Mansour, Ahmed, Inside Fallujah, The Unembedded Story, Olive Branch Press, 2009
Ahmed Mansour was a talk show host turned journalist for Al-Jazeera who reported on the two battles for Fallujah in 2004. He was an opponent of the war and thought attacking a city with civilians was a war crime. That led him to blame everything upon the Americans and repeat false stories that he heard from Iraqis. While he reported on the casualties and suffering of the people of Fallujah you cannot believe anything else he wrote.
Mansour said that he was trying to maintain his integrity as a reporter while in Iraq. He claimed his mission was to tell the truth and not support one side or the other. During the first battle for Fallujah for instance he said he wouldn’t report on anything that didn’t have two sources. Later he contradicted himself by saying that he was in Fallujah to defend the people there by reporting upon their experiences. He said it wasn’t wrong to be biased as long as he reported facts. He completely failed at that.
In the first ten pages of the book he loses all credibility on reporting on what was happening in Iraq. He talked to the head of the Iraqi Union of Oil Experts who said that the first year of the U.S. occupation had cost the country $475 billion. Iraq’s GDP in 2002 before the invasion was $32 billion. He claimed that the Iraqi military was well kept and maintained and that Iraqi Air Force jets were being sold as scrap. He said there was a state of the art factory with computers and satellites which was looted by the Americans on orders from a U.S. army corporal.
The author said he believed the same thing with a story of seeing a traffic accident in Salahaddin province. Inside a truck he claimed to have seen a part from an oil refinery and assumed that this was being looted and shipped to Turkey which was over 150 miles away. He also noted that Iraq’s border crossings were always full of trucks heading out of the country. While he couldn’t tell what was in any of the vehicles he assumed it was all looted goods.
These two examples point out how Mansour’s opposition to the war led him to believe anything Iraqis told him and blame everything upon the U.S. The Iraqi military was falling apart and there were no new factories in Iraq because of 13 years of sanctions upon the country. Military vehicles were barely maintained because there were no spare parts. Iraq couldn’t import linen for funerals or school supplies due to the sanctions so the idea that it had new mainframe computers at a factory is laughable.
Another factor playing into Mansour’s accusations about the occupation was that he only talked to Sunnis. They had gone from the rulers of Iraq to being a minority. They therefore had the most complaints and the author took them all at face value without ever questioning or checking them.
On the positive side the book does include stories of the deaths and suffering of the people in Fallujah during the 1st battle. Mansour led the only TV crew within the city during the fighting. One time he went to a home that was bombed and 24 family members killed inside. Another time a child of one of his friends in the city was going to have a funeral and he couldn’t go because of all the fighting. He felt guilty because he felt like this kid deserved to have their story told to the world. This side of the battle was barely reported since the media had left.
As for the actual battle he runs into the same problems as before. He claimed insurgents ambushed the U.S. supply lines to Fallujah and completely cut off the Marines there and they could only get food and ammo in by helicopter when this was not true. He wrote that the Marines were military defeated by the militants and that’s why they called a ceasefire. The Americans actually stopped because the Iraqi Governing Council was fracturing due to many members resigning or threatening to do so unless the fighting stopped. The U.S. couldn’t afford for Iraqi politics to collapse under the weight of the battle.
Even Mansour’s own personal account of the fighting cannot be trusted. One time his crew was on a roof transmitting their stories when they were attacked. He blamed it on the Americans believing that they were after him for his reporting from the city. He told his superiors at Al Jazeera and requested that they complain to the Bush administration about it. Then later on an insurgent told him that he was the one that shot at Mansour thinking he was working for the Americans. Why couldn’t he say that when he first retells the story? Because it would contradict his narrative that the U.S. was bad.
Later on he reported that the Americans called a ceasefire and then were constantly violating it by attacking the city. Again, an insurgent leader told him they didn’t believe there would be a peace so they continued to attack the Marines. This didn’t stop Mansour repeating that it was only the Americans that continued the fight. The author believed the insurgency was a legitimate response to the U.S. occupation so he was not going to criticize it.
His chapters on the second battle of Fallujah were no better. For instance, he mentions a report that claimed 4000-6000 civilians were killed and that in one neighborhood 600 died and were buried by the Americans in mass graves. Only around 600-800 people were killed in total.
He repeated insurgent claims that Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his foreign fighters were not in the city. The author wanted to portray Fallujah solely as a battle between its Iraqi population and the Americans. Zarqawi did leave before the 2nd battle but some of his men remained and Mansour admitted to that later on. Again, his support for the militants meant he repeated their claims even if they were false.
There is nothing wrong with opposing the U.S. war in Iraq or the two battles of Fallujah. Attacking a city was always going to have a huge human cost and the city was left in shambles after the 2nd battle which took years to rebuild. The Americans destroyed the city to save it. However that doesn’t excuse Mansour’s book. If you wanted to know the discontent and anger Sunnis felt in Iraq than Inside Fallujah would be a perfect example. However if you want to know what actually happened in Iraq this would be the last thing to read.
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