( Report reproduced from Sunday times, 18th April 2004)
“Since the US offensive began, Jo Wilding has been one of the few Westerners who has braved the bullets to deliver medical supplies to the city (of Fallujah). Here she tells her disturbing tale of the bloody horror taking place there. ”
Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east of Fallujah. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that is not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past vehicles full of people with few possessions heading the other way.
Our bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason that I am on the bus is that a journalist I know turned up at my door telling me things were desperate in Fallujah. He had been bringing out children with their limbs blown off.
The US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the US military check-point on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.
“armed groups (Mujaahideen )control the roads we would travel on.”
The journalist said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, Westerners, to get through the US checkpoints. The rest of t he way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we would travel on.
We would take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave.
“Air strikes de stroyed the town's main hospital. ”
We arrive in one piece. We pile the stuff in the corridor and the boxes are torn open straight away; the blankets most welcomed. It is not a hospital at all but a clinic, a private doctor's surgery treating people for free since air strikes destroyed the town's main hospital. Another has been improvised in a car garage. There is no anaesthetic. The blood bags are in a drinks fridge and the doctors warm them up under the hot tap in an unhygienic toilet.
Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces . Ummi , mother, one cries. I hold her until Maki, acting director of the clinic, brings me to a bed where a child of about 10 is lying with a bullet wound to the head.. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper, they said, hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Fallujah.
The lights go out, the fan stops and in the sudden quiet someone holds up the flame of a cigarette lighter for the doctor to carry on operating. The electricity has been cut off for days and when the generator runs out of petrol, they just have to manage until it comes back on. Dave who is with me quickly donates his torch. “Come”, says Maki and ushers me alone into a room where an old woman has just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched up. Another wound in her leg is being dressed, the bed under her foot soaked with blood, a white flag still clutched in her hand and the same story: “I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I was hit by a US sniper.”
Some of the town is held by US Marines, other parts by local fighters. These people's homes are in the U S- controlled area a nd they are adamant that the shooters were US Marines.
“Bodies are lying in the streets…”
Snipers are causing not just carnage but also the paralysis of the ambulance and evacuating services. The biggest hospital after the main one was bombed is in US territory and cut off from the clinic by snipers. The ambulance has been repaired four times after bullet damage. Bodies are lying in the streets because no one can go to collect them without being shot.
Some said we were mad to come to Iraq; quite a few said we were completely insane to come to Fallujah, and now there are people telling me that getting in the back of the pick up to go past the snipers and fetch sick and injured people is the craziest thing they have seen. I know, though, that if we don't, no one will. One man is holding a white flag with a red crescent on it; I don't know his name. The men we pass (i.e.the Mujaahideen) wave us on when the driver ex-plains where we are going. The silence is ferocious in the noman's land between the pick-up at the edge of the Mujahedin territory, which has just gone from our sight around the last corner and the Marines' line beyond the next wall; no birds, no music , no indication that anyone is still living until a gate opens opposite and a woman comes out and points.
We edge along to a hole in the wall where we can see a car. Spent mortar shells around it. The feet are visible, crossed in the gutter. I think he is dead already. The snipers are visible too, two of them on the corner of the building. I think they can't see us so we need to let them know we are there. “Hello”, I bellow at the top of my voice. “Can you hear me?” They must. They are about 30m from us, maybe less, and it's so still you could hear the flies buzzing 50 paces. I repeat myself a few times, still without reply, so I decide to explain myself a bit more.
“We are a medical team. We want to remove this wounded man. Is it OK for us to come out and get him? Can you give us a signal that it's OK?” I am sure they can hear me but they are still not responding. Maybe they didn't understand it all, so I say it all again. Dave yells too in his US accent. I yell again. Finally I think I hear a shout back. Not sure, I call again. “Hello”. “Yeah. ” “Can we come out and get him?” “Yeah. ” Slowly, our hands up, we go out. The black cloud that rises to greet us carries with it a hot, sour smell. Solidified, his legs are heavy. I leave them to Rana and Dave, our guide lifting under his hips. A Kalashnikov is attached by sticky blood to his hair and hand and we don't want it with us so I put my foot on it as I pick up his back. We heave him into the pick - up, the way into the clinic clears in front of them, straight up the ramp into the makeshift morgue. We wash the blood off our hands and get in the ambulance.
There are people trapped in the other hospital who need to go to Baghdad. Siren screaming, lights flashing, we huddle on the floor of the ambulance, passports and ID cards held out the windows. We pack it with people, one with his chest taped together and a drip, one on a stretcher, legs jerking violently so I have to hold them down.
The hospital is better able to treat patients than the clinic but has not got enough of anything to sort them out properly and the only way to get them to Baghdad is on our bus, which means they have to go to the clinic. We are crammed on the floor of the ambulance in case it's shot at. Nisareen, a female doctor about my age, can't stop a few tears. At the clinic, a doctor rushes out to meet me: “Can you go to fetch a lady? She is pregnant and she is delivering the baby soon. ”
Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him, and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window. We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US Marine uniforms on the corners of the building. Several shots come. We duck. I can see tiny re d lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some are hitting the ambulance. I start singing. What else do you do when some-one's shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.
I am outraged. We are trying to get to a woman who is giving birth without medical attention, without electricity in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance. Azzam gets the ambulance into reverse, another tyre bursting as we go over the ridge in the centre of the road, the shots still coming as we flee around the corner. The wheels are scraping, burst rubber burning on the road.
The men run for a stretcher as we arrive back at the clinic and I shake my head. They spot the new bullet holes and run t o see if we are OK.
“Is there any other way to get to her?” I want to know. There is no other way. The woman is still at home in the dark giving birth alone. We can't go out again. For one thing there is no ambulance and besides, it's dark now and that means our foreign faces can't pr otect the people we pick up.
Maki is the acting director of the clinic. He says he hated Saddam but now he hates the Americans more. The sky starts exploding somewhere beyond the building opposite. Minutes later a car roars up to the clinic. I can hear him screaming before I can see that there is no skin left on his body. He is burnt from head to foot. For sure there is nothing they can do. He will die of dehydration within a few days.
Another man is pulled from the car onto a stretcher. Cluster bombs, they say………“The dead we cannot help,” Jassim said. “I must worry about the injured.”
We go again, Dave, Rana and I, this time in a pick-up. There are some sick people close to the Marines' lines who need evacuating. No one dares come out of their houses because the Marines are on top of the buildings shooting at anything that moves. Saad fetches us a white flag and tells us not to worry. He has checked and secured the road, no Mujahedin will fire at us; this 1 year old child, his A K-47 almost as tall as he is.
We shout again to the soldiers, hold up the flag with a red crescent sprayed onto it. Two come down from the building and Rana mutters : “Allahu Akbar. Please nobody take a shot at them. ”
We jump down and tell them we need to get some sick people from the houses and they want Rana to go and bring out the family from the house whose roof they are on. Thirteen women and children are still inside, in one room without food and water for the last 24 hours. “We're going to be going through soon, clearing the houses,” the senior one says.
“What does that mean, clearing the houses?” “Going into everyone searching for weapons.”
He is checking his watch, can't tell me what will start when, of course, but there are going to be air strikes in support. “If you're going to do this you have to do it soon.”
First we go down the street we were sent to. There is a man, face down, a small round red stain on his back. Again the flies have got there first. As we reach to roll him on the stretcher, Dave's hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out.
There is no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He w as unarmed. He just went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the tradition of treating the body immediately.
We cover the face, carry him to the pick-up. There is nothing to cover his body with. The sick woman is helped out of the house, the little girls around her hugging cloth bags to their bodies, whispering : “Baba, baba, ” Daddy. Shaking, they let us go first, hands up, around the corner, then we usher them to the cab of the pick-up, shielding their heads so they can't see him, the cuddly fat man stiff in the back.
The people seem to pour out of the houses now in the hope we can escort them safely out of the line of fire: kids, women , men, anxiously asking us when they can all go, or only the women and children. We go to ask. The young Marine tells us that men of fighting age can't leave.
“What's fighting age?” I want to know. He contemplates. “Anything under 45. No lower limit.” The pick-up gets back and we shovel as many onto it as we can. The bus is going to leave, taking the injured people back to Baghdad , the man with the burns, a woman who was shot in the jaw and shoulder by a sniper, several others. ……..The way back is tense, people escaping in anything, even piled on the trailer of a tractor, lines of cars and pick - ups and buses ferrying people to the dubious sanctuary of Baghdad, men in vehicles queuing to get back into the city having brought their families to safety, either to fight or to help evacuate more people.
We stop in Abu Ghraib and swop seats, foreigners in the front, Iraqis less visible, head-scarves off so we look more Western. ……
On satellite television, the news says the ceasefire is holding and President George W. Bush says to the troops: “I know what we're doing in Iraq is right.”
Shooting unarmed men in the back outside their family home is right? Shooting grandmothers with white flags is right? Shooting at women and children who are fleeing their homes is right? Firing at ambulances is right?
Well, I know too now. I know what it looks like when you brutalise people so much that they have nothing left to lose. I know what it looks like when an operation is done without anaesthetic because the hospitals are destroyed or under sniper fire.
I know what it looks like when tracer bullets are passing your head, even though you are in anambulance. I know what it looks like when a man's chest is no longer inside him, and know what it looks like when his wife and children pour out of his house.
It's a crime and a disgrace to us all.”
This commentary is adequate to portray the brutality of America.
