Testimonies from Fallujah
by Helena Cobban

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...

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U.S. Troop Level In Iraq To Grow

The Pentagon said yesterday that it will boost the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 150,000, the highest level since the U.S. occupation began 19 months ago.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com

Iraq Elections: Negroponte Optimistic; Shiites Enthusiastic for Reasons that would not Please Negroponte
by Juan Cole

Insurgency broken? Far from it

A senior American commander made the mistake of telling reporters that the military offensive that eventually captured a largely depopulated and destroyed Fallujah had "broken the back of the insurgency" across Iraq. It did not, of course. It could not.

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Twin Attacks in Iraq Kill at Least 30

Iraqi insurgents staged nearly simultaneous attacks Friday morning on police stations at opposite ends of Baghdad, killing at least 30 people, freeing dozens of prisoners and emptying a police arsenal in a demonstration of the militants' strength in the heart of the country.

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  thanks to Eschaton

Maybe Iraq is like Algeria
by Steve Gilliard

Here are four entries from Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches. Dahr Jamail is required reading. His is a view from the street. Sor rare.

This time last year…
by Dahr Jamail

I’m in need of a haircut, so I ask Abu Talat if he thinks it would be safe to get one here, risking the time on the street required to do so. Smiling, he says, “Yes Dahr, it may be possible, but we must make sure we have confidence in the barber so you get a haircut, and not a head cut!” His jokes provide him with great amusement…but I’ve begun enjoying them myself, in a sick sort of way.

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“We are living a disaster.”
by Dahr Jamail

Back at my hotel I indulge my daily ritual of asking the owner if I have hot water yet. The cold showers are getting old now that the temperature has dropped and it remains chilly. This morning I was awakened by the usual 7am gun battles nearby. They usually coincide with the morning mortar ritual of blasts hitting the so-called green zone. Now as I type this evening, a huge explosion rattles my walls. A gun battle with heavy automatic weapons kicks off down the street, and the usual wailing sirens of ambulances and Iraqi Police begin blaring across the city-streaming in this direction.

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Low Crime Rate in Fallujah

I am reminded of what occurred in Lidice, Czechoslovakia during World War II. Similar to what the US military has done to Fallujah, the German Nazis leveled Lidice as payback collective punishment for the death of a high ranking member of the German security administration, Reinhard Heydrich, who was killed by Czech patriots in 1942. Last March, four mercenaries were brutally killed in Fallujah, which led to the first US siege of the city in April as collective payback for the attack. Mostly for political reasons that siege was ceased, which set the stage for the recent attack on the city. Similarly, Heydrich was assassinated by Czech patriots who were accused of being aided by the village of Lidice. Thus, Hitler ordered the village to be erased, and all men in the city over the age of 16 were killed. Musar, a woman at the mosque standing nearby is weeping. “My 5 cousins and uncle are trapped there,” she cries, “They are not fighters but the Americans won’t let them out. And now the soldiers are coming to our refugee camp and detaining people!”

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The Quiet of Destruction and Death

This past Sunday a small Iraqi Red Crescent aid convoy was allowed into Fallujah at 4:30pm. I interviewed a member of the convoy today. Speaking on condition of anonymity, (so I’ll call her Suthir), the first thing she said to me was, “I need another heart and eyes to bear it because my own are not enough to bear what I saw. Nothing justifies what was done to this city. I didn’t see a house or mosque that wasn’t destroyed.” Suthir paused often to collect herself, but then as usual with those of us who have witnessed atrocities first hand, when she started to talk, she barely stopped to breath. “There were families with nothing. I met a family with three daughters and two sons. One of their sons, Mustafa who was 16 years old, was killed by American snipers. Then their house was burned. They had nothing to eat. Just rice and cold water-dirty water…they put the rice in the dirty water, let it sit for one or two hours, then they ate the rice. Fatma, the 17 year-old daughter, said she was praying for God to take her soul because she couldn’t bear the horrors anymore.” The families’ 12 year old boy told Suthir he used to want to be a doctor or a journalist. She paused then added, “He said that now he has no more dreams. He could no longer even sleep.”

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"They hate our policies, not our freedom"

This lovely report (big PDF file) was dumped by the administration on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. While a number of news agencies reported on it, because it happened on the busiest travel day of the year few people probably noticed. Produced by the Defense Science Board, it is utterly damming of the way we are conducting the war on the rest of the world: 'Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies [the report says]. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.

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