FALLUJAH, Iraq – The snipers spotted them first, a line of figures beneath two white banners Saturday afternoon, moving tentatively toward the Marine base camp. Behind them was an old taxi, piled high with suitcases. Within moments, a patrol squad was en route to the site.
“I see about 30 or 40 people, three men standing and waving, women and children huddled on the ground. They seem peaceful,” Sgt. Chris Driotez said into his radio.
“Any of them wearing vests?” another squad member asked tersely, vigilant for suicide bombers.
Cautiously, the two groups approached each other, Marines with rifles raised, Iraqis with hands in the air. Driotez radioed for interpreters, and a psychological operations team arrived in two armored vehicles.
An hour of confusion and frustration followed. The group’s leader, Jasim Hamid, a thin, agitated musician, kept saying they needed food, water and cigarettes, that the women and children were sick, that it was too dangerous to stay home and too difficult to leave.
“Where is danger? American side or other side?” another man whispered. His wife and children were in Baghdad, he said, and he had to reach them. “How long is war? One day, one week? Where we go? How we go?”
The Marines were sympathetic, but there was not much they could do to help. The women and children could leave the city, they told the Iraqis, but the men had to stay. The families conferred, shook their heads and remained where they were.
A Humvee brought cases of meal rations and water, and the troops stacked them on the road. A second vehicle brought two medical corpsmen, and several women rushed over. One held up a sick baby, another held her stomach. The corpsmen smiled and handed out analgesic tablets.
The Iraqis began to relax, but their faces still showed consternation and fear. One man told the interpreters that in the morning he had heard a message broadcast from a mosque loudspeaker telling people to come out, open their shops and go back to work.
The Marines were startled at the news. For days, their psychological operations teams had been broadcasting warnings that families should leave the city or stay indoors, away from the fighting. An officer shook his head worriedly. “You should not believe that message,” he said through an interpreter. “It is putting people in danger.”
Finally, the forlorn Iraqis picked up the food and retreated the way they had come, vanishing into the urban battlefield. The Marines walked back to their base in silence.
“I feel sorry for these people, man,” one rifleman said.
“Watch your flanks. This isn’t over yet,” retorted another.
Less than a mile away, just beyond the U.S. military cordon that has sealed off Fallujah since April 5, doctors and nurses waited in an isolated compound of white medical trailers. Most of the hospital’s beds were empty, and the staff had little to do.
Everyone at the Jordanian hospital, opened eight months ago by the government of Jordan as a goodwill gesture, knew that people in Fallujah were wounded and sick, that medical supplies were running out, and that the city’s central hospital had been shut down by the fighting between U.S. Marines and Iraqi guerrillas.
Occasionally, the staff has gotten glimpses of the suffering. A 3-year-old boy with a bullet wound in his back, an old man with shrapnel wounds, both of whom died.
“We are here to help, and the people in Fallujah know there is a hospital here, but they can’t come because the way is blocked,” said Samir Smadi, a surgeon. “We expected to a have a lot of injured patients, but we’re not even at full load.”
Last week, U.S. military forces began allowing ambulances and relief convoys from Baghdad to enter the city, and Friday they agreed to clear the way for vehicles to reach the central hospital.
Jordanian doctors said they had been in sporadic telephone communication with the hospital in Fallujah, but no formal arrangements had been made between them, except a request for 600 pints of blood.
“Six hundred pints, that’s a big amount,” said Ahmed Zawahreh, another surgeon. He said the blood was collected from local donors and an ambulance picked it up.
Thursday, two rockets struck the hospital compound, badly injuring two staff members.
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