'Getting Aid Past US Snipers is Impossible'

[bicentennial_baby]

(Jo Wilding, 29, is a human rights campaigner and trainee lawyer from Bristol. She and two other foreign nationals have been inside Falluja for the past week, providing medical and humanitarian aid)



Everybody in Falluja has lost someone. There is not a person here who doesn't have a close friend or relative who has been killed, and a lot of them have lost several. We are hearing that the death toll is around 880 civilians, and that within the first few days 86 children were killed.

People have been under bombardment for the last eight days. A lot of people are trapped in their houses still - despite the ceasefire - without food, without water and terrified to leave. Food and medical aid is now arriving but the problem is getting the aid around the city. A lot of it is delivered to the mosque, but then getting it to the hospitals, past the American snipers, is proving to be impossible.

The main hospital apparently has been destroyed by bombing and the second largest is covered by US snipers - the Iraqis call it sniper alley. So Iraqi people are not able to get to and from the hospitals. I was working from a private clinic that had been turned into a hospital, and there was also one other improvised hospital in a car garage.

Nobody could give us a figure for injuries but there was an enormous stream of people going to this clinic, this makeshift facility. It comes in bursts. There is a lull in fighting and then more people start coming into the clinic. We saw two kids arriving with their grandmother, they had all been wounded by gunfire, they said by American snipers, while they were trying to leave their house to flee to Baghdad.


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0417-06.htm