** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **

'I treated people who had their skin melted'

The Independent
By Dahr Jamail
Published: 15 November 2005

Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting in November
last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up
for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of
the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the
battle's heaviest fighting.

"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud,"
he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires
that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the
burns".

As an unembedded journalist, I spent hours talking to residents forced
out of the city. A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah, on the
outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the siege "who
had their skin melted".

He asked to be referred to simply as Dr Ahmed because of fears of
reprisals for speaking out. "The people and bodies I have seen were
definitely hit by fire weapons and had no other shrapnel wounds," he said.

Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the Lebanese
Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), witnessed the first eight days of the
fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies that were
burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So they definitely used
fire weapons, especially in Jolan district."

Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips to Reuters, LBC
would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled some tapes
out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US soldiers.

Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military to conceal the
use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping some of the
bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted resident,
Abdul Razaq Ismail.

Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004, said: "In the
centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which have
been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as
they were."

He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it on to trucks
to carry away. In certain areas where the military used "special
munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed from each blast site.



The author is an unembedded journalist who reported from Fallujah/

For version posted on The Indepenent website, click here
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article327136.ece>.

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