[She's not a leftwing girl, and Slate's not a left-wing mag. But it sounds remarkably similar to Rahul Mahajan's diary on www.empirenotes.com]
http://slate.msn.com/id/2093154/entry/0/
From: Wendell Steavenson
Subject: Fallujah Stories
Monday, April 12, 2004, at 12:47 PM PT
My driver, Mousab, a sweet shy man with a smile like an adorable
4-year-old's, got a call from his cousin in Fallujah. The call was
short, the line fizzy, and they were abruptly cut off. His cousin told
him that they had tried to send his mother and the children out of the
city ("Somehow, I don't know, they don't have a car"), and could he
try to come and collect them?
Mousab set off the next day from Baghdad at 10 a.m. He took the main
highway that goes to Fallujah and Ramadi. Still in the city, among the
suburbs, he saw a tank burning and a Humvee on fire. There were
explosions. He saw another car; it was also going to Fallujah, and
they joined up and got off the highway and tried to find back roads,
dirt roads between villages. Soon they came to a mujahideen
checkpoint. They stopped.
"Who are you? Where are you going?"
"We are going to Fallujah."
"To Fallujah? For jihad?"
"No, we are going to help people there."
"Do you need weapons? Do you need someone to show you the way in?"
Mousab and the other car declined the offer and drove another two or
three hours to Gurma. There was fighting in Gurma. Mousab saw the
blackened carcass of a helicopter and a Humvee on fire. There were
large numbers of mujahideen there and American helicopters overhead
firing rockets.
The mujahideen told them which way to go. They saw Americans on the
highway, but they avoided them. Finally they arrived at the north side
of Fallujah on the outskirts of a neighborhood called Jolan.
"The fighting was very bad," said Mousab in his calm way, without
adding any details or drama. "There was heavy bombing, there were
large numbers of mujahideen heading toward the Americans. I could see
houses burning."
He could not get into Fallujah, and he drove back to Gurma, ate some
lunch, and set out to try again.
The fighting was still going on. Iraqis on the road told him it was
too dangerous to go forward, that the Americans were targeting every
vehicle, any kind of car. The explosions were continuous. He came
across a man in a car with his family. The man asked him to take his
family--five women and a multitude of small children--to relatives in
Gurma. The women did not want to leave their father. They were crying,
"We want to stay with you, we would rather die together." For half an
hour this conversation continued, and then the father left them,
promising to follow in a couple of hours. He walked back to his own
car. Before he got to the car he was shot in the head.
Mousab, telling me this, looked down at the ground. "His brain was
everywhere. The women were screaming. I got them into the car."
There were hundreds of cars in Gurma--families, people trying to get
out of Fallujah. The family Mousab had ferried found their relatives.
Mousab stayed a few hours in the house of a stranger, and then in the
small hours he set off for Baghdad in a convoy of refugees. The
mujahideen said it was safer then, there was less bombing. They drove
on back roads with their headlights off. There were mujahideen
fighters all the way into the city. Mousab saw them outside Khadamiya,
a Shiite neighborhood to the west. One had his face covered with a red
and white scarf, the others just standing there with their
rocket-propelled grenades.
The American spin suggests a cordoned-off Fallujah full of small arms
fire. I've been talking to people who have been in and out of Fallujah
over the past few days, mostly friends of mine trying to take medical
supplies in or to get relatives out. The Americans don't control the
main highway--their supply convoys are constantly getting hit--and
they have not sealed the town effectively. They do not seem to control
any tract of country between Baghdad and Ramadi, and every day attacks
on the western edges of Baghdad creep closer into the center of the
city. The streets in Baghdad are emptier and emptier, the unease is
palpable. On Saturday I drove out to the western suburb of Ghaziliya
(a town on the way to Fallujah) and saw a tank on fire under an
underpass. There were two Bradley fighting vehicles a few hundred
yards away craning the surrounding neighborhoods with their gun
turrets. Two helicopters circled overhead, like poised dragonflies in
the muddy afternoon blue sky haze.
Sunday morning I woke up at half past 5 to explosions, maybe mortars.
It was still dark, lightening with birdsong into dawn. A siren sounded
in the U.S. compound in the center of Baghdad, the green zone, across
the river from my balcony. I stayed awake. Bradleys rumbled down the
road, a tank, some Humvees, and a truck full of American troops, then
a foot patrol platoon strung out along the verge.
When he got back to Baghdad on Sunday morning, Mousab got a call from
his relatives in Fallujah. They said they had made a mistake trying to
leave the town. They couldn't get out, they were back home. They were
all right; they were going to stay.
Three brothers and a neighbor drove their families out of Fallujah on
Saturday night.
I found them in a relative's house in Baghdad, angry ("We saw them
shooting families with children"; "There was a cease-fire but they
continued to attack us"). They were family men with their wives and
dozens of children crowding shyly around, listening to their fathers
talk.
"Just tell the truth," they told me. "Because we can see CNN and BBC
are full of lies." They held up a weighty pointed piece of steel and
said it was an armor-piercing bullet fired at their car.
Abdul Karim Majid, the middle brother, said they had wanted to stay in
their home. They had a generator and food. The electricity was off,
but there was water. They could hear explosions half a mile away in
Jolan and see the jets firing bombs overhead, but their neighborhood
was all right--until Saturday night, when a tank stopped at the edge
of their street; there was fighting, gun fire, and then the tank fired
a shell through their house, blowing up their water tank on its way
into their neighbor's house. There it exploded and injured the legs of
two small girls. Abdul called an ambulance because they had a mobile
phone, a rare thing in Fallujah, but when the ambulance came, it was
fired upon. More bombs were exploding. They loaded the whole family
into four cars and escaped from their neighbor's house, driving to
Baghdad on back roads. "The Americans don't know."
I asked them about conditions in Fallujah. They said that most of the
shops were closed, and they had been helping their poorer neighbors
with food. The new cemetery was outside the town, and the Americans
had blocked the road and shot a burial party on the first day of the
insurgency, so the clerics had said that bodies should be buried in
the football pitch. Only the men would go out of their homes, "to get
food, to check on relatives, to give the fighters our support," said
Abdul's brother Ali. "To give them food and water." They offered to
help fight, but the mujahideen groups are close-knit and small, they
said they didn't need recruits. The main hospital was also cut off
outside the town. The injured couldn't reach it. Mortada, the
neighbor's son, said his friend had been shot in the calf by an
American sniper firing from the top of a grain silo. Mortada had
dragged him bodily to the nearest mosque. The mosque had sent out the
call for medicine, beds, blankets, and doctors, and a clinic had been
set up inside. They left the bullet in his calf, bandaged it up, and
sent him home to make room for more wounded.
"Most of those injured are just bleeding to death because there is no
help for them," said Ali.
I asked them about the fighting. They said the Americans had not used
helicopters since the first two days, because they risked getting shot
down easily. They saw only F-16s firing missiles and tanks in the
streets. No Humvees, no soldiers on foot. The tanks would come in and
fire at things for an hour or two and then withdraw.
"Hopefully Fallujah will become the Graveyard of the Occupiers," said
Ali, the more fervent of the brothers. "Every time we put up that
sign, the Americans come and wipe it out."
And the police, I asked? And the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps?
They laughed.
"The police ran away and gave their cars and RPGs to the mujahideen.
They are from Fallujah; they cannot fight people in Fallujah."
The brothers were strong and clear and proud. They did not exaggerate
what they were saying or inject it with polemic. Ali stroked his
little son Ahmed's head, teasing him, telling me proudly, "He is
always pointing his hand in the air like a gun!" The men were going
back to fight. "The Americans," Ali seemed sure, "will not leave Iraq
without violence. The only way is by violence. All their excuses and
reasons are false."