When - IF - the smoke clears...
.
When the smoke has cleared around Fallujah, what horrors will be revealed?
As the Americans move street by bloody street towards control of the insurgents' stronghold, aid agencies warn of a humanitarian catastrophe. Kim Sengupta and Raymond Whitaker report.
14 November 2004
Victory was being declared yesterday in the battle of Fallujah, with 1,000 rebels reported dead, hundreds more in custody and spectacular footage from embedded television crews, showing Marines charging through deserted neighbourhoods.
"It's like those pictures from the advance into Baghdad," said one watcher as the TV showed the view over a tank gunner's shoulder, with fire pouring down an empty street. But that comment unconsciously identified the real problem: more than a year and a half after George Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq at an end, the US military, backed by British and Iraqi forces, is having to fight the war all over again.
For the full text - it is a perspective worth checking - see http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582722
When the smoke has cleared around Fallujah, what horrors will be revealed?
As the Americans move street by bloody street towards control of the insurgents' stronghold, aid agencies warn of a humanitarian catastrophe. Kim Sengupta and Raymond Whitaker report.
14 November 2004
Victory was being declared yesterday in the battle of Fallujah, with 1,000 rebels reported dead, hundreds more in custody and spectacular footage from embedded television crews, showing Marines charging through deserted neighbourhoods.
"It's like those pictures from the advance into Baghdad," said one watcher as the TV showed the view over a tank gunner's shoulder, with fire pouring down an empty street. But that comment unconsciously identified the real problem: more than a year and a half after George Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq at an end, the US military, backed by British and Iraqi forces, is having to fight the war all over again.
For the full text - it is a perspective worth checking - see http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582722