This is our Guernica

Jonathan Steele, the Guardian’s senior foreign correspondent and Dahr Jamail, a freelance American journalist explain the significance of Fallujah and the price paid in that “hotbed” of anti-American insurgency.

We still don’t know the true cost of American attacks. Casualty figures vary wildly, but thousands of civilians may have been murdered. This town, the “symbol of defiance”, is still under siege and atrocities are being reported by the few brave journalists entering the city.

“Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city’s compensation commission…reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.

“Daud Salman, an Iraqi journalist with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, on a visit to Falluja two weeks ago, found that only a quarter of the city’s residents had gone back. Thousands remain in tents on the outskirts. The Iraqi Red Crescent finds it hard to go in to help the sick because of the US cordon around the city.”

Read the whole thing. This is Iraqi “liberation” in the trenches.

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