By: E&P Staff In a startling report for the Friday edition of The New York Times, based at least partly on an unnamed Iraqi employee, reporter Edward Wong describes a Falluja where "the insurgency is rising from the rubble?.eight months after the American military killed as many as 1,500 Iraqis in a costly invasion."
Much of the city is still in ruins, even with the return of 140,000 former residents, but at least four suicide bombs have exploded in recent weeks, one of them killing six American troops. Two of five new police forts have been firebombed. Three members of the city council have suddenly quit. "Just as disturbing, even Falluja residents who favored purging the streets of insurgents last November are beginning to chafe under the occupation," Wong writes.
He quotes Abdul Jabbar Kadhim al-Alwani, 40, the owner of an automotive repair shop, as expressing a widely held sentiment: "Some preferred the city quiet, purified of the gunmen and any militant aspect. But after the unfairness and injustice with which the city's residents have been treated by the American and Iraqi forces, they now prefer the resistance, just so they won't be humiliated."
Falluja, thus, is approaching a turning point, American officials acknowledge, "precariously balanced between rebuilding or degenerating into the urban battlefield it once was," Wong relates.
"The Iraqi Army is not trained," Sheik Thaier Diyab al-Arsan, 30, angrily told a Marine colonel at a meeting. "They're killing people. They're shooting people in the head. You're not in the street. You don't see what's happening."
The Iraqi employee for the Times, who contributed to this report, had his name withheld "for security reasons."
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