Quotes by Dahr Jamail

Another refugee, Abu Sabah, an older man in a torn shirt and dusty pants, told of how he escaped with his family, just the day before [the attack on Fallujah], while soldiers shot bullets over their heads, killing his cousin. "They used these weird bombs that first put up smoke in a cloud, and then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burned for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours."
This was the first time I had heard a refugee describing the use of white phosphorous incendiary weapons by the US military, fired from artillery into Fallujah. Though it is not technically a banned weapon, it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to use white phosphorous in an area where civilians may be hit. I heard similar descriptions in the coming days and weeks, both from refugees and doctors who had fled the city.

... a controversial Kuwait-based construction firm is building a $592 million US embassy in Baghdad. The "Embassy," will be a self-sustaining cluster of 21 buildings reinforced 2.5 times the usual standards, with some walls to be as thick as 15 feet.
Plans are for over 1,000 US "government officials" to staff and reside there. Lucky for them, they will have access to the gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, food court and commissary. There will also be a large-scale barracks for troops, a school, locker rooms, a warehouse, a vehicle maintenance garage, and six apartment buildings with a total of 619 one-bedroom units. And luckily for the "government officials," their water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad's city utilities. The total site will be two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC.

I want to use an example of an airbase called Camp Anaconda, it's in a town called Balad... It's a giant airbase - big, sprawling, heavily, heavily fortified. There's 20,000 troops on this base alone, less than 1,000 of whom ever leave the base. So if you get sent to Iraq, you want to be on a base like Camp Anaconda, because there are concrete barracks there for troops - they are air conditioned of course. When I researched it at the time, they were preparing them to run internet, overseas phone lines and cable TV lines into the troop barracks, quarters. There's 2 base exchanges there, where they sell all the latest high tech equipment - CDs, DVDs, TVs, DVD players, i-Pods - you name it. One of the base managers boasted to a colleague of mine that he was happy to be selling an average of 15 TVs a day to US troops there...

When we talk about these lavish [military] bases [in Iraq], these huge well-fortified places... and then the same with the Embassy: we have apartment buildings, we have the largest swimming pool in the country, we have yoga studios, we have gymnasiums, we have a school - for the kids of the between 3,000 - 8,000 'government officials' that will be working at this embassy.

43% of Iraqis suffer from ‘absolute poverty’. According to some estimates, over half the population are now without work. Children are hit the hardest by the decline in living standards. Child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 per cent before the US-led invasion in 2003 to 28 per cent now.

Iraqi farmers struggle to get water to their crops. There is severe lack of electricity to run pumps, and fuel to run generators.
"The water is there and the rivers have not dried up, but the problem lies in how to get it to our dying plantations," Jabbar Ahmed, a farmer from Latifiya south of Baghdad told IPS....
Iraq now imports most agricultural products because of lack of irrigation. "I used to sell fifty tonnes of tomatoes every year, but now I go to the market to buy my daily need," Numan Majid from the Abu Ghraib area just west of Baghdad told IPS. "... One cannot grow crops in Iraq any more with this water shortage."

"We got 30 bodies out of the refrigerator on Sunday, put a number on each, and put them in plastic bags provided by U.S. troops," morgue official Kareem al-Rubaee told IPS. "We asked families to have a look at the bodies. Then, they were buried collectively."
There is expected to be a need now to bury bodies collectively every 15-20 days in order keep the capacity of the refrigerator intact, al-Rubaee said.
...Many victims of U.S. air strikes have been buried under the rubble of their homes for days, sometimes weeks, residents say. The military operation has been launched to target al-Qaeda, amid local reports that the operation began after the al-Qaeda suspects had fled town.

More and more bodies of victims of the ongoing violence are being found every day in Baquba, capital city of the province, 50km northeast of Baghdad.
"The morgue receives an average of four or five bodies everyday," Nima Jima'a, a morgue official, told IPS. "Many more are dropped in rivers and farms -- or it is sometimes the case they are buried by their killers for other reasons. The number we record here is only a fraction of those killed."
...Dealing with these remains is becoming difficult. Like the rest of the city, the morgue suffers from continuing lack of electricity. Over the last two weeks, two of its refrigerators have been shut down. The smell of decomposing bodies hits visitors 100 metres away.