How the Fallujah battle played in the media - website commentary by Tony Kevin, 15 November 2004

 

World media interest in the siege of Fallujah peaked the day the US attack started last Tuesday. It began to fade, as soon as it became clear this was not going to be a decisive "last battle" between the US Army and insurgents, but just another distressing chapter in the cycle of collateral civilian death and destruction that life in Iraq has become since the US invasion in March 2003.

The death of Yassir Arafat at 9.30 pm on Wednesday night overwhelmed the Fallujah story. Media interest in Arafat's imminent decease had been building for days. There ensued several days of intensive world reporting of his funeral rites, historical significance, and what may now lie ahead in Israel/Palestine. Effectively, the Fallujah battle story was marginalised.

Meanwhile in Fallujah, the main insurgent force (an expected 6000 fighters) melted away. A few hundred guerilla fighters continued to fight a rearguard action in the narrow alleys of Fallujah, using booby-traps and sniper fire against 10,000 US and 2000 (mostly Kurd) pro-Allawi soldiers. US forces responded with massive destruction of roads and suspect buildings by air and artillery strikes.

The media mainstream reported little about the horror of this ongoing battle for the 300,000 people of Fallujah – how it destroyed their streets, mosques, marketplaces, hospitals and schools, made 200,000 of them temporarily or permanently homeless, and killed, wounded or just plain terrified the unknown number (variously estimated between "a small number" and 100,000) of them thought still to be hiding from the combat in their homes and cellars, some of whom may by now be starving. No aid convoys have got into Fallujah for a week now – the city has been sealed off by the US military.

According to the latest ABC Australian news (15 November), the US military says 38 US soldiers have died in the week-long offensive to recapture the Iraqi city of Fallujah from rebels and 275 have been wounded. The US military says about 1,000 insurgents have been killed and 450 to 550 captured.

There is no US official figure for civilian casualties. Residents say many people have died. There have been reports of large numbers of bodies of women and children lying unburied in the streets, of hospitals invaded and forced to close or left without supplies, one specific incident of a young boy who bled to death in his father’s arms at home after being hit by stray shrapnel – his father was afraid to leave the house and in any case there was no hospital to go to.

We only get fleeting glimpses of the scale of this ongoing suffering from television footage and the odd reported observation by embedded Western journalists with US forces. Their main reporting focus has been on the military battle as such, on its sights and sounds. But we read or hear a little …. the stench of rotting corpses, minarets and palm trees destroyed. However, the spectacle of overwhelming US military firepower methodically ripping a city of 300,000 people apart in pursuit of a few hundred diehard snipers, does not make for pleasant television. The Fallujah footage is mostly being sanitised, or simply dropped as too disturbing for viewers.

Very little news has come out in mainstream Western media about this battle as experienced by the Iraqi civilians or by the insurgents. Two honourable exceptions: The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and BBC News radio which ran some memorable telephone reports from Fadhil Badrani, an Iraqi eyewitness journalist who had stayed in the city. You can still catch these texts on Google News.

We are also starting to hear from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society about the humanitarian plight of the civilian people trapped in the city and sheltering in villages around it, and about Red Cross/Red Crescent aid convoys not being allowed yet into the sealed-off city. Again, Google has these up-to-date stories.

It will be some days or even weeks before there are any reliable observer estimates of the numbers of non-combatants killed or wounded in Fallujah since the attack began last Monday. This was a peaceful city – a major centre of Sunni population and culture – 20 months ago, when the US invaded Iraq. Now it is an empty and ruined desolation.

The US speaks of a determination to inject massive funds for reconstruction before next year’s proposed elections, to try to win back Sunni hearts and minds. But surely that is a futile hope. What has been done here this past week cannot be undone.

Was it militarily or politically necessary for the US to attack this city in such massive and lethal force? Kofi Annan did not think so. Much of the world did not think so. According to editorials in the Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald early last week, no discernible military purpose could be seen, beyond a show of force and exemplary punishment of a city that was sheltering Sunni insurgents.

The US Commander-in-Chief, General Richard Myers has now admitted that the Sunni insurgent soldiers have simply regrouped and launched new operations in other cities, eg Mosul, Samarra.

Were the gains in Fallujah commensurate and proportionate to the destruction?

Greg Sheridan is in no doubt that they were ("Fallujah had to be fought", Sunday Telegraph, 14 November, 2004):

"Thus the American operation, in which Australia is cooperating intimately, to train and equip Iraqi forces, is critical. None of this can occur if the terrorist forces are allowed to roam free, murdering and kidnapping at will and taking whole cities hostage. Thus the necessity of the Fallujah operation. It is tough, terrible street-by-street fighting. The coalition forces are doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties, but undoubtedly some civilians are suffering grievously. But there can be no doubt who bears the moral guilt for this situation. It is the terrorists …."

To access well-argued, factually backed alternative views of the significance of Fallujah, I have gone to the Internet. Here are some sites and articles that impress me as offering responsible compilations of international media reporting, and commentary:

www.slate.msn.com - hear their online audio military commentator, Fred Kaplan.

www.antiwar.com - read "Four Times Fallujah Equals?", by Tom Engelhardt and Mark LeVine.

www.motherjones.com - read " ‘Success’ in Fallujah?".

 

Perhaps Fallujah will remain a ruined and sniper-haunted battleground , like the ruins of the Chechen capital Grozny. US military spokesmen now speak of a 30-day "mopping -up" period; they say the "main battle" is almost over. But it depends on the insurgents whether they will want to keep some sort of battle going in Fallujah. Clearly, they can do so if they wish.

There is still dispute as to how much of the ruined city the US Army actually occupies and controls - as distinct from US armored vehicles being able to drive down ruined main streets. Is it 70%? Or 30%? In any case, there seems no prospect of any kind of normal civic life returning to Fallujah soon.

When I commented last Tuesday 9 November in the Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.tonykevin.com/WarCrime1.html

that I feared Fallujah would be a US war crime as measured by the definitions of the Geneva Conventions and the International Criminal Court Statute, I was sadly accurate in my expectation of the kind of battle it would be.

Fallujah is now part of the ongoing civilian horror of Iraq. But its name will come particularly to represent and symbolise that horror, as more data emerges on what happened to the people of this city last week.

Though the US attack on Fallujah faded last week as a story in mainstream world news, in dissenting and antiwar internet sites it has just kept growing.

The siege of Fallujah seemed last Monday to be the break-out issue that might put the Iraq war back into mainstream consciousness. Its drama and enormity threatened to revive mass antiwar demonstrations. That may still happen, if people search out the news of what has happened here. Australian Iraqis understand this, and the rest of us should too.

Tony Kevin, Canberra 15 November 2004