Even as the U.S. media moves on to coverage of insurgent activities in Mosul and Baghdad, reports are coming out that suggest that Fallujah is not even nominally under the control of the U.S. military. This morning it was reported that the Iraqi Red Crescent is
pulling out of Fallujah, after waiting weeks to get in to deliver humanitarian assistance, due to unsafe conditions:
"Multinational forces asked the IRC to withdraw from Fallujah for security reasons and until further notice," the organisation's spokeswoman Ferdus Al Ibadi told AFP.
Ms Ibadi, speaking in Baghdad, had said earlier that the agency left of its own free will, but she said she was only informed after the IRC left the city that it had been told to do so by US marines.
The Asia Times Online published an interesting article on December 2nd titled From Guernica to Fallujah (a comparison made right here a week earlier by Avila). This article confirms that the U.S. does not control the city:
Fallujah has been reduced to rubble, and thousands of civilians have died. But Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad confirm that according to residents, the southern - and larger - part of Fallujah is still controlled by the resistance; the Americans control only the north and some eastern spots. Small groups made up of five to 20 mujahideen still conduct hit-and-run attacks. More than 15,000 refugee families may be living in sordid makeshift shelters around Fallujah - not to mention the upwards of 200,000 residents who escaped the city before it was leveled.
Talking to al-Jazeera television network this past weekend, Sheikh Abd as-Salam al-Kubaysi, chief of the public relations department of the powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) confirmed that "until now, more than half of Fallujah is in the hands of the resistance". Al-Kubaysi added that "the Americans are entrenched in Fallujah but cannot get out and on to any street or alley in more than half the city, whether that be in Jolan, Shuhada or the industrial zone, or Nazal, or in many places".
The article also opens with this quote:
"It's difficult to believe that in this day and age, when people are blogging, emailing and communicating at the speed of light, a whole city is being destroyed and genocide is being committed - and the whole world is aware and silent. Darfur, Americans? Take a look at what you've done in Fallujah."
- Female Iraqi blogger Riverbend
It goes on to catalogue the failures of the U.S. in the Fallujah offensive including:
- A failure to comprehend the scope of the insurgency, believing the armed combatants to represent the "bulk of the movement"
- The use of "massive firepower" despite warnings from the Pentagon that such a tactic would result in collateral damage and that this would strengthen the insurgency by "driving the locals into the arms of the insurgents"
- A failure to understand the cultural environment responsible for the hostility felt by Sunnis for the U.S. forces
And finally:
What Americans and US corporate media seem incapable of understanding is that counterinsurgency operations - however massive and deadly - simply are not enough to break the back of wars of national liberation. The Fallujah offensive was a typical demonstration of the power of which Washington "chicken hawks" are fond. But if they had read their Che Guevara (Episodes in the Cuban Revolutionary War) and their General Vo Nguyen Giap (Writings) of the Vietnam resistance correctly, they would have seen that instilling fear and terror is useless as a strategy of capturing hearts and minds. No wonder the majority of Sunnis (the "water") keep supporting the resistance (the "fish") with weapons, cash and shelter, and are inclined to boycott the elections.
Much more than grieve over the dead and the rubble to which Fallujah was reduced, they took note of two very important facts. Not a single government agency, be it American or Iraqi, offered any kind of assistance to the 200,000-plus residents who in a flash were turned into refugees: instead they turned off water and electricity in the city. And the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was nowhere to be seen - as well as any other representative of the "international community". The real story of what happened to Fallujah is being told by these 200,000-plus new refugees, and a few lucky hundreds who managed to escape during the battle. They are the Picassos who will paint the new Guernica for future historians.
Thanks to RichM for inspiring my diary title :)