US snipers shoot anything that moves

[UpInArms]

http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/04/18/news/world/world01.asp

The Iraqi city of Fallujah has been besieged by the US military since four Americans were killed there and their bodies mutilated. Since the US offensive began, JO WILDING has been one of the few Westerners who has braved the bullets to deliver medical supplies to the city. Here she tells her disturbing tale of the bloody horror taking place there.

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east of Fallujah. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that is not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past vehicles full of people with few possessions heading the other way.

Our bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I am on the bus is that a journalist I know turned up at my door telling me things were desperate in Fallujah. He had been bringing out children with their limbs blown off.

The US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.

...more...

[Rationality]

1. Sounds like Israel

Checkpoints, curfews, natives performing ghastly attacks against the labeled occupiers... I seriously hope we change our approach if we're going to continue the occupation, because from what I read of this, we're looking at our own version of the Israel/Palestinian conflict starting up.

[amber dog democrat]

2. Naturally we are looking for payback.

Where are we now? 690 American military lost so far?
Is there honestly an end in sight?

And why are we so surprised at the sabotages and ambushes?

I don't care what the Chimp administration thinks about comparing this quagmire to V ietham. In mind this is too much Vietnam...say about 1965.

If we screw this up we will be 20 years trying to live down bad policy, bad leadership, just plain bad...

Pardnen the rant. I am NOT ok with snipers shooting everything that moves even if we are in an US vs Them situation.

[Thor_MN]

16. "US vs Them".... *'s foreign strategy....

.

[demoman123]

3. The paradox of force

The harder the US comes down on the Iraqis, the more enemies it creates.

[demdave]

4. this 11-year-old child, his AK-47 almost as tall as he is.

Funny how this line is in all of the "independent" reports of the atrocities.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

8. What are you implying? That all independent reports

are somehow managed?

[demdave]

12. No, that a single article is being rewritten and reposted on the net.

Read a few of the accounts I linked to below and tell me you don't see remarkable similarities.

[UpInArms]

9. demdave - have you read any

of the other things that Jo Wilding has written?

you can go here:

http://www.bristolfoe.org.uk/wildfire/iraq/

information will open your eyes.

[demdave]

10. I guess she wrote this also......under the name of Helen Williams

We also met another small boy, he was an 11 year old mujahadeen fighter, masked by his yeshmack and holding his AK47 - the gun was almost as tall as him.

http://www.newswales.co.uk/?section=Politics&F=1&id=6831
And this.....under the name of Dahr Jamail


On the way, we passed groups of mujahedeen at their posts, among them defiant armed boys as young as 11.

http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18414

and this...under the name Rahul Mahajan


Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov)


This is one very busy 11 year old.

[anarchy1999]

13. DemDave, there may be a rather simple explanation.

If I am not mistaken, I believe that all four of these people were on same humanitarian excursion into Fallujah. Their reports are each seperate but similar. When they got to Fallujah they each went different ways. Jo was with ambulance.

(I know for a fact that Jo, Dahr and Rahul were together that day)

Each one of them are to be respected.

[NMDemDist2]

5. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.


O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

[UpInArms]

6. thank you for that AZDemDist6

all I can do is :cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry:

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

7. We bombed the hospital? The hospital? What kind of war is this?

This is even more horrific than VietNam, without a doubt. I have never heard of a US Marine refusing treatment of injured civilians before, much less intentionally disregarding Red Cross/Cresent protections and shooting people with white flags.

How will these guys deal with this kind of stress?

This is terrible.

[bemildred]

11. LA Times had a sniper story today.

You can find it here.

This one bit was interesting:

A shaky truce exists between the Marines who surround the city and the
fighters within the circle. But the cease-fire allows the Marines to carry out
defensive operations within the city, which they define as, among other things,
allowing fire on insurgents who display weapons, break the curfew or move
their forces toward U.S. troops.

[Skittles]

14. I've never been in combat

I will not venture to guess what it feels like, what it does to the minds of young soldiers to know each minute could be your last. I'm not excusing their actions, I am saying we who have not been there cannot possibly know.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

17. As you know, I have been there. I shot and killed a teen-aged

Cambodian boy on the front porch of his home because I thought he was going for a gun. He was going to show me a picture of his family, it appears.
Two days later, two Marines and I were in a fighting hole set up for an ambush. We were told that anyone coming from our left would be enemies. A person darted from tree to tree just before dawn from our left.
All three of us fired and killed a Marine from another company who was turned around and trying to find our Company Commander.
To this day we do not know which of us killed him. I do know that of the three, I am the least affected. Jim stepped in front of an express Amtrak train in 1983, ending his pain forever. Hank is still hospitalized (I believe) in a VA psych ward. I was doing much better until a year ago when * started this silly war.
I now have the dreams I had for years. At least this time I have tools to deal with them, and the support of my wife and children.

Marines are not supposed to kill civilians, and they are DAMN SURE not supposed to kill fellow Marines. Being a Marine comes with a long tradition of traditions, which the action in Faludja seems to have abrogated. This makes me very sad.
Very sad, indeed. I hope it is simply an aberrant situation.

[mrdmk]

18. Want to know what it is like in a gun fight and walk away

Just play a game of paint ball (skirmish). The paint ball (bullet) that gets you comes from nowhere. Once you are hit in the game of paint ball you are out of the game. In war the consequences are much higher thus the pressure. War is not a game or a means of showing a country's powerlessness. Maybe the Afghan war was necessary to a degree, but the Iraqi war was not necessary by any means, just an idea of an extreme group of people.

[Skittles]

19. bless your heart

I think like in Viet Nam, these young soldiers and Marines are put in impossible, no-win situations. And they feel the guilt so much more than the people who truly were responsible the wars.

[Lalena]

15. Jo Wilding is an amazing woman.

This story is so sad. What a horrible experience for everyone. The following is Ms. Wilding's website. http://www.bristolfoe.org.uk/wildfire/