Falluja children pay price of US blitz on foreign guerrillas

Sure enough, at about 9pm, the first cars began to converge on the cluster of houses that constituted the compound of Aifan Faza’a Shneiter, the head of a clan in the village of Zoba, 10 miles south of Falluja. One after another, cars carrying fighters whose origins ranged from Saudi Arabia to Sudan came to a halt outside the Shneiters’ main residence.

It was an hour later, when everyone was inside, that the bombardment began. First came a pounding from warplanes that punched holes in roofs and craters in floors, killing many of the militants outright. Then the helicopters swooped low, almost touching the tops of the trees as they spewed gunfire at those who fled on foot for the shelter of ditches or tried to make getaways by car.

The American military said in a statement later that about 60 fighters had been killed in “a successful precision strike on a confirmed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terrorist meeting site”.

That many militants had died was beyond doubt. It was equally obvious from the casualties at Falluja general hospital that women and children had also been killed and injured.

In one ward, Fatima Taha Shneiter, 8, lay on a bed, her hair and clothes covered in mud. A large area of flesh below her right knee was missing and the bone protruded. She moaned, repeating the words, “There is no Allah but Allah,” over and over again.

“I was running away with my mother to hide from the bombing and they hit us,” she cried. “A man grabbed me and my brother and sister and threw us into the little spring to protect us, and the helicopters hit us then. The man protected us but he died and all of us were injured.”

She did not yet know that much of her extended family had been wiped out, including her father, Taha Shneiter, and at least three of her uncles. Her mother, Jinan, and sister Shaimaa, 6, were in a coma. Only her youngest brother, Mohamed, 4, had escaped injury.

The anger of Taher Abdul Hussein, a relative who drove her to hospital, was directed equally against US forces and Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister. “To Allawi we say, ‘How can you claim to love Iraqis and to represent the Iraqi people and their interests, and then permit the Americans to do this?”

Such comments reflect the anguish of many of Falluja’s inhabitants over the large number of civilians who have been caught up in US operations against supporters of Zarqawi since last spring.

It is five months since US marines withdrew from the city after a bloody three-week siege and handed power to a group of local Iraqi officers known as the Falluja brigade.

The brigade never established control and was disbanded last week by Allawi, who said it had failed to take effective action against insurgents flooding into the city and had even helped them to carry out some of their attacks.

During two rare visits to Falluja made by The Sunday Times last week, something akin to normal life appeared to have returned to parts of the city centre, where traffic police had resumed patrols. However, masked insurgents controlled the entrances to the city, and the outlying areas where the fiercest fighting raged in the spring were evidently in the hands of foreign fighters.

In one hospital a discreet extension had been added for wounded Arab fighters. Nine of them — including Saudis, Syrians and Egyptians — lay there on Friday, safe from scrutiny.

Relations between al-Zarqawi’s foreign supporters — who also include Yemenis and north Africans — and the people of Falluja have become increasingly fraught. The fighters have outraged the locals with killings and kidnappings, and by simply helping themselves to property.

“We do not refer to them as mujaheddin,” said a senior commander in the rival Iraqi resistance. “The mujaheddin are the local fighters who fought for their city in April, and then the Arabs came in and their nickname here is the mujaherrin (the conceited).”

One local man, Hamid Hamed, described how he and his father had been kidnapped at a checkpoint manned by masked men. They ended up with foreign fighters who accused the father of collaborating with the Americans.

Both men were beaten with pistol butts. “As they beat me up they kept on saying, ‘Your father is a spy’,” he said.

After some bargaining, Hamed was freed last Thursday in return for some communications equipment owned by local Iraqi insurgents. His father is still being held.

Another man said that when he returned home one day he found several foreign fighters had moved in. They refused to leave, insisting they had every right to be there, and scolded him for his “un-Islamic spirit” and ingratitude for their efforts on his country’s behalf.

Abu Sayyaf, a local insurgent, cited an occasion a few weeks ago when he urged a Saudi fighter about to launch a rocket-propelled grenade near his home not to do so for fear of provoking a counterattack on a residential area. The Saudi told him to mind his own business.

“We have told them to go and fire from the front lines and not to use the residential areas,” he said. “But they just ignore us and carry on arguing they are here for us and to help us liberate our country.”

Some local fighters who have gone over to al-Zarqawi’s group have been appalled by what they found. Abu Muawiyah, a senior Iraqi resistance commander in Baghdad, said he had spent some time with al-Zarqawi but left because he disagreed with the Jordanian’s policy of killing and maiming Iraqis. While al-Zarqawi sees the Iraqi police and army as legitimate targets, members of the so-called National Resistance consider this unacceptable — not least because many of the forces ’ members act as their informants.

“There are people in all these institutions who work with the resistance secretly and are of great help to us,” said Abu Muawiyah. “Killing them is not justifiable in Islam as they are Iraqis and Muslims.”

The resistance also opposes the beheading of hostages, which they claim is prohibited by Islam, and argues for a distinction to be made between coalition forces and foreign civilians.

There is growing concern that Allawi will lose patience with Falluja and authorise American forces to storm the city, fighting from street to street to eradicate the foreign terrorists. The most anxious talk is of Falluja facing its own “black September”, a repetition of the events of September 1970 when King Hussein of Jordan drove out thousands of fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organisation, along with large numbers of civilians.

To the alarm of Abu Muawiyah, many locals are flocking to support al-Zarqawi. “A lot of people want to resist the occupation,” he said. “Al-Zarqawi has vast amounts of money and is able to provide them with the weapons to carry out their attacks.”

Given the breakdown of security in Falluja and its refusal to allow Iraqi police to take charge of law and order, it did not surprise many inhabitants when Allawi hinted last week that he would push ahead with national elections in January with or without their participation. But there are doubts about whether it will be possible to hold elections in other parts of Iraq after 300 lives were lost in one of the worst weeks of violence this year.

Much of the “Sunni triangle” to the north and west of Baghdad — including the towns of Ramadi, Mahmudiya, Latifiya, Samaraa and Baquba — is out of control, as is a large area of Baghdad, where insurgents have increased attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi police and National Guard alike.

Yesterday a suicide bomber struck in Kirkuk, 155 miles north of Baghdad, killing 23 people waiting outside the regional headquarters of the Iraqi National Guard. Most of the victims were waiting to sign up. Three American soldiers were injured in a separate incident when a car bomb exploded near Baghdad’s airport.

The Kirkuk bombing was similar to an attack near a police station in Baghdad last week that killed 47 people, many of whom were queuing to join the Iraqi police.

Recent pessimism in Washington over the short-term prospects for Iraq was laid bare by the leaking of an intelligence report which suggested that President George W Bush had been warned that the country could descend into civil war.

Contradicting the White House’s upbeat assessment that progress was being made in Iraq, the report — prepared under George Tenet, who stepped down as CIA director in July — warned of a “worst-case” scenario in which civil war would break out within a year. In the “best case”, Iraq would enjoy only “tenuous” stability in economic, political and security terms.

Bush’s spokesman emphasised that the CIA’s role was to look at different scenarios, and the administration has insisted that despite all the violence “freedom is on the march”.

For some parts of the country, perhaps; but it did not seem that way last week in Falluja.

Additional reporting: Ali Rifat