Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Fallujah turnout 'best in Sunni triangle' posted by Richard Seymour
To get a high turnout among Sunnis, it seems, you had to bomb them to bits and obliterate their cities. Such is the lesson of Fallujah, according to the Christian Science Monitor :Nearly 8,000 people here defied insurgent threats and voted, according to US military officials. That figure accounts for 44 percent of all votes cast in Anbar Province, which includes the Sunni triangle, where antielection feeling was so strong that less than 7 percent voted at all.
8,000, with a total population of 300,000 isn't all that impressive notes Left I .
And Dahr Jamail reports on a family that could not have voted even if they wanted to:
“One story is of a young girl who is 16 years old,” he says of one of the testimonies he video taped recently, “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.”
The girl managed to hide behind the refrigerator with her brother and witnessed the war crimes first-hand.
“They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head,” he said. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead.
“She continued hiding after the soldiers left and stayed with her sisters because they were bleeding, but still alive. She was too afraid to call for help because she feared the soldiers would come back and kill her as well. She stayed for three days, with no water and no food. Eventually one of the American snipers saw her and took her to the hospital,” he added before reminding me again that he had all of her testimony documented on film.
Meanwhile, the leading Shi'ite candidate for Prime Minister of Iraq, a former nuclear scientist jailed by Saddam, brands Allawi's regime the most corrupt in Iraq's history . One expects that he is maneouvring for support from Sunnis who didn't vote with that statement, but if he is right then consider the competition Allawi was up against.
And as large numbers of US soldiers return from Iraq with mental disorders , many would be fighters are fleeing to Canada . Keep repeating: Iraq is not Vietnam. We don't do historical comparisons, unless Auschwitz is involved.