Posted on 11/12/2004 5:32:54 PM PST by saquin
FALLUJAH, Iraq — Alert and on patrol, the Marines heard voices from inside a house.
"Who's in there? Who's in there?" the Marines called out, not understanding the Arabic they heard any more than those inside comprehended the English shouts.
From the front and back, Marines stormed the house.
Two men rushed out toward the street.
Their clothing was in tatters, their cheeks hollow, their shoulder blades protruding.
They are brothers, Khalad and Hamiis, it was later learned. Their cousin, who lives across the street and served as translator, described both as slightly retarded. For six days, they said, they had been locked up without food or water. Why? They did not know. By whom? "Strange men," they said.
According to a detainee taken earlier this week, the house was owned by a now-missing officer in the Fallujah police force who has been accused of working with insurgents, Marines said. They said the detainee told them the brothers and two others were captured because their families were suspected of giving information to U.S. forces.
Outside the house, tomato vines grew and purple flowers bloomed in a garden. Yellow curtains hung at the kitchen window.
Inside, the house was gutted, transformed into a makeshift prison and death chamber. Grated metal doors turned bathrooms into small jail cells. Blood seemed to be everywhere. The Marines found two corpses on the floor.
One man's death looked to have come from shelling by U.S. mortars. The other man had been shot through the forehead, an apparent execution that forensic experts said probably occurred within the past 24 hours. His feet had been hacked off.
"There's no doubt anymore that we're dealing with inhumane terrorists," said company commander Capt. Troy McNulty. "They seem to have been killing their own, those who have refused to fight us."
Sgt. Elber Navarro, 24, who led the Marines down the street and into the house on the corner, said it looked like "an execution lair."
For the Marines, the scene conjured up a gruesome image from home. They called it the "Silence of the Lambs" house.
Hisham Ali and his wife did as they were told.
Broadcasts from loudspeakers on the streets urged Iraqi civilians in Fallujah to go to their neighborhood mosque and get assistance from U.S. forces. But when they left their home in a neighborhood at the Euphrates River, Ali was frightened by a tank at the mosque and kept going.
"Soon I heard another loud speaker and I walked toward this sound," he said shortly after meeting Marines advancing through the city.
He said he had remained in Fallujah because he thought the fight would last only two or three days and he wanted to protect his home from the type of looting that occurred in the spring after U.S. forces led an abortive assault on the insurgent stronghold.
Adnan Hadi, another Fallujah resident who led his large family to U.S. forces Friday after exhausting their food supply of rice and beans, described life before as frightening and terrible. Masked gunmen patrolled at night, he said, and shops that sold CDs and videos were destroyed.
"They never hurt my family. They did hurt some of my neighbors, but I tried to stay quiet and mind my own business and so they ignored me, too," Hadi said. With him were his wife and their 13-year-old daughter, 2-year-old boy and a nursing infant, as well as two of Hadi's brothers and their elderly father.
Ali said his house had fared well during the U.S. assault. Only the windows had been shattered," he said.
"I've been nervous for almost one year. What I want is for life to be normal again and to feel safe," he said. "For me, it's the stronger body that can make the city safe."
For those trying to understand the insurgents in Iraq, two suspected safehouses in Fallujah offered clues but no definitive answers.
In one two-story terra cotta home with simple white plastered walls and ceramic tiled floors, posters and a wall hanging dominated the austere interior. They promoted an extremist sect of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. That movement is anathema to extreme Wahhabi Muslims whose beliefs are said to have influenced al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist thought to have used Fallujah as a base of operations before the U.S. assault began Monday.
Special operations forces examining the house said they suspected the residents were connected to former elements of Saddam Hussein's regime
In the other safe house about a half-mile away, posters and religious material promoted the beliefs of Sunni Muslims, who number fewer than Shiite Muslims in Iraq but who dominated in Saddam's government. A mural on one wall showed the holy Saudi Arabian city of Medina, where the prophet Mohammed was buried and from which the founder of Wahhabism was expelled.
Both houses had one thing in common: weapons caches.
One- and two-story shops line a commercial street near a water treatment plant. They once sold food, supplies, small goods. At one end was a farmer's market.
Like much of the neighborhood, they now show the effects of U.S. aerial assaults.
The bodies of 10 men littered the street. One corpse had been ripped in half from aircraft fire. Every vehicle — sedans, pickup trucks, a passenger bus — was burned out, blackened, gutted.
At the farmer's market, bombs had reduced the vegetable and meat stalls to piles of twisted metal.
Oranges and tomatoes rotted on the street.
Not sure exactly what he means by this but it seems to me it's something like bin Laden's statement about people following the "strong horse". The U.S. needs to show itself as the strong horse in this fight, as we now are. If we back off, as in April, people will ally themselves with the insurgents if they see them as stronger.
No more holding back.
YEs, this time I was encouraged by photos of GI's occupying mosques, and walking around with their dirty boots on. Screw the moslems and they hypocricy.
Cool.
BTTT
No, WE WILL KICK YOUR ASS. NOT 'CAN', BUT 'WILL'. If you follow the Taliban, the Wahabi, or OBL, PREPARE TO DIE.
I wish. Practiacally every mosque in the city was a weapons cache and according to the rules of war that makes them fair targets, yet we are walking on eggshells around them because we are afraid of making them mad.
Stop the presses. A decent report out of the AJC.
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