Dahr Jamail (and JWN, to the extent is publicizes such views) fits the following:
    “At least a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States. Many of the same people who found it hard to say anything bad about Saddam Hussein find it equally difficult to say anything nice about pro-democracy demonstrators in Ukraine. Many of the same people who would refuse to condemn a dictator who is anti-American cannot bring themselves to admire democrats who admire, or at least don’t hate, the United States. I certainly don’t believe, as President Bush sometimes simplistically says, that everyone who disagrees with American policies in Iraq or elsewhere ‘hates freedom.’ That’s why it’s so shocking to discover that some of them do.”
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23721-2004Nov30.html
    It would be a relief to see at least some acknowledgment that the Fallujah insurgents are NOT incipient “freedom fighters.”
    See: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=9&u=/ap/20041202/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_torture_chamber
    The FCNL notion that the US should simply take its troops out of Iraq, yet somehow reconstruct it, is a non sequitur. There can be no elections or reconstruction without order. There can be no order if people are shooting and bombing the police. There can be no efficient or neat apprehension of insurgents who wear no uniforms and whose neighbors and relatives, fearing reprisals, dare not report.
    Dahr Jamail / JWN has loads about carnage or abuse attributed to the US, but nary a remark about who is forcing the US to take actions in Fallujah and elsewhere. The insurgents are not a gentile

  6. John Koch presents the recommendations of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) as “the US should simply take its troops out of Iraq, yet somehow reconstruct it” This is not correct.
    What Does FCNL Advocate Now?
    As the possibility for a democratic, peaceful Iraq emerging from the churning chaos becomes increasingly remote, many policymakers in Washington are looking for a way out of the quagmire. Policy think tanks as diverse as the Center for American Progress, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the CATO Institute have been calling for an exit strategy. On September 10, an editorial in The Financial Times announced,

  7. John Koch – can’t handle the truth, much? Quit your mongering and pray for these people and their families.

  8. “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” I don’t know if we in America are scratching yet, but maybe we will soon.
    The dogs of war were unleashed by liars, but they do not rampage here in America yet. Nor do I wish them to do so.
    I would recommend that the film “Missing” be shown again as a protest against our government’s interference in other countries, as well as the cold-blooded attitude on the part of the power seekers of national security state (or whatever they call it now) in pursuit of its aims. Anyone standing in its way is fair game.
    But the group in power now is part of a dynasty going back to Nixon. There are some habitual players and criminals in the pack. They must be removed from US power or we can have Fallujah’s in America. Talk about your “threats to national security”. Illegal wars have to be the worst and most unconstitutional kind.

  9. John Koch wrote:
    “nary a remark about who is forcing the US to take actions in Fallujah”
    That’s a familiar, if peculiar, line of thought . . . somehow reminiscent of how the Palestinians “force” Israel to build settlements in the West Bank and kill little girls in Gaza.
    They must be pretty powerful people, those Fallujans, “forcing” all those US Marines to travel all the way from Texas, or whatever hellhole they come from, to destroy a city, and kill old men, and women, and children.
    Deward Hastings

  10. This is the Last Judgment. All who support these atrocities and this war or make excuses for it have judged themselves.

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