From Holden:

Although these stories have been entirely ignored by our media, the rest of the world knows what we did to Fallujah.

One of the few reporters who has reached Falluja is American Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press Service. He interviewed a doctor who had filmed the testimony of a 16-year-old girl.

“She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters.

She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything. They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead,” Jamail relates.

[snip]

Another report comes from an aid convoy headed up by Dr Salem Ismael. He was in Falluja last month. As well as delivering aid he photographed the dead, including children, and interviewed remaining residents.

Again his story does not tally with the indifference shown by the main media networks.

“The accounts I heard … will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Falluja, but the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined”

He relates the story of Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Julan district of Falluja: “Five of us, including a 55-year-old neighbour, were trapped together in our house in Falluja when the siege began. On 9 November American marines came to our house.

‘My father and the neighbour went to the door to meet them. We were not fighters. We thought we had nothing to fear. I ran into the kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going to enter our house and it would be wrong for them to see me with my hair uncovered.

“This saved my life. As my father and neighbour approached the door, the Americans opened fire on them. They died instantly.

“Me and my 13-year-old brother hid in the kitchen behind the fridge. The soldiers came into the house and caught my older sister. They beat her. Then they shot her. But they did not see me. Soon they left, but not before they had destroyed our furniture and stolen the money from my father’s pocket.”

[snip]

[Dahr] Jamail recounts: “Last November, another Falluja refugee from the Julan area, Abu Sabah, told me: ‘They (US military) used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.’

“He explained that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burned peoples’ skin even when water was dumped on their bodies, which is the effect of phosphorous weapons, as well as napalm.”

The reports of the use of napalm in civilian areas are widespread, as are many other frightening allegations.

The attacks on the hospitals and medical facilities in Falluja are also in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions.

But as Richard Perle, a senior adviser to US President George Bush said at the start of the Iraq war: “The greatest triumph of the Iraq war is the destruction of the evil of international law.”