Battle for Fallujah Intensifies

Battle for Fallujah Intensifies

Whatever the short-term safety of those living stateside bodies are piling up in Iraq. Already "scores of civilians have been killed or injured" in Fallujah since the US assault began on Monday. Early figures put the U.S. dead at 10 soldiers. The object of the massive military invasion is now being seriously questioned. "It appears that many of the insurgents who had been based in Fallujah slipped out of the city and moved to other parts of Iraq before the offensive," the London Independent is reporting. The British Guardianâ??s Sami Ramadani paints a depressing picture of Fallujah, once a center of resistance to Saddam Hussein, and now being made an example of in another occupation "pacification" program.


Fallujans defied Saddam's rule during his last years in power. Falluja - known as the city of a thousand mosques - attracted Saddam's wrath in 1998 when its imams refused to hail the tyrant in their Friday sermons. Many were imprisoned, and the city punished as a result.

On April 28 2003 US soldiers opened fire on parents and children demonstrating against the continued military occupation of their primary school - killing 18 of them in cold blood and injuring about 60 others. Until the killing of those demonstrators, not a single bullet had been fired at US soldiers in Falluja or any of the cities north of Baghdad. But, remorselessly, little-known Falluja became a world-renowned centre of defiance, where a poor and poorly armed people has courageously faced the military wing of the new empire ;) .

Blair once again misled parliament this week by branding the resistance in Falluja as Zarqawi-style terrorists out to destroy the prospects for democracy. It was Blair and Bush who last year rejected the calls for early free and fair elections from those who rejected the occupation, including Ayatollah Sistani, Moqtada al-Sadr, the resistance and the widely supported Iraqi National Foundation Congress. Bush and Blair are terrified of the Iraqi people voting for anti-occupation leaders. They will accept nothing short of the legitimisation, through sham elections supervised by the occupation authorities, of an Allawi-style puppet regime.



Peace