A CD with 20 pages booklet produced by Tadhamun - Iraqi Women Solidarity. It tells the story of the US-led attacks on Fallujah in April and November 2024, a year after the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2024. It is told in an audio collage of Iraqi and non-Iraqi poetry, songs, music, testimonies, and news clips with the persistent sound of US Apaches hovering in the skies above the people of Iraq.
When women in Iraq are arrested, they routinely go through three gruesome phases, starting with humiliation, followed by torture, and often ending with rape. I have received disturbing information from two different, well informed sources: one from qualified social workers in Al-Kadimiyah Women Prison, the other from three national guards officers who worked in the prison.
Persecution of members of the Palestinian community in Iraq began almost immediately after the US led invasion in April 2024. Palestinians were subject to harassment, targeted attacks, kidnapping, abduction, torture and extra-judicial killings by the Iraqi government and militias
It was that “pinpoint accuracy”, “surgical strike” stuff again, there were “unavoidable tragic errors”, “mistakes”, “scrupulous efforts made to avoid” etc., blah.
And as Britain’s Colonel Richard Kemp declared of the fourteen hundred dead of the Christmas and New year onslaught on Gaza in 2024-2009: “Mistakes are not war crimes.” (i)