Meanwhile, the military had seized Fallujah’s main medical facility, preventing its use in treating the wounded.15 “U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault,” recalled journalist Rahul Mahajan, one of the few unembedded journalists to enter Fallujah at the time. “[F]or the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics.”16 Food supplies were running out in the city, and a local doctor said that sixteen children and eight women had been killed in an air strike on a neighborhood on April 6.17 The siege of Fallujah was under way. “We are solidly ensconced in the city, and my units are stiffening their grip,” said Marine commander Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne.18 If anyone resists, he said, “We will break their backs. We will drive them out.”19 Fallujah, Byrne said, had become a haven for resistance fighters and smugglers because “No one ever took the time to clean it out properly.”20 Byrne’s battalion “was the first to persuade the U.S. Army Psychological warfare teams to initiate scatological warfare,” recalled Bing West, a military author who was embedded with U.S. forces around Fallujah.21 Platoons “competed to dream up the filthiest insults for translators to scream over the loudspeakers. When enraged Iraqis rushed from a mosque blindly firing their AKs, the Marines shot them down. The tactic of insult-and-shoot spread along the lines. Soon the Marines were mocking the city as ‘Lalafallujah’ (after the popular stateside concert Lollapalooza) and cranking out ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses and ‘Hell’s Bells’ by AC/DC.”22
As images from inside Fallujah emerged, primarily via journalists from Arab television networks, portraying a dire humanitarian crisis in the city, protests began spreading across Iraq, with U.S. forces using violence in an effort to shut them down.23 Mosques in Baghdad and elsewhere began organizing humanitarian convoys to Fallujah and stockpiling blood.24 By April 8, local hospital officials inside the city painted a horrifying picture of the human suffering, saying that upwards of 280 civilians had been killed and more than 400 wounded.25 “We also know of dead and wounded in various places buried under the rubble but we cannot reach them because of the fighting,” said Dr. Taher al-Issawi.26 The U.S. military denied it was killing civilians and accused resistance fighters of trying to blend into the broader population. “It is hard to differentiate between people who are insurgents or civilians,” said Maj. Larry Kaifesh. “It is hard to get an honest picture. You just have to go with your gut feeling.”27
Byrne, according to the Washington Post, “said any bodies were those of insurgents. He estimated that 80 percent of Fallujah’s populace was neutral or in favor of the American military presence.”28 That optimistic pronouncement, however, did not match the ferocity of the resistance that succeeded—at an incredible human cost—in keeping the United States from totally capturing control of the city. “The enemy was better prepared than the Marines had been told to expect,” wrote veteran Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks.29 He cited an internal Marine summary of the battle. “Insurgents surprise U.S. with coordination of their attacks: coordinated, combined, volley-fire RPGs, effective use of indirect fire,” the summary stated. “Enemy maneuvered effectively and stood and fought.”30
As the siege neared a week, bodies began piling up in the city and, according to witnesses, a stench of death spread across Fallujah. “Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in Fallujah,” recalled a doctor from Baghdad who made it into the city with a peace delegation. “There is no law on earth that can justify what the Americans have done to innocent people.”31 Independent U.S. journalists Dahr Jamail and Rahul Mahajan, meanwhile, managed to make it into Fallujah—unembedded—a week after the siege began. Upon entering the city with a humanitarian convoy, Jamail described the scene at a makeshift emergency room at a small health clinic. “As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who’d been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in. One woman and small child had been shot through the neck,” Jamail wrote in a dispatch from inside the besieged city. “The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life. After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.”32 Jamail said he saw one victim after another brought into the clinic, “nearly all of them women and children.”33 Jamail called Fallujah “Sarajevo on the Euphrates.”34
Mahajan, meanwhile, reported: “In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were ‘military-age males.’ I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him. One thing that snipers were very discriminating about—every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at.”35 Jamail reported that “the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards.”36
The War on Al Jazeera
While most of the world came to understand the siege of Fallujah as an earth-moving development in the occupation, the story of the extent of the human suffering endured by Iraqis was downplayed in the “mainstream” U.S. press. Embedded corporate journalists reported exclusively from the vantage point of the invading U.S. forces and relied disproportionately on military spokespeople and their Iraqi proxies. The graphic verbiage that had peppered the media landscape following the ambush and killing of the Blackwater men days earlier was now absent from the reporting on the civilian consequences of the assault. As battles continued to rage on and spread to the outskirts of Fallujah, New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman—totally avoiding mention of the humanitarian disaster—wrote that the fierce fighting “showed not only the intensity of the resistance but an acute willingness among insurgents to die.”37 [Emphasis added.] Coming alongside U.S. military claims that “90 to 95 percent” of Iraqis killed in Fallujah were combatants,38 such embedded reporting from the U.S. “paper of record” appeared almost indistinguishable from official U.S. military propaganda. “It’s their Super Bowl,” Maj. T. V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman, was quoted as saying in Gettleman’s story. “Falluja is the place to go if you want to kill Americans.”39