Dahr Jamail: America, You Crushed My Country,

and now it has no future: Back then,everyone was writing about Iraq, but it's surprising how few Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of Iraqis. Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn't what's on anyone's mind. This was why I returned to that country, before the recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration's invasion, and why I feel compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today. But let's start with than. It's April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I'm inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah, while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I'm alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook, and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children, being brought into the clinic. A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically, as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he'll be dead. This sort of thing happens again and again. Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty clinic, with next to no medical resources, and screech to a halt. Grief stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives, women and children, gunned down by American snipers. One of them, an 18 year old girl,, has been shot through the neck, by what her family swears, was an American sniper. All she can manage are gurgling noises, as doctors work frantically to save her from bleeding to death. Her younger brother, an undersized child of 10, with a gunshot wound in his head, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomits, as doctors race to keep him alive. He later dies, while being transported to a hospital in Baghdad. According to the Bush administration at the time, the siege of Fallujah was carried out in the name of fighting something called terrorism, and yet, from the point of view of the Iraqis, I was observing at such close quarters, the terror was strictly American. In fact, it was the Americans, who first began the spiraling cycle of violence in Fallujah, when US troops from the 82nd Airborne Division killed 17 unarmed demonstrators on April 28th of the previous year, outside a school they had occupied and turned into a combat outpost.