Iran behind ongoing slaughter of Sunni Muslims in Fallujah-The City of Mosques in Iraq

-Latheef Farook-

Implementing Iranian agenda, American installed Shiite minority government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Al Abadi, began shelling the Sunni majority  Fallujah known as  the city of minarets, 69 kilometres from Baghdad.

It is common knowledge that ever since the US led invasion of Iraq when a Shiite minority government was installed in Baghdad, to pit the Shiites and Sunnis against each other, Iran has the final word in Baghdad.

Today’s  Shiite war on Sunnis was undertaken since 22 May 2016 under the guise of fighting IS forces -created by US, trained by Israel and funded by Saudi. The current carnage was backed by aerial support from the U.S led  war coalition and paramilitary forces   made up of Shiite militias-Iraqi government troops.   

Hundreds of thousands of people including children have been trapped with their families inside the city and face a dire humanitarian situation. In an opinion piece under the headline-Fallujah: Iranian revenge amid American silence”  columnist  Abdi-Al-Wahhab Badr-Khan had this  to state in  the  AlKhaleejOnline on 30 May 2016.

“Three leaders of the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces appeared on television and issued threats against Fallujah, rather than Daesh. The threats, which do not distinguish between Daesh and the people of Fallujah, are reminiscent of the events that began in late 2003.”

According to another report  attacks on  “Fallujah  are under the direct command of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of Iranian forces in Iraq and Syria, who is operating from a field command center”.  The US air force is helping Soleimani’s attempt to capture Fallujah. The American decision to support Soleimani’s operation shows the central role played by Iran in the wars carried out by the US and Russia in the Middle East.

This was the second major attack on Fallujah. The first barbarity was during the Holy month of Ramadhan in November 2003 when   war criminal George Bush bombed and incinerated Fallujah where he roasted people with poisonous gas and chemical weapons.

 The savagery unleashed was unprecedented. American forces dropped cluster bombs and used phosphorous weapons that caused severe burns in the military’s most intense urban fighting since the days of Vietnam. Within ten days Fallujah has been laid waste, a hell on earth of shattered bodies and destroyed buildings while the city entered history as the place where US imperialism carried out a crime of immense proportions. The head of Turkey’s Parliamentary Human Rights Committee said this genocide surpassed those of Pharaoh, Hitler and Mussolini.

Families fleeing Fallujah   were blocked by American soldiers who forced them back to their homes and slaughtered. Those who managed to survive were deprived of electricity, water, food and medical aid, while the injured were left to die. American soldiers on house to house patrols, kicked opened doors, and grabbed men in the presence of petrified, screaming and starving women and children trapped inside their houses. Most of the abducted were never seen again.

An eyewitness account stated that US forces used artillery barrages, air strikes with 2,000-pound bombs and air-to-surface missiles together with volleys of tank fire. Homes, apartment buildings and nearly half of the city’s 120 mosques have been destroyed or severely damaged. Human corpses, bloated and rotting, littering the streets where they fell were gnawed at by starving dogs while parents were forced to watch their wounded children die and then bury their bodies in their gardens. 

Later reports emerged of the US military using banned napalm, poison gas and other outlawed weapons to kill innocent civilians. Hundreds of “melted” bodies proved that the napalm gas had been used. Residents said “Americans used everything – tanks, artillery, infantry, poisonous gas and other non-conventional weapons to raze Fallujah to the ground.  

A year later, in November 2005, there emerged many reports including a documentary entitled “Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre”, together with hideous photographs, videos and interviews providing clear evidence and vivid descriptions of how the American troops used chemical weapons, poisonous gas and incendiary bombs, a new and improved form of napalm, in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention.

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohammad Tareq, interviewed for the documentary, said: “A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact”.

Citing a doctor who survived the attack, Amnesty International stated that twenty Iraqi medical employees and scores of civilians were killed when a US missile hit a medical clinic while a nine-year-old bled to death after he was hit in his stomach. His parents buried him in their house garden because they were not able to take him to the hospital with the fear of the killings. Within days, macabre accounts of killing of civilians began to emerge, and doctors reported that patients were forced out by the Americans who even took away a doctor while operating on a patient who was left to die.

Recalling the many US atrocities, one Iraqi who escaped from the carnage said he watched US soldiers roll over wounded people in the street with tanks so many times, and they often used tanks to pull bodies to the soccer stadium to be buried. There were dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of American snipers. They dropped some of the bodies into the Euphrates River. People who attempted to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege were shot by American soldiers from the shore and these included civilians, including an elderly woman, who were holding white flags or white clothes over their heads to indicate they were not fighters. US troops machine-gunned an entire family of five to death when they tried to escape the fighting by swimming across the Euphrates River and they even killed the wounded. In another incident, resembling the Zionist crimes in Palestine, American troops asked people to come to a mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and all those went there carrying white flags were killed.”

Refugees, moved to the comparative safety of camps, said they lived like dogs and the kids didn’t have food or clothes. Those who managed to reach refugee camps told harrowing stories of being caught in the crossfire were harassed and threatened by US troops and their Iraqi stooges.

Summing up George Bush’s savagery, a Western reporter observed as follows: “some districts reeked from the sickening odour of rotting flesh, a stench too powerful to be swept away by a brisk breeze coming in from the sandy plain surrounding the city forty miles west of Baghdad. A week of ground combat by US and Iraqi surrogates, supported by tanks and attack helicopters, added to the destruction in a city where the homes and businesses for about 300,000 people are packed into an area, a little less than two miles wide and a little more than two miles long...cats and dogs scamper along streets littered with bricks, broken glass, toppled light poles, downed power lines, twisted traffic barriers and spent cartridges. Walls are full of bullet holes. US troops have blown holes in walls and knocked down doors to search homes and shops. Dead Iraqis still lay out in the open’.

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 and the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940. All the talk about precision bombing in Iraq is dust thrown in the public’s eyes.

One report asked ‘what have the people of Fallujah and the rest of Iraq done to deserve such homicidal cruelty? What could conceivably justify the US military killing Iraqis for the “crime” of living in their own country?’ It’s difficult to believe that in this day and age, when people are e-mailing and communicating at the speed of light, a whole city is being destroyed and genocide is being committed - and the whole world is aware and silent. The Fallujah offensive virtually disappeared from the news cycle within weeks. But history - if written by Iraqis - may well enshrine it as the new Guernica.

Here in Sri Lanka too, by and large, people are ignorant of these atrocities. Like in the rest of the world herein the island too the media is not interested in highlighting these war crimes and educate the people in the way they always highlight Hitler’s crime.

Why? Perhaps media is ignorant, indifferent to Muslim sufferings or sold its souls to war criminals for petty benefits? Ends