![]() In late 2006, roughly speaking, months before George W. ![]() planners decided to throw their weight behind the Awakening Movement, it was already something of a done deal. It was a seat-of-the-pants, spur-of-the-moment quick fix. This wasn't a careful, strategically laid, made-in-the-USA plan. Aifan's good fortune was this: He was the right sheik in the right place at the right time when the Americans, desperate over their failures in Iraq, decided to throw their support behind the reconstitution of a tribal elite in the province where the Sunni insurgency raged with particular fierceness from 2004-2006.ĭon't misunderstand. Today, 34-year-old Sheik Aifan may be the richest man in town, thanks to his alliance of self-interest with the U.S. This is strikingly evident in Falluja, once known as the city of resistance, since the fiercest fighting of the American occupation years took place there. Thanks to the Awakening movement that began forming in 2006 in al-Anbar Province, then the hotbed of the Sunni insurgency-into which American occupation forces quickly poured significant amounts of money, arms and other kinds of support-violence across most of that province is now at an all-time low. The BMW belonged to Sheik Aifan Sadun, head of the Awakening Council of Falluja. To say that my newest mode of transportation was an upgrade that left me a bit disoriented would be (mildly put) an understatement. The crucial book on Iraq for antiwar activists is Anthony Arnove's Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, published in an updated paperback edition with a foreword by Howard Zinn. public the idea of an endless "war on terror." occupation of Iraq and demolishes the myths used to sell the U.S. Michael Schwartz's book War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context provides a thorough analysis of the U.S. Juan Cole's blog Informed Comment is a valuable source of information and analysis. His book Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq describes his time in Iraq reporting the other side of the story.įor daily news updates and analysis of Iraq, see the Electronic Iraq Web site. F-16s dropped bombs inside Falluja while we wound our way toward it through rural farmlands, we arrived to find its streets completely empty, save for mujahideen checkpoints.ĭahr Jamail's reports from Iraq and other writings on the Middle East can be found at Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches Web site. ![]() ![]() We had made our way into the city, then under siege, on a rickety bus carrying humanitarian aid supplies. One of the last times I had been driven through Falluja-in April 2004-I was with a small group of journalists and activists. In fact, for much of my "tour" of Falluja, I was inside a heavily armored, custom-built, $420,000 BMW, with all the accessories needed in 21st century Iraq, including a liquor compartment and bulletproof windows. Given the countless still-bullet-pocked walls of restaurants, stores and homes, it is impossible to view the city from any vantage point, or look in any direction, without observing signs of those sieges.Įverything in Falluja, and everyone there, has been touched to the core by the experience, but not everyone is experiencing the aftermath of the city's devastation in the same way. The trauma from the 2004 attacks remains visible everywhere. attacks, Falluja shows few signs of "reconstruction" (Dahr Jamail) military personnel have scanned your retinas and taken your fingerprints.įour years after devastating U.S. Such a card can only be obtained after U.S. How could it be otherwise, given the amount of effort that went into its destruction and not, subsequently, into rebuilding it? It's a place where a resident must still carry around a U.S.-issued personal biometric ID card, which must also be shown any time you enter or exit the city if you are local. Unemployment is rampant here, the infrastructure remains largely in ruins, and tens of thousands of residents who fled in 2004 are still refugees. As one of the few visible signs of reconstruction in the city, that street-largely destroyed during the November 2004 siege-is slowly being torn up in order to be repaved. bombs, artillery or mortar fire back then still line Falluja's main street, or rather, what's left of it. The shells of buildings pulverized by U.S. military assaults in April, and again in November 2004, and more than four years later, in the "new Iraq," the city continues to languish. At least 70 percent of that city's structures were destroyed during massive U.S. DRIVING THROUGH Falluja, once the most rebellious Sunni city in this country, I saw little evidence of any kind of reconstruction underway.
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