Residents trickle back to devastated city, many in despair

New York Times (via International Herald Tribune)
January 6, 2005
By Erik Eckholm

Residents trickling back to the city they fled in November, before the biggest battle of the Iraq war, are entering a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, drooping power lines and severed palm trees.

Sullen and anxious, tens of thousands of Falluja residents have passed through stringent checkpoints over the last week to find, after agonizing weeks of uncertainty, whether their homes and shops were reduced to rubble or merely ransacked.

Even if their houses are still standing, they are pondering whether a family can resume any decent life in a place devoid of electricity, running water, schools or commerce, in a debris-strewn city with a strict 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, conspicuously occupied by American marines and Iraqi troops who still have daily firefights with guerrillas.

So far, only the hardiest and the luckiest are choosing to stay. Most leave in the afternoon, saying they will wait until infrastructure repairs, now started in earnest by the Americans and the Iraqi government, are farther along.

Some, returning to scenes of complete devastation, are in despair.

"We found that our house was destroyed along with all our belongings," said Rasmiyah Abbood, a 55-year-old widow who now lives on handouts in a primary school just outside the city. "My son who supported me is a car mechanic and he lost his garage," she said. "I'm homeless, and I only hope God will give us patience to endure."

Amer Muhammed, 23, who was collecting free bottled water, meal packs and yellow floral bed sheets at an aid center the marines have set up inside Falluja, is somewhat more optimistic.

The family house, he had just discovered, is still standing. But the windows were blown out and the furniture was wrecked, apparently as troops searched for weapons, as they did in virtually every house in the city, marking each cleared building with a big red X.

"Even with no schools or electricity, our own house will be better than the tents where we live now, drinking dirty water," he said.

Muhammed said that he would take his wheelbarrow's worth of aid rations back out to the refugee camp tonight but that his extended family, including 13 children, would move into the city within days.

Life here will be daunting for months at least, American reconstruction officials say. A half-day tour, escorted by a convoy of marines who said it was too dangerous to join families entering their homes, leaves the impression that the city cannot return to anything like normal for years, at best.

Falluja, a conservative Sunni city of 250,000 just west of Baghdad, had served as the headquarters of the insurgency that developed after the fall of Baghdad. After an abortive invasion in April, following the killing of four American contractors, military officials vowed that they would pull no punches in this invasion, designed to "break the back" of the insurgency.

Combat ravaged virtually every block in this sprawling, low-slung city. The remains provide a visible record of savage, house-by-house 20th-century warfare.

In the commercial district of Andalus, a green silk wedding dress stands elegant behind a cracked shop window; to each side, the stores are crumbled.

Falluja does not have the carpet-bombed look of 1945 Berlin, but a more sinister feeling of close combat. Though the occasional house was flattened by larger, precision bombs from the air, more common are the holes in the walls of many homes and shops, punched by tank shells fired by troops who knew that civilians had evacuated the city and took no chances as they fought through guerrilla-infested streets.

Marines, Seabees and Iraqi ministries are working to restore water, power and sewage disposal, but progress will not be anything like what senior Iraqi officials have publicly claimed in recent weeks, predicting city resettled in time for the Jan. 30 elections.

The first task, after the fighting ended, was to clear human remains from the debris. The marines found more than 400 bodies and laid them in a local potato factory, eventually burying them in mass graves, with their heads aimed toward Mecca and an imam's prayer.

The marines believe that most of the bodies they found, often without identification papers, were those of insurgents. A few residents this week found the decaying remains of relatives who had stayed during the fighting. (All together, American officers estimate, perhaps 5,000 residents remained in the city are still scrounging a living there.)

The main streets are cleared of debris but the bulldozing, let alone reconstruction, has scarcely begun for thousands of buildings and homes.

A priority has been fixing the pumps that, by pushing down the water table, prevent chronic flooding in this low-lying river city.

The main domestic water lines will be fixed within weeks, though broken pipes to houses must be fixed one by one, said Lieutenant Colonel Scott Ballard of the marines. For now, residents must take containers to plastic water tanks at 15 locations and carry what they can back home.

Electricity for homes may take a few months, Ballard said.

In an old amusement park in the Jolan district, near the center of Falluja, the marines have established one of several humanitarian aid centers. Against the incongruous backdrop of an idle Ferris wheel and a lime green octopus ride, residents, most of them just in for the day, line up for food, water and bedsheets. Marines hand candy and toys to the children.

The intent is friendly, but security concerns are overriding: The people file through huge coils of razor wire, past a gauntlet of armed marines to pick up their supplies.

On the road out front, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Malay, who is running military operations in the north half of Baghdad and led fierce combat through this neighborhood, watched the scene with satisfaction.

"This is how I like it, just like Disneyland," he said. "Orderly lines and people leave with a smile on their face."

His units killed hundreds of insurgents but also lost several men, he said.

Malay said the extensive destruction was unavoidable because some buildings were booby-trapped, making it prudent to fire shells before entering, and insurgents were holed up in building after building.

At five checkpoints around Falluja, residents who want to enter show proof of their former residence and are often questioned by Iraqi guards before an exhaustive search for weapons. A minority of men are photographed and fingerprinted.

Some people have gone in and out several times now, and some, like Sayeed Jumaily, 36, are preparing to take in their families. Jumaily has been staying with relatives in Baghdad but this week found that his house was largely intact, though the furniture was destroyed and to his deep shame, he said in a crimson whisper, rummaging troops had scattered his wife's underwear in the open.

Of 200 houses in his immediate neighborhood in the Andalus district, he said, about five have been reoccupied. One-third were destroyed and another third of the houses had been burned, he said.

He was in Baghdad the other day buying a small generator to provide lighting and is resigned to the harsh conditions ahead, he said, because 'it's my house and I can't feel content unless I'm living in my house." During the fighting in November, Jumaily said, some residents put blame for their woes on the insurgents, for refusing to seek a peaceful solution.

But recently, he said, many of the refugees are shifting more blame to the Americans again.

© 2005 The International Herald Tribune

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