Fallujah Bombing

Israel is surrounded on all sides by enemies who wish to destroy her very existence. Bombs and agression on both sides of that conflict have turned a debatably unavoidable occupation into the entire world's nightmare, to say nothing of the Israelis' and Palentinians'. We're now in the same boat, but we have no excuses at all. Juan Cole makes an important point in this post:

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but for an Occupying Power to drop bombs on residential neighborhoods is a war crime. The three women and five children killed are not "collateral damage." They are human beings. They were killed by the United States. There are no such things as "precision strikes" in residential neighborhoods. Bombs not only throw off shrapnel themselves, they create lots of deadly flying debris, including flying glass from broken windows, that can kill and maim. Dropping bombs on an tank corps assembled in the desert and intending to do harm is one thing. Dropping bombs on a residential district is another.

We on the outside have no way of judging the various claims made in these sorts of situations. For all I know the Hamadi clan has a lot of blood on its hands and has been blowing up people. But if so, they should have been arrested by a special ops team cooperating with the Fallujah Brigade. You can't go around bombing residential buildings and killing women and children if you are to retain any respect whatsoever from the local population or, indeed, the world community.

Occupation carries responsibilities. Of course, our commander in chief knows no responsibility for anything, nor do his subordiantes. We've spent hundreds of billions, lost nearly a thousand of our own soldiers with thousands more coming home wounded, maimed and psychologically scarred, killed literally untold numbers of Iraqi civilians, sqaundered historical alliances and have truned much of the world against us, for this?

A senior officer of the U.S.-backed Fallujah Brigade on Sunday disputed U.S. claims that an American airstrike had hit a safehouse of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network.

The Health Ministry said at least 16 people were killed in the attack Saturday; witnesses put the number of dead at least 20, including women and children.

Col. Mohammed Awad said members of the Fallujah Brigade had investigated the site and "affirmed to us that the inhabitants of the houses were ordinary families including women, children and elders."

"There was no sign that foreigners have lived in the house," Awad said.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy operations chief, told reporters Saturday that multiple intelligence sources reported that the house was used by the al-Zarqawi network, which U.S. officials believe operates in Fallujah.

Or this?

One resident contacted by telephone by The Observer, who had been to the scene of the explosion in the poor Shouhadda area, in the south west of the city, said that at least 22 people had been killed.

Dr Fadhil al-Baddrani said the entire family of Mohammed Hamadi, a 65-year-old farmer, married with two wives, were killed. Among the dead where his wives and children. At least three women and five children were among the dead. 'The whole family is gone,' said al-Baddrani. 'The blast was so powerful it blew them to pieces. We could only recognise the women by their long hair.'

He added that the carnage had been met by angry scenes within the city, with residents accusing the US of staging a 'provocation' intended to reignite fighting in a city that has seen the strongest resistance to the US occupation.

The air strike, and its high death toll among women and children, will inflame tensions at a moment of high tension in Iraq.

Senior coalition officials had been congratulating themselves in recent days for 'neutralising' the inflammatory effect of fighting in Fallujah and Najaf, in the run-up to the handover of power on 30 June.

It is a doubly worrying in Fallujah as coalition sources have privately admitted that the 'Iraqi-isation' of the problem there is close to failing. Among the first to condemn the US attack was the city's police chief. 'At 9:30 am, a US plane shot two missiles on this residential area,' said the police chief, Sabbar al-Janabi, 'Scores were killed and injured. This picture speaks for itself.'