"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."
That was Fallujah in 2004. Bush and Petraeus are about to do the same to the slum of 2.5 million in Baghdad known as Sadr City. 1,000 civilians have already been slaughtered. Right now 75,000 children are trapped.
Welcome to the buzzkill. It's called Bush's War Crimes R Us, and it's the reason most of us have been so furious for all these years now.
They're about to do to Sadr City what they did to Fallujah, and why? Because they're still in power, because nobody has been able to stop them.
Aid groups: Sadr City devastated by fighting
Thousands are fleeing amid shortages of food, water and medical care, agency officials said.
By Bradley Brooks
Associated Press
BAGHDAD - Entire sections of Baghdad's Sadr City district have been left nearly abandoned by civilians fleeing a U.S.-led showdown with Shiite militias and seeking aid after facing shortages of food and medicine, humanitarian groups said yesterday.
The reports by the agencies, including the U.N. children's fund, added to the individual accounts of civilians pouring out of the Sadr City area as clashes intensify.
U.S. forces have increased their use of air power and armored patrols in an attempt to cripple Shiite militia influence in Sadr City, a slum of 2.5 million people that serves as the Baghdad base for the Mahdi Army, led by the anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The fighting started in late March, after the Iraqi government had begun a crackdown on militias and armed gangs in the southern city of Basra, including some groups the United States says have links to Iran.
Claire Hajaj, a UNICEF spokeswoman based in Jordan, said that up to 150,000 people - including 75,000 children - were isolated in sections of Sadr City "cordoned off by military forces."
And it's only just begun.
Iraq prepares for Baghdad exodus
By Clive Myrie
BBC News, Baghdad
The authorities in Baghdad say they are preparing for an exodus of thousands of people from eastern parts of the city.
(snip)
Two football stadiums are on stand-by to receive residents from two neighbourhoods in the Sadr City area.
(snip)
Iraqi army operations, backed by US ground and air support, have so far failed to overwhelm the Shia militiamen, who are still responding with roadside bombs, sniper fire, mortars and rockets.
The government has distributed leaflets in two key districts of Sadr City, warning people to leave.
The speculation is that government forces are preparing for a big push into eastern Baghdad to end the current fighting once and for all.
Sound familiar? It does to me. Sounds exactly like what they did to Fallujah. In Fallujah we sealed the place off, then proceeded to commit scores of war crimes, including deliberately targeting hospitals, using White Phosphorous (a banned chemical weapon), and mowing down families -- FAMILIES -- trying to escape by swimming across the river. I remember it as the first place I saw dogs eating human bodies. Our very own New Orleans was the second.
Here are a couple of the more palatable images from Fallujah, 2004:
Fallujah, 2004
Fallujah, 2004
I'll spare you the ones of the families murdered in their beds, or the dogs eating the bodies in the streets.
The words of Chris Floyd communicate the atrocities far more effectively than any photos:
One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors – and their patients, including women and children – were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as "propaganda centers," the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told the NY Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time – except for NBC's brief, heavily-edited, quickly-buried clip of the usual lone "bad apple" shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner – the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.
So while Americans saw stories of rugged "Marlboro Men" winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.
Remember that? Most people don't, because most people never heard about it in the first place.
Now Floyd fears that Bush and Petraeus are about to do the same to Sadr City:
George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make a new Fallujah in Sadr City, home to two million Shiites in Baghdad. Thousands of people are already fleeing the area before the full-scale slaughter and destruction begin. As in Fallujah, the multitudes who cannot escape will be trapped in a "free fire zone", subjected to ruthless bombardment and ground assault. Thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of innocent civilians stand in the shadow of imminent death.
The assault is part of the run-up to the coming attack on Iran -- an attempt to secure the rear of that new front by destroying Iraq's Shiite nationalist forces. It is also part of an on-going effort to eliminate the strongest rival to the Shiite extremists that Bush has installed in office in Iraq, before the conquered land's fall elections.
The preliminary assault on Sadr City has already begun, of course. As the BBC notes, in the last seven weeks around 1,000 people -- most of them civilians -- have already been killed by the Bush-Petraeus "surge" into the area. Petraeus is frantically building high-walled ghettos in Sadr City, slicing neighborhoods in half, sundering families, destroying communities and livelihoods. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is circulating leaflets in Sadr City districts, warning the people to leave -- or else.
When I check Google News, every day there is a spot reserved for whatever is "happening" on American idol. That is NEWS in America.
I've seen nothing about this. There is not spot reserved for the Iraq War on Google News.
I have to end this with yet another quote from Floyd:
There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate – the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: they have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas.
We're behind an Iron Curtain of mass media. The only holes through which you can peek through are right here, on the Internet. Meanwhile, our Windows To Our World, which we happily pay this Infoglomerate for the privilege of having in our homes, serves up a mass opiate of mind-numbing spooge. It might as well be 24-hour a day images of the Yule Log they show at Christmas.
Then again there's a reason people take opiates. They can come in handy when you feel utterly powerless to stop pain. And our nation has failed, in a disastrous way, to stop an endless war crime of our own creation, and failed to bring anyone guilty for it to justice.