The News From Planet Falluja (Page 2)

In Falluja the front is the north edge of town, along the Askari ("officers") neighborhood, which ends at the edge of Iraq's main east-west highway. In the desert on the other side of the highway were the US Marines in their armored vehicles. Most of the time the front was quiet, but at night it got busy. Tariq says that between five and seven muj fighters were being killed each day, usually by aerial bombing. During the first two days he was there the Marines attempted ground assaults, but thereafter mostly hung back (though ground combat does continue; on July 2 two more Marines died from fighting in Falluja). The muj would counterattack, but did not venture too far into the open desert. Tariq says that the whole time he was there, Falluja was buzzed by F-16 fighter jets and Predator drones. "The sound makes you crazy," he says.

At night the cell would often head to the front to shoot at the Marines while dodging incoming US rounds. On most of these occasions they left Tariq behind, because he insisted he only wanted to do civilian work. After each night of fighting the cell would turn on a little mechanical stuffed monkey that played a jingle. This was one of the few things Tariq was allowed to videotape on his small digital camera.

The culture of the local fighters, as described by Tariq, is a closed, self-referential world. "They don't even watch the news," he tells us. "They just watch DVDs of sermons and speeches and muj music videos. Even the top guys had no idea what was going on in the rest of Iraq."

Of course, Tariq wasn't really sure who the top guys were. But there were hints. At one point in the fighting during Tariq's visit the ICDC actually told the muj irregulars to move to the wings and give their heavy weapons to the ICDC. These US-trained professionals then did the bulk of the fighting against the would-be masters, the Marines. Tariq also says that the recent airstrikes on alleged safehouses in Falluja, such as the one on June 22 that killed about twenty people or the one on July 1 that killed four and wounded ten, were in fact precision strikes, in which spies had first dropped infrared beacons just before the attacks. Tariq says the victims were mostly fighters, though not connected to the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as the US military has claimed.

"People joked about Zarqawi," says Tariq. "There were foreign fighters in Falluja, and some were killed in those strikes. But I don't think Zarqawi was around. Falluja is very Iraqi."

Quite disturbingly, Tariq says that Sharia law--or perhaps more accurately, a kind of Sharia lawlessness--was in full effect in Falluja, with hands cut off for theft, women kept away from men, etc. Even worse was the routine killing of spies and suspected spies. The leader of the cell that watched over Tariq confessed one such crime to him.

Tariq, at the edge of a couch in our hotel, reads his verbatim notes quoting the man: "We are all sinners, Tariq, all of us, I swear. The things we've done make us sinners. There was a Turkoman who ran a hotel; he had a wife and family. We thought he was a spy, so we beat him. We broke every bone in his body, but he wouldn't confess. Then we cut a checkerboard in his back with a knife and poured salt on his wounds. He begged us to kill him but he would not confess. We knew by then that he was innocent. To kill him was an act of mercy. We are sinners all, Tariq."

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