Crimes in Fallujah

Adrian Rossi is in Sanaa, Yemen. This is his account. This came from a Facebook post.

This is a first-hand account of the reprehensible war crimes I witnessed General James Mattis and the US-NATO coalition committing against Iraq and its civilians during the Fallujah massacres. Whoever can read and share this will have my unwaivering gratitude. Thank you in advance.

I was almost twenty eight years old when I first entered Iraq as a doctor- headed to Fallujah chock full of naive, quixotic ideals and an ever-growing repulsion towards the USA's foreign policy. Grew up in Italy, went to medical school in the US. Having grown up surrounded by a family of doctors and humanitarian aid workers, one might say medicine was the natural evolution. Our team was comprised of 15 people of nine different nationalities - two of them Iraqis from Baghdad. It was mid-April as we made our way toward what was a small clinic where we were to deliver medical supplies and start our work immediately.It was pure, unadulterated madness as we sneaked into the city, away from prying US-Military eyes. We were greeted by Maki al-Nazzal, who had been assigned to take care of what was one of the two remaining clinics in Fallujah, there to treat the entire city after the US military had bombed its hospitals to a crisp. He was not a doctor. He was with the Fallujah Aid Association - known today as the Iraqi Aid Foundation. The second clinic, as we would later that day find out - was in fact just a mechanic's garage. The doctors' desperation while opening the medical supplies was almost feral in nature. A type of desperation I had yet to fully understand at that time. Unfortunately this was just the beginning of what was going to turn into an experience that has left me and our entire team emotionally handicapped for life.

According to the official narrative, US Marines led by then head of Camp Pendleton's 1st Marine Division - General James Mattis, were fighting terrorists who had killed four Blackwater security contractors in what was called "Operation Vigilant Resolve". Officially, by mid-April US marines were in a "state of confusion" as they slaughtered well over a thousand unarmed, terrified civilians, supposedly in self defense. That is the contrivance-ridden euphemism and convolution tactic the US Army likes availing itself of whenever caught with its war crime pants down. In reality, Blackwater Security, now known as Academi - had been supplying advanced weaponry to the US Army, along with other military logistics that had led to the gratuitous murders of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the MNF-I long before any of this had happened. Civilians turned fighters whose unbridled fury at witnessing the slaughter of their families and friends was no doubt justified. Unfortunately, mainstream media chose to portray them as "insurgents" instead. Most certainly an attempt at sanitizing the war crimes the US Military and its Foreign Liaison Missions were committing, as well as masquerading themselves as saviours -- all courtesy of what we now know as the "Deep State". As it happens, Blackwater's first major Iraq contract came in the form of a $21 million one, deploying a Personal Security Detachment and two helicopters for Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq - whose June 2004 CPA Authority Order no. 17 made sure Blackwater, Dyncorp and their MNF-I comrades could operate within Iraq exempt of Iraqi law.

Alas, the translation to this June 2004 order would be written in the blood of hundreds of thousands of civilians - well over five thousand of them slaughtered in the second siege of Fallujah by Mattis's Marines which started on November 7th 2004, and ended on December 23rd. Apocalypse was a daily occurrence in Iraq's Fallujah, as I witnessed US Marines led by Mattis engage in horrific war crimes the likes of which the ICC hadn't dealt with in a long time. Atrocities including but not limited to: targeting mosques filled with innocent civilians, bombing all of Fallujah's hospitals filled with doctors and patients to a crisp , grossly violating cease-fires, silencing and sometimes murdering both local and foreign journalists officially classified as "collateral damage", dropping Depleted Uranium, White Phosphorus and Napalm on scores of civilians and non-combatants whose ages ranged anywhere from a few months to 50 and older forever altering their DNA, and burning them to the bone. Unbeknownst to the public, the US had long classified White Phosphorus as both an incendiary and a chemical weapon. Specifically, after Kuwait. To this day, the increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia, stillbirths and genetic birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah far exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Under the immunity courtesy of Bremer's CPA Order 17, the US-led coalition ( otherwise known as the MNF-I), Blackwater, Dyncorp and other such private military entities were able to slaughter, rape, torture engage in human trafficking and photograph themselves with civilians' limbs at will, not having to fear any reprisals from US, International, or Iraqi law. One would think US Marines would know that this did not fall under the incidence of war trophy DD 603-1 policies, which only include certain types of weapons. The truth is they did not care as they could afford that luxury. To them, war trophies went far beyond used up AK47s. It focused mainly on videos of rapes and executions. On November 12th, I was shot in the lower left abdomen by US marines as I opened the ambulance doors for a few civilians desperately trying to escape the Julan district - the most affected area of Fallujah at the time. The adrenaline rush and preoccupation with the patients I had managed to get into the ambulance made for a slow realization of my own injury. Our driver lost his eye to the shattered window glass as we made our way out of Julan District while still under fire.

It is important to note that, at the time, I was already a US citizen with full rights. Each of us would take 15 minute naps in rotation, knowing we couldn't possibly operate on civilians under the haze of severe sleep deprivation. Unfortunately, there came the time when we had to do just that, as civilians started pouring in at a rate that no longer allowed for breaks of any kind. Civilians would come in by the hundreds with holes in their necks; some after exposure to the Depleted Uranium and White Phosphorus; blood and vomit shooting out of their throats like geysers as their families cried and slapped themselves in pain and horror, begging us to save their loved ones. People would come in with missing limbs, sometimes held by their relatives in the hope of surgical reattachment, or a miracle. People whose faces were half gone and whose families refused to accept the reality that not even a miracle could revive them. At some point, the US Military cut the power off, rendering us unable to operate on patients and having to store the lifeless bodies of those we couldn't save in slowly melting freezers.

By the end of December, Fallujah had been bombed to the ground. All that was left was a silent wasteland. The type I remember likening to winter mornings before people wake up and go about their day. A bone chilling silence broken by a few shots here and there, some screams or the idle banter US soldiers would have in between the mockery they'd make of the few remaining civilians in Fallujah - especially in the Julan district. Those were the only signs of life left. As doctors, we had to avoid stepping on the hundreds of dead bodies left in the wake of Mattis's frenzy. We were not allowed to take them away in order to avoid an epidemic since US soldiers had fun stepping on them, spitting on their lifeless bodies and calling them savages. I witnessed US Marines roll over wounded people in the streets with tanks - children included; beheading them and raping Iraqi women in front of their husbands, fathers and children - all the while having their fellow marines film these atrocities; dragging lifeless bodies along and throwing them into the Euphrates as though they were animal carcasses , or worse - expired merchandise there to be discarded; turning civilians into live target practice and laughing themselves silly in the process.

These individuals returned to the US and were hailed as heroes It was a Sunday morning when I shared my bottle of water with Ahmed. A seven year old boy whose mother and father had been slaughtered by US Marines led by general James Mattis just weeks earlier. At that point he was living with his uncle, struggling to survive. He too had lost his wife and children to the Fallujah massacre that had started in November. We had struck some kind of friendship I can't convey into words. In some way I believe we became each other's tether emotionally speaking. He probably saw a fatherly figure in me, while I, on the other hand, saw him as a reminder to stay sane. He was drinking from my bottle of water as two US Marine snipers shot him in the neck from what was the crumbling rooftop of a pottery trader who had been slaughtered and thrown into the Euphrates just days earlier.

Both started laughing uncontrollably as they watched him collapse. I ran three miles with that child in my arms, not once stopping. Fortunately, he survived. His two year old cousin wasn't as lucky. It pains me to say that the case of Abeer Qassim Hamza is far from singular. It is rather the tip of an iceberg floating in a bottomless ocean no one wants to ransack because, according to US officials, it would "bring discredit upon the armed forces". Although the US Army 's manifesto was out-terrorizing everyone, thus making sure Iraqis would yield to the occupation, I firmly believe the US Marines I saw engaging in these horrific war crimes had to have had both mental and emotional problems so deeply rooted, no amount of therapy or deprogramming could change. One that stemmed not from the atrocities of war they themselves had created, but the upbringing and indoctrination courtesy of a country and culture whose delusions of exceptionalism still reigns supreme. A sadistic pleasure that seemed to emanate from the their very core.

Even more troubling is the fact that the US maintained Bremer's revised Authority Order 17 until late 2005, during which time the murders, rapes and every war crime one can think of continued throughout Iraq. An eloquent example of this is the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, where Blackwater Security shot over 40 unarmed Iraqi civilians, killing seventeen and injuring over twenty in Nissour Square, Baghdad while escorting a US embassy convoy. Their defense? Claiming the unarmed Iraqi civilians had provoked the attack. It took the US Federal Court almost seven years to try and convict four of the Blackwater employees responsible for what was nothing short of a war crime, yet only one of them was convicted of murder while the other three got off with manslaughter charges. The fact that Blackwater and other such private military companies continued to engage in atrocious war crimes after the dissolution of both the CPA and its Authority Order is a testament to the USA's American Exceptionalism driven thirst for power at all costs, including genocide with impunity.

As if that wasn't enough, the 4 year Saleh v Bush lawsuit where Sundus Saleh, an Iraqi single mother coming from a once prosperous family displaced by the Iraq invasion sued members of the Bush administration finally ended after the Ninth Circuit availed itself of the Westfall Act , reaffirming immunity for the executive branch, despite the horrendous scale of the crimes committed. This is coming from the same Ninth Circuit that ruled in favour of the plaintiff in the 1992 Siderman case, adding : "the right to be free from official torture is fundamental and universal". What's even more disheartening ( but not surprising ) is the fact that the Ninth Circuit ruled against president Donald Trump's travel Ban on February 9, supposedly in an attempt to maintain and honour the separation of power with blunt acumen in the face of an administration whose predilection towards unilateral action was no secret. One more example of the infinite corruption and politicization of the USA's justice system, or rather -- its remnants.