ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES
April 28, 2005
Journalist braves streets of Iraq, brings story
to Boston
Jeremy Schwab
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to get the other
side of the story.
While reporters for major U.S. media outlets often do not venture
outside of the heavily fortified “Green Zone” in Baghdad
unless accompanied by U.S. troops, Jamail moved around the occupied
nation for eight months, often with an entourage of one translator.
Jamail’s reports, carried by The Nation, the BBC and other
media outlets, focused on the war’s effects on Iraqi civilians.
Jamail described the horrors of the U.S. occupation Monday during
an event organized by three area anti-war groups, Boston Mobilization,
Newton Dialogues on War and Peace and Brookline Peace Works, at
the Arlington Street Church in downtown Boston.
Jamail showed slides of daily life under the occupation —
gas lines snaking as long as six miles, with Iraqis waiting for
one or two days to fill up their tanks, a billboard reading “Please
keep your cars out of the way of tanks” because many civilian
cars get crushed.
“If you listen to the corporate media, everything is great
since the elections,” said Jamail.
But Jamail painted a very different picture. He noted that hospitals
face chronic shortages of medicines, IV needles and doctors, as
many physicians have fled the country due to the security situation.
Iraqis face a shortage of healthy drinking water and often do
not receive more than three hours of electricity per day, said
Jamail. Car bombs are a daily occurrence in Baghdad, making the
daily commute hazardous.
The U.S. military has encircled entire villages with razor wire,
restricting residents’ freedom of movement, said Jamail.
The war is also taking its toll on U.S. soldiers.
“One soldier described it to me as like being
in jail, because we are on our base, often without communication
[from home], or on patrol like a moving target,” said Jamail.
Jamail entered Fallujah last April 9, five days after the first
U.S.-led siege of the city began, in a vehicle carrying medical
supplies.
Jamail described seeing hospitalized women, children and seniors
with bullet wounds they said came from U.S. snipers who shot anyone
leaving their homes.
Jamail showed a photograph of two Iraqi men holding handfuls of
nails, which Jamail said littered the streets after U.S. forces
dropped bombs that exploded in the air, scattering the deadly
nails in all directions. Nail-bearing bombs and cluster bombs
are widely criticized by human rights groups because they indiscriminately
kill civilians.
Jamail also said that refugees and doctors from Fallujah reported
very heavy use of cluster bombs in the April siege and the second
siege, that began November 8, just days after the U.S. elections,
and leveled most of the city.
“When the November 8 siege of Fallujah was launched, the
military went in with Iraqi and U.S. soldiers and took doctors
and patients and tied their hands behind their backs,” he
said. “They took over the hospitals. [This] has been quite…
[effective] in keeping an account of the dead out of the hands
of U.S. media.”
The April siege began after a convoy of what Jamail described
as “mercenaries” — non-military security forces
— was attacked by American-based militants and their bodies
mutilated in Fallujah. The pictures were published and shown widely
in the press and television news.
Jamail noted that Iraqi civilian deaths — which estimates
put at between 14,000 and 100,000 since the war began due to violence
and other war-related factors such as deteriorating health conditions
— receive much less attention in the U.S. press. He ended
his presentation with a plea for the audience of approximately
100 people to do something to try to end the war.
“Whatever you’ve thought about doing, whether it’s
media activism or what, now is the time to do that thing,”
he said.
Raised in Houston, Texas, Jamail worked as a freelancer for the
weekly Anchorage Free Press in Alaska prior to his work in Iraq.
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