Remember Fallujah

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail: This is our Guernica

Remember Fallujah? Fallujah is the city we laid waste to in November in order to "break the back of the insurgency."

Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja's 300,000 people to flee. The city was then declared a free-fire zone on the grounds that the only people left behind must be "terrorists".

Three weeks after the attack was launched last November, the Americans claimed victory. They say they killed about 1,300 people; one week into the siege, a BBC reporter put the unofficial death toll at 2,000. But details of what happened and who the dead were remain obscure. Were many unarmed civilians, as Baghdad-based human rights groups report? Even if they were trying to defend their homes by fighting the Americans, does that make them "terrorists"?

The degree to which Fallujah was destroyed has been largely a matter of speculation. It is a closed city and still dangerous. I'm not aware of any comprehensive post-campaign photographic or video record of the state of the city.

This article in the Guardian tells us quite a bit more than we've heard to date:

Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city's compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.

The city's pre-campaign population was appx. 300,000. If 36,000 homes were destroyed with four people per home, that's around half of the city's homes.

One thing is certain: the attack on Falluja has done nothing to still the insurgency against the US-British occupation nor produced the death of al-Zarqawi - any more than the invasion of Afghanistan achieved the capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies.

This is important. It's not just us moonbats who are wringing our hands about this. The absurdity inherent in leveling a city is self-evident to most.

In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.

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