On the Grave Situation in Fallujah:

Interview with Issam Shukri regarding US Bombing on Fallujah

 

 

Maryam Namazi:

I want to talk about the situation in Iraq. We know that the US is planning a campaign of attacks particularly because they are saying that they want to make the environment secure for the upcoming elections. 

Can you tell us exactly what the situation is? We know that they started their attack in Fallujah and some other places..

 

Issam Shukri

The situation is very bad. For people who haven’t been following on the news Fallujah is under bombardment since two day ago. 200 bombs have been dropped by US forces on the city. As you know this is a city of half a million population; although  it has been reduced to one hundred thousand or so, due to bombardment and the  siege conditions that Us forces have put in place on the city.

The situation is really bad, horrendous and inhumane.  People have been bombarded around the clock. The roads of Fallujah have been blocked by the US. There is only one road leading outside the city to Baghdad which is under the control of the US army.  The food is getting scarce every minute.  Actually, there are only men now in the city because the city has been evacuated from its population. It is really inhumane and horrendous situation that the world should oppose. People are being killed while I am speaking under the pretext of fighting terrorism, Islamic terrorism. This is unacceptable. The whole world should stand up and oppose this atrocity that the US army is committing in Iraq.

 

Maryam Namazi

I mean you did mention and we have seen in a lot of news reports that there are only men that have been left in Fallujah although we see pictures of women and children and men who have been killed in these bombardments. My question is the numbers are unbelievable, recently the British medical journal LANCET issued a report stating that since April 9, 2003 the fall of Saddam Hussein 100,000 people have been killed in Iraq. This is an outrages number. It is also outrageous that we hardly hear about these numbers.  We hear about when British and American service men are killed and that too sometimes is under cover. Although the numbers are so incredible, why is it that the world hears so little about these numbers?

 

Issam Shukri:

It is because of the US war propaganda, the US control of the main system of lies, it is trying to maintain with it allies.

Of course there are so many agencies which have visited Iraq since 2003. Even before that date. The lies of the US in its mainstream media are not a new phenomenon. The sanctions had killed 1.5 million people and no one mentioned or talked about it. Ironically when Tommy Franks the Chief of US Army in Iraq was asked about the casualties among civilians he said” we do not count bodies”. People were shocked by this declaration coming from the symbol of the US army in Iraq; the symbol of what I would call, State Terrorism. I think they are dropping the number of causalities of family members. We should multiply that number by three or four. I really doubt that this is the real figure. It could be much more than that. The techniques of war and the war machines that the US has been using exceed the human imagination regarding the killings. I think the reason why the US is concealing its atrocities is because it wants to hypnotize people into believing that what they are doing (the US) is but for the sake of Iraqi people. This number shows the magnitude of the atrocity of what the US and Britain is doing in Iraq and shows the hypocrisy of talking about Saddam Hussein's atrocities.

Saddam was a murderer and a tyrant but what the US did exceeded what Saddam had done by far.

 

Maryam Namazi:

If someone is saying that bush is getting an over whelming mandate in the US elections that his US policy  will go unabated, it'll go even further than  before, though you'd said before in a previous interview that there wouldn’t be too  much difference in your perspective between Kerry and Bush.  In the US foreign policy in Iraq, do you think it will make the situation worse in Iraq or it can’t get any worse?.

 

Issam Shukri

The outcome of elections will reinforce and strengthen the US polices not only in Iraq but in its global plan of invasion, the so-called New World Order. This is an assurance that Bush's policy would resume at least for the coming four more years while he is in office.

The US is facing problems in Iraq and it is in trouble because people are turned against it. People no longer trust the US. There was once a talk about the US receiving flowers and smiles (from the Iraqis), but this has long gone. Now people of Iraq are very angry, and there is a very strong anti-American sentiment in Iraq because of the atrocities they are committing, the bombardments of Samarah, Fallujah, and Baghdad, because of the lack of human dignity and the lack of basic conditions of life. All these conditions made it very clear for the people in Iraq that the US is a monster (not a liberator). It has nothing to do with providing them with a decent living.

 

The right wing polices of US, as I mentioned before, is State Terrorism. The situation they have created in Iraq, which is called the Dark Scenario, means that they are fighting with another terrorism; Islamic terrorism inside the Iraqi society. People are been killed because of the conflict between these two poles of terrorism. The right wing of militarism of the United States and the Islamic terrorism form one side and the people of Iraq on the other side. I mean 25 million of people in the other side. I think the elections would give bush more energy to resume his right wing policy.

 

Maryam Namazi

In sentence or two in your opinion what should people be doing against this situation?

 

Issam Shukri

We as progressive people have to turn the situation in Iraq around and to provide the conditions that would allow the people of Iraq have their needs. Actually the situation of Iraq is so dire and so severe that people need security, bread, and some kind of normal civil society. These conditions can not be maintained while the US is there. The US presence is causing all these problems.

We think that the Pull-out of the US forces from Iraq is important. The Islamic terrorism will decrease and be much less then. We also demand the immediate and unconditional halt of Fallujah's bombardment and siege and all the other Iraqi cities. This blood shed must stop immediately.