In order to get at them, the Marines surrounded the city, gradually invaded it, and ordered strikes on positions from which they took fire. It is the nature of urban warfare that civilians fall victim to it, for while they can flee a field of battle, here the battle comes to their own homes and street corners. It is too soon to estimate reliably the death toll of Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah, but reports of 600 deaths are common. It is controversial how many of those are women and children as opposed to combatants (some say as many as 200). It seems likely that most of the dead were combatants, since they were the ones the Marines were firing at. That U.S. firepower was so blunt an instrument that it killed dozens of innocents is, however, plausible, as is the countercharge that the insurgents' wild firing was responsible for much civilian loss of life.

The impression gained by many Iraqis and the Arab media was that the U.S. showed a disregard for innocent life in besieging and attacking the entire city, and that perhaps there was even an element of deliberate vindictiveness in the operations against ordinary Fallujans. Even Adnan Pachachi, the prominent Iraqi nationalist and former foreign minister of the Qasim government in the early 1960s, said, "It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal." Pachachi serves on the U.S.-appointed Interim Governing Council (IGC) and was one of the few Sunni leaders with some credibility to have associated himself with the Americans. That he was so enraged by Fallujah is a bad sign. His implication that the U.S. was engaged in collective punishment, assaulting an entire city to avenge the desecration of four U.S. security contractors, was especially damaging, since collective punishment is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.

The Iraqi minister of human rights, Abdul Basit Turki, who had been appointed by the IGC to great fanfare as a symbol of the new Iraq, resigned his post in disgust. Another IGC member suspended his membership on the council in protest at U.S. attacks on Shiite cities in the south, in pursuit of militiamen loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, who had mounted insurrections in several cities.

One British commander who spoke anonymously to the press complained bitterly of the tactics of U.S. forces in places like Fallujah, saying that they were using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. He also forthrightly accused the U.S. military of viewing Iraqis as an inferior form of human being or Untermenschen, and having little regard for innocent Iraqi life.

The siege of Fallujah was represented on the Arab satellite television channels, such as al Jazeera, as a massacre of innocent civilians, a charge that was apparently widely believed but which caricatures the Marines, who took heavy fire from experienced fighters and lost many killed and wounded. This toll was hardly inflicted by innocent women and children. However, many of the latter were killed by a U.S. military strategy that disregarded risks to civilian life in its pursuit of the fighters.

In any case, the siege of Fallujah inspired a mood of anger and solidarity in much of the Arab world. Thousands of Palestinians marched in the Gaza Strip in support of the people of Fallujah on April 11. At the Jabaliya refugee camp, demonstrators raised placards with pictures of Sheik Ahmed Yassin of Hamas, Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and even Saddam Hussein.

In Baghdad, the relatively upscale Shiite quarter of Kazimiyah had a longstanding rivalry with nearby Sunni Azamiyah, which lay across the Tigris on the other side of a bridge. The youth of the two quarters often engaged in turf wars and taunting. Now they joined forces, gathering food, water and medicine in front of the Sunni Umm al-Qura mosque. They mounted a joint Sunni-Shiite relief convoy, accompanied by protesters who carried posters of assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Muqtada al-Sadr.

On Friday, April 9, Sunni cleric Sheikh Harith Suleiman al-Dhari called in his Friday prayers sermon at the Mother of All Battles Mosque in Baghdad for national unity and a three-day general strike to protest the siege of Fallujah, a call that thousands of Shiites answered. Pan-Islamism and Sunni-Shiite unity in the face of encroaching Western powers has been a political dream since the 19th century, but has usually proven futile. The U.S. assault on Fallujah managed to give it some reality.

The siege of Fallujah made the American military look to many Iraqis and Arabs as though it were imitating the tactics of the Israeli military, which had long launched punitive raids into Gaza (and before that Beirut) and targeted places like civilian apartment buildings and crowded streets with bombs and missiles from jets and helicopter gunships. The Yemeni teachers union, just the sort of educated leaders of thought the U.S. should be trying to woo, on April 12 issued a scathing condemnation of what they called the "carnage" in Fallujah and in the Gaza Strip.

The upshot: In many minds, there are now two major occupations of Arab land by outside powers, the West Bank and Iraq. This perception is a very dangerous development for Americans seeking legitimacy in Iraq and the Muslim world.

The massive U.S. assault on Fallujah created a situation in which political forces not on very good terms with one another put aside their differences to unite against the U.S. Palestinians and Iraqis tend to differ about whether the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein from power was a good thing. Almost all Iraqis agree that it was. But both concur that Israeli occupation and punitive measures toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are wrong.

Likewise, radical Sunnis and radical Shiites do not for the most part like each other very much. But they were capable of joining together to send tens of relief trucks in a convoy to aid Fallujah. This forging of new bonds among forces that reject both the now-formalized process of annexation by Israel of Palestinian territory and the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq signals that the U.S. is losing the battle for hearts and minds. Once such attitudes harden, they are extremely difficult to overturn. Fallujah may be one of those historical turning points, where the stronger power wins militarily but loses all legitimacy in the eyes of those for whom it is supposedly fighting.

Recent Stories