I have updated the December 24, 2004 posting
"Fallujah has not been taken" with the following line:
The Resistance have withdrawn from Fallujah after three months of fighting. January 23, 2005 (In Arabic).
This news item in English is:
Resistance Proclaims Victory In Fallujah, Fighters Allocated To New Locations
January 24, 2005
PS: Today is January 25, 2005.
Would one wonder why this news item, relevant as it is, is not mentioned in any 'mainstream media'?
I believe that there are two reasons for this anomaly:
First, is that the numbers of claimed US dead soldiers, as reported in the above withdrawal report, does vary widely than the numbers of dead and wounded American soldiers in and around Fallujah (they have been reporting the location of the dead casualties with the short hand acronym of Al-Anbar province, which is nearly one fifth the size of Iraq and does include both Fallujah and Ramadi) that are publicly reported by Dept of Defence and CENTCOM (after 24 hours of death and after breaking the sad news to their families, of course)
.
With 50-70 attacks daily, as has often been admitted by American generals in Iraq, and yet only one or two US soldiers, on the average, are reported to be affected daily? .... I do beg to differ also.
Secondly, the 'mainstream media' has been clamoring for a couple of months now that it took the American forces just one to two weeks to 'break the back' of the Fallujah insurgency. So what was really happening in Fallujah during the past three months if they report this? Aside from its near total 'liberated' destruction.
"The New York Times reported that "Residents trickling back to Falluja . . . enter a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees. Sullen and anxious, tens of thousands of residents have passed through stringent checkpoints to find out . . . whether their homes and shops were reduced to rubble or merely ransacked . . . people have to file through huge coils of razor wire and a gantlet of armed marines to pick up their supplies. On the road . . . Lt. Col Patrick Malay . . . watched the scene with satisfaction. "This is how I like it, just like Disneyland," he said. "Orderly lines and people leave with a smile on their face"."
Iraq as Disneyland January 25, 2005