Mon, May 03, 2004 page9

• Graveyard near Fallujah reveals Iraqi side of story

  • By Christine Hauser / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The place where the new dead lie in this city west of Baghdad was once a soccer stadium called the Fallujah Sports Club.

  But now, after weeks of fighting between U.S. Marines and insurgents, it is known as the Fallujah Martyrs Cemetery.

  In handwritten Arabic lettering on the stone markers are the names of two children, Amal and Mustafa Alawi, killed in Jolan, a poor neighborhood in Fallujah where much of the fighting has taken place.

  "There are 250 people buried here from American strikes on houses," said a gravedigger who gave only his first name, Nasser. "We have stacked up the bodies one on top of the other."

  The headstones in this makeshift cemetery were silent witnesses to part of the Iraqi side of the brutal story.

  The gravediggers said that the cemetery was full of women and children. But there were signs of fallen fighters -- some of the headstones had the Arabic word for "hero" inscribed alongside the names. There were also the marks of civilian victims, as some of them read "child."

  The Iraqi Health Ministry has tried to piece together the number of Iraqis killed in the fighting. The ministry said 271 people have been killed since the offensive began on April 5. Doctors quoted by news agencies have cited more than double that number.

  This cemetery contains other unanswered questions.

  One headstone read simply "unknown," but it recorded where the person had been killed, Hay Askari, another district in this city of about 300,000 people where fighting has taken place since the siege started early this month.

  US officials say that foreign fighters are among those battling Marines in the town.

  Last Tuesday afternoon, there were the sounds of ongoing battle, despite a declared truce.

  The rattle of machine-gun fire and explosions that sounded like tank rounds could be heard in the distance.

  "Hear that?" said one man who stopped to listen with other residents and a few fighters in the cemetery, their faces shrouded with scarves and clutching machine guns.

  Judging by the littered ground, bodies had been brought in from hospitals or by ambulance medics. Surgical gloves and masks had been tossed near the graves. Boxes of incense had been spent and discarded, and palm fronds were stuck into the dirt of grave mounds.

  More room was being made for graves in the center of the stadium, where the turf had been tilled with trenches deep enough to stand in.

  "There are still a lot of bodies out there," Hamza said. "But we can't get them because of the fighting."

  Some of the corpses were pulled out from under the rubble of bombed homes, said Iraqis at the cemetery. One grave was simply marked "hand." Another "fingers." One man, Abu Abdullah, was described as "mutilated by the Americans."

  Fallujah has been the center of strong resistance to the year-old U.S.-led military occupation, but the offensive began after the killing of four American security contractors here in late March.

  Under a truce plan that has so far failed to end fighting, insurgents were called on to surrender their weapons, and Iraqi security units were to begin joint patrols with Americans to keep the peace.

  These elements appeared to be in place in one neighborhood April 27, though not quite as intended.

  The main road that divides the city, cutting through the central Hay Askari area of single-story houses and apartment blocks, was dead calm. There were few vehicles on the road. Most shops were shuttered. Occasionally a face could be seen peeking out from a home's dark interior.

  Several hundred families who fled the fighting in Fallujah have since retraced their steps, but they were hard to find. There were no signs of U.S. troops in the area.

  But there were scattered groups of gunmen. One sat on a street corner eating his lunch out of a bowl, which hungry cats quickly set upon when he stood up to give directions, clutching his AK-47. No, he said, he did not know of any recently returned families.

  Another man roared up on a motorcycle, an ammunition vest around his chest and a weapon over his shoulder. No, he could not help either.

  Several blocks away, three youths with machine guns quickly wound their head scarves over their faces so they would not be identified. Down this alley, they said, was a family that had just returned.

  The man of the house was Abu Ammar. He sat cross-legged on the floor, and his son served cold water. An elderly neighbor sat nearby.

  "We returned three days ago," Ammar said.

  Just minutes into stories of the looting of their home by thieves while they were gone, two figures appeared in the doorway.

  Their faces were masked. One wore a long tribal robe, while the other had ammunition magazines strapped across his chest.

  "Who is that?" Ammar's neighbor murmured.

  It was clear who was in control of this neighborhood at the moment. The masked men demanded and were shown identification cards.

  A short distance away, two Iraqi policemen and a civil defense patrolman sat in the shade in the middle of the main road.

  One of the policemen, named Walid Faiq, stood up from the curb. He said that, as a local resident of Fallujah, "there was no difference" between him and the armed men deep inside the neighborhood's alley.

  But unlike those men, he said, "We don't carry weapons."

  He pointed to a sandbagged wall on the roof of a two-story building, which he said was an American sniper position.

  "Our job is just to keep the two sides apart as best as we can," he said.
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