This is
the “Freedom and Democracy” that the Criminal George W. Bush Regime brought to
Iraq
US War Crimes in
Iraq: Fallujah Residents Starving, Murdered, Besieged by US Backed Government
Forces and ISIS
Global Research,
April 08, 2016
It is hard to
imagine that anything worse could befall Fallujah after the war crimes and
criminal assaults by the US military in 2004. At the time, one correspondent
wrote:“There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi
invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and
bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May
1940.” (1)
Seventy percent of
houses and shops were reported destroyed, with those still standing damaged.
Iraqi doctor, Ali Fadhil, described a city:
“ … completely
devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Fallujah
used to be a modern city, now there was nothing. We spent the day going through
the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn’t see a single building
that was functioning.”(City of Ghosts, The Guardian, January 11, 2005.)
Nicholas J. Davies,
author of “Blood on our Hands – the American Invasion and Destruction
of Iraq”, has written:
“The Fallujah
Compensation Committee reported in March 2005 that the assault destroyed 36,000
homes, 9,000 shops, 65 mosques, 60 schools, both train stations, one of the two
bridges, two power stations, three water treatment plants and the city’s entire
sanitation and telephone systems.”
Now, Human Rights
Watch has written a Report (2) indicating that near unbelievably, twelve years
on, all has deteriorated to the extent that: “Residents of the besieged city of
Fallujah are starving. Iraqi government forces should urgently allow aid to
enter the city, and the extremist group Islamic State, also known as ISIS,
which captured the city in early 2014, should allow civilians to leave.”
Fallujah is now
under siege by the US imposed Iraqi puppet government and ISIS – as people
demonstrate in thousands in protest at yet another American backed
administration which has brought nothing but misery to the population.
Incredibly US Vice President Joe Biden and Iranian Major-General Qassem
Soleimani have come together: “to make clear … that no attempt should be made
to unseat” the current Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi. (“US, Iran Keep Iraqi
PM in Place”, Reuters, 6 April 2016.)
“The people of
Fallujah are besieged by the government, trapped by ISIS, and are starving”,
states HRW Deputy Middle East Director, Joe Stork.
“Since government
forces recaptured nearby Ramadi, the capital of Anbar governorate, in late
December 2015, and the al-Jazira desert area north of Fallujah in March 2016,
they have cut off supply routes into the city, three Iraqi officials said. Tens
of thousands of civilians from an original population of more than 300,000
remain inside the city.”
HRW obtained a list
of one hundred and forty people, including young children, said to have died in
the last few months “from lack of food and medicine.” The names have been
withheld for fear that ISIS, which forbids the population making contact
outside the city “would punish the relatives of the dead.”
Residents are
reported to be eating bread made from flour from ground date stones and soup
made from grass. Food still available is sold at staggering prices. “A
50-kilogram sack of flour goes for US$750, and a bag of sugar for $500.” In
Baghdad, just seventy kilometres away: “ the same amount of flour costs $15 and
of sugar $40 … each day starving children arrive at the local hospital … most
foodstuffs are no longer available at any price … the hospital has run out of
baby food.”
The World Food
Programme has stated weakly that it is “concerned” about the food situation. In
the annals of shamefully pathetic UN responses to tragedies of enormity this
may be this 2016’s winner.
Sources told HRW
that both Iraqi government troops and the Popular Mobilization Force, one of
about forty militia forces under the Ministry of the Interior are preventing
food and essential goods from reaching the city.
Those trying to
leave the city are in danger of being murdered by ISIS. On 22nd March,
one man who went to one of their checkpoints saying he had to leave, he could
not take the situation any longer, was taken back into the city and executed.
In late February a
family trying to leave were also killed. On 30th March it was
reported that thirty five people trying to leave had also been executed.
Moreover:
“Government aircraft and artillery have carried out numerous attacks, which
Fallujah residents say have killed many civilians.”
Aircraft and
artillery supplied by the US.
“Neighbors reported
to one former resident that on November 27, 2015, bombings killed 12 people in
his neighborhood, including nine children.
“On August 13 (2015)
aerial bombs struck Fallujah’s children’s hospital, killing several people … A
medical source in the city, whose information Human Rights Watch could not
confirm, said that since January 2014, 5,769 combatants and civilians have been
injured and 3,455 killed, roughly one-fourth of them women and children.”
It seems it is
Iraq’s plight to be starved and bombed as a result of US-UK policies. Thirteen
years of the most draconian embargo ever administered by the UN, driven by the
US and UK, with the UK heading the Sanctions Committee, the 1991 bombing,
twelve subsequent years also of illegal US-UK bombing. Under Saddam there was a
rationing system, ironically, commended by the UN for its efficiency – although
hugely restricted by the UN for lack of imports. Since “liberation” Fallujah is
another symbol of the sheer Western driven wickedness and iniquity that has
befallen Iraq since 2003.
Perhaps it is time
Tony Blair – whose officials authored the dodgy dossiers that gave the excuse
for the illegal invasion – lived up to the farcical Global Legacy Award
presented to him by Save the Children in November 2014 and pitched up in
Fallujah with desperately needed aid from his £multi-million charity and from
his own £multi million pocket. It would be trivial amends, but it would be a
start.
Perhaps Save the
Children could also atone for awarding a man who many eminent legal minds argue
should be accounting for himself at the International Criminal Court in The
Hague by doing the same.
I feel a petition
coming on.
Notes:
- http://www.globalresearch.ca/fallujah-us-marines-further-allegations-of-war-crimes-surface/5366163
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/07/iraq-fallujah-siege-starving-population
The original source
of this article is Global Research
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
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