Doug Lorimer
"Residents of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province some 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, have started to flee the city following the latest offensive launched by US Marines and the [puppet] Iraqi army", IRIN news, the news service of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reported on February 24.
"Worried that the offensive could proceed as it did in nearby Fallujah, where the majority of the city's population was forced to flee during a near three-month long campaign, many Ramadi families are taking personal effects and food supplies and heading to relatives' houses in the capital, or to the same camps where residents from Fallujah fled."
According to the IRIN report, US marines have imposed a cordon around Ramadi, most shops in the city have closed "and people are having difficulties getting food supplies as the offensive came quickly and without warning, giving them no time to prepare".
Firdous al Abadi, a spokesperson for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, told IRIN that many people had been trapped in Ramadi's university and inside mosques for more than 48 hours as fighting raged outside between US marines and Iraqi resistance fighters.
Referring to the US troops, Muhammad Farhan, a father of five, who was fleeing the city with his family, told IRIN: "They want to destroy the whole area and build a New York City there, and for that they are tearing down everything."
The February 21 New York Times reported that the US offensive against Ramadi, inhabited by 400,000 residents, "appeared to be a new phase in the military strategy adopted last summer, when the US military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., took over with a plan to reclaim a string of cities that had fallen to insurgent control".
The first target of this plan was Fallujah, from which the US occupation forces had been driven out by its armed residents in February 2004, and which an assault in April by 4500 US marines had failed to recapture. However, following a three-month campaign of aerial attacks, last November 10,000 US army and marine troops, backed by a massive artillery bombardment, invaded the resistance-held city of Fallujah.
The NYT report noted that the "Fallujah offensive ended with much of the city reduced to rubble, and insurgent groups still capable, weeks later, of mounting attacks from isolated pockets of resistance. But US commanders acknowledged a more compelling reason that the offensive proved less decisive than they had hoped. Many rebels fled ahead of the offensive, some north to Mosul, some southeast toward Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad, and others to Ramadi, 40 miles to the west, where insurgents last year took a measure of control almost on a par with their takeover of Fallujah."
The February 7 Le Monde reported that, three months after the US invasion of Fallujah, the city "has since become a ghost town. A very small fraction of the population has returned, certainly less than 20%, most of them poor people who had no means to live in Baghdad or who found no other place to live elsewhere. They survive in an apocalyptic decor, in the midst of ruins and roads blocked or clogged up with burned out cars and piles of rubble.
"The stores are empty, looted. The hospitals have been damaged and closed. Electricity and water service are just beginning to barely return. Cars are only exceptionally permitted to enter the city. The residents live like nomads.
"The Red Crescent is trying to provide for basic needs and a few itinerant merchants on foot bring some subsistence into this broken city which the [US] marines continue to occupy and control through numerous checkpoints ...
"Every day, former residents return to the place where their home used to be. In order to do that, they must be equipped with an American-issued identity card and go through the hours of waiting at check points before they can get into the city which is still under high surveillance, just to observe the damage and preserve whatever still can be preserved. Most people leave again the same day."
IRIN reported on February 17 that, "very few shops are open" in Fallujah and that "electricity and water is still not running adequately and families are reliant on support from some NGOs who are filling water tanks distributed throughout the city...
"According to Col. Peter Smith of the US Marines 1st Division, nearly 8000 people are now living in the city, but he added that some 100,000 had passed through the checkpoints into the city, which used to have a total population of 280,000."
From Green Left Weekly, March 9, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.