3/7/2005 9:10:00 PM GMT
According to the IRIN news service of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the "Residents of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province some 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, have started to flee the city following the latest offensive launched by U.S. Marines and the Iraqi army".
"Worried that the offensive could proceed as it did in nearby Fallujah, where the majority of the city's population was forced to flee during a near three-month long campaign, many Ramadi families are taking personal effects and food supplies and heading to relatives' houses in the capital, or to the same camps where residents from Fallujah fled."
The report states that U.S. marines have imposed a cordon around Ramadi where most of shops in the city have closed "and people are having difficulties getting food supplies as the offensive came quickly and without warning, giving them no time to prepare".
Firdous al Abadi, a spokesperson for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, told IRIN that many people had been trapped in Ramadi's university and inside mosques for more than 48 hours as fighting raged outside between U.S. marines and Iraqi resistance fighters.
One Ramadi citizen and father of five told IRIN, "They (U.S. Army) want to destroy the whole area and build a New York City there, and for that they are tearing down everything."
The New York Times reported that the U.S. offensive against Ramadi, inhabited by 400,000 residents, "appeared to be a new phase in the military strategy adopted last summer, when the U.S. military commander in Iraq, General George W. Casey Jr., took over with a plan to 'reclaim' cities…" deemed to be "under the control" of anti-occupation fighters.
The first target of this plan was Fallujah, from which the US occupation forces had been driven out by its armed residents in February 2004. However, following a three-month campaign of aerial attacks, last November 10,000 US army and marine troops, backed by a massive artillery bombardment, invaded Fallujah.
The French paper Le Monde reported that, three months after the U.S. invasion of Fallujah, the city "has since become a ghost town. A very small fraction of the population has returned, certainly less than 20%, most of them poor people who had no means to live in Baghdad or who found no other place to live elsewhere. They survive in an apocalyptic decor, in the midst of ruins and roads blocked or clogged up with burned out cars and piles of rubble.
"The stores are empty, looted. The hospitals have been damaged and closed. Electricity and water service are just beginning to barely return. Cars are only exceptionally permitted to enter the city. The residents live like nomads.
"The Red Crescent is trying to provide for basic needs and a few itinerant merchants on foot bring some subsistence into this broken city which the [US] marines continue to occupy and control through numerous checkpoints ...
"Every day, former residents return to the place where their home used to be. In order to do that, they must be equipped with an American-issued identity card and go through the hours of waiting at check points before they can get into the city which is still under high surveillance, just to observe the damage and preserve whatever still can be preserved. Most people leave again the same day."
IRIN reported on February 17 that, "very few shops are open" in Fallujah and that "electricity and water is still not running adequately and families are reliant on support from some NGOs who are filling water tanks distributed throughout the city..."