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thedrifter
12-31-08, 08:06 AM
Desert city rekindles hope for rebuilding lives torn apart by war

Timothy Williams
January 1, 2009 - 12:00AM


IN FALLUJAH, a city that rises abruptly out of the vast Syrian Desert an hour west of Baghdad, almost every building left standing has some sort of hole in it.

Mosques are without minarets. Apartment walls have been peeled away by artillery shells. A family's kitchen is full of holes made by a fragmentation grenade.

Of all the places where fighting has raged since the US invasion almost six years ago, Fallujah — the site of two big battles and where American security contractors' bodies were hung from a bridge — stands out as one of the bloodiest and most intractable.

This month, as the last of the marines prepare to leave Camp Fallujah, the city has come to represent something unexpected: the hope that an Iraqi city once at the heart of the insurgency can become a model for peace without the US military.

As part of the cutback of US troops in Iraq, by today there will be few marines left in or around this mostly Sunni city of about 300,000. The closing of Camp Fallujah is one of the most prominent symbols that America's presence, which at times seemed all encompassing, is diminishing.

Up to a year ago, the base's impending closure was cause for alarm. The calm that seemed to have taken hold then was fragile enough that Iraqi and US officials feared the consequences of the marines' departure. Today they look forward to it. "That will make our job easier," said the commander of the Fallujah Police Department, Colonel Daoud Mohammed Suleiman.

"The existence of the American forces is an excuse for the insurgents to attack. They consider us spies for the Americans," he said.

The threat of violence has not vanished, but the police said they were proud that a place that had a major attack a week a few years ago has had only two in the past six months. "Our sons will take care of the security issue," resident Khalil Ibrahim, 50, said. "They can do a better job."

Camp Fallujah will be handed over to the Iraqi Army. Most of the marines will be moved to al-Asad air base, 130 kilometres to the west.

The city, which had been emptied of much of its population before the second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, now bustles, its streets filled with honking cars inching their way to the Old Bridge that spans the Euphrates River.

In a small building at the foot of the bridge, freshly painted green, not far from where the bodies of two Blackwater security guards were hung, Fallujah has established an Office of Citizen Complaints. At the primary school where in 2003 the 82nd Airborne Division fired on protesters — some of whom may have been armed — killing 17 people, dozens of girls were playing. A sign said the school was a voter registration centre for provincial elections.

Not far away, a restaurant named KFC — not affiliated with the American fast-food chain but adorned with unlicensed pictures of Colonel Sanders — sells a fried chicken lunch for about $US3.50.

Hashim Hammoud, 69, a caretaker at a mosque that had been said to be a centre for insurgent activity, was thankful for the city's new-found peace.

But he was hesitant to discuss an insurgency that could rise up again at a moment's notice. "Al-Qaeda?" he asked, a bit cagily. "I don't know anything about them. I go from the mosque to my house, and that's all."

Ellie