Post by POA on Apr 15, 2004 15:59:54 GMT -5
News from the Front: U.S. Snipers Ignored Ceasefire
Printed on Tuesday, April 13, 2004 @ 19:30:53 CST ( )
Report by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke, YellowTimes.org
NewsFromtheFront.org
WASHINGTON (NFTF.org) -- Accounts from Fallujah residents who either witnessed or were shot during three failed ceasefires seem uniform; U.S. forces fired indiscriminately at any person who dared venture outdoors.
"They say there is a ceasefire and they said 12:00. People went out to do some shopping, and everybody who went out was shot, and this place was full and half of them were dead. I don't know why. Please, you do your best to ask them why," clinic director Mekki Al Azar pleaded to filmmaker Julia Guest, who herself had slipped into Fallujah with a group bringing medical supplies to the near decimated town.
Yesterday on the American independent news and politics show, Democracy Now (DN), guest and journalist Aaron Glantz, who interviewed Fallujah residents in Baghdad, confirmed accounts in Al Jazeera and United Press International (UPI) that U.S. forces in Fallujah are treating all residents as insurgents, firing indiscriminately at women, children and the elderly.
"When I arrived" (Sat., April 10), reported Guest, "I found a woman who I think was in her 70s who had decided to try to help her sons get out of the city. They decided to leave the family group, and so she just had taken the decision to walk out the front door waving a white flag, because they knew they were in a heavily -- there was a lot of shooting in their area. And she was shot in the stomach and the foot. So, I found her in the hospital with one of her sons in quite a state and she was evacuated in a small van that volunteered to come out from Baghdad and picked her up and took her back to Baghdad."
Glantz relayed that the clinic's ambulance was fired upon twice during the ceasefire, once while it was transporting citizens from the U.K. and U.S. who had received permission to rescue injured sniper victims. He also interviewed an 11-year-old boy, Yousef Bakri Amash, whose younger, best friend was allegedly shot by an American sniper while crossing the street.
"America is the enemy of the children," Amash told DN. "Americans shoot us on the street. They even bombed our school. We are innocent kids. We can't play on the streets because of the Americans."
Ironically, but unsurprisingly, the cold refusal of snipers to distinguish between unarmed civilians and armed insurgents, coupled with the mounting casualties of the innocent is transforming people who looked forward to peace just a week ago into fighting resistance members.
Ibrahim Hassen, a 40-year-old father shot during the siege told Glantz that he now plans to fight.
"I went to the market to bring food for the kids because we were running out of food," said Hassen on DN. "When I went out to the mosque to bring food for the people who didn't have it, it was between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning. The Americans told us we could go out from 6:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the afternoon but it was a big lie. At any time, they're ready to shoot. The bridge was at my back. It was about 300 years I felt the gunshot above my head. I was a civilian man. There were a lot of children around, including my children. When I entered the road, they shot us with explosive dum-dum bullets. I was wounded below my collar bone and in my head and then my stomach."
UPI correspondant P. Mitchell Prothero interviewed a family in Baghdad whose sons and father were slipping in and out of Fallujah to fight.
"There is no place in Fallujah without a fight," 21-year-old Ahmed (not his real name) told Prothero. "The Americans have snuck snipers all over Fallujah and everyone can be hit anytime. We can only work at night, but during the day, they kill the civilians. I saw them shoot a family just for trying to run to a car to leave part of the fighting."
Only a handful of journalists are covering Fallujah. Aside from Guest, the only known journalists in the city are a crew from Al Jazeera. The Qatar- based Arab news network was banned after airing footage of the dead and wounded – largely children, but senior producer Samir Khader told Glantz his journalists refused to abandon their families in Fallujah.
"The response – the American response to Al Jazeera coverage is simple; they don't want any witness[es]," Khader told Glantz in Baghdad. "They want to do their job behind the scenes without the world knowing what's going on."
British commanders in Iraq are also condemning U.S. tactics as heavy-handed and say they unnecessarily kill innocent civilians. One British officer, who asked to remain anonymous, told London's The Telegraph, "My view and the view of the British chain of command, is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen."
He continued, "They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude toward the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful. The U.S. troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned, Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
YellowTimes.org correspondent Lisa Ashkenaz Croke drafted this report.
