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Outside Fallujah, fear for what might be inside Fallujah

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

April 30, 2004

Fallujah, Iraq - I've spent the past three days on the edges of Fallujah, trying to find a way in. I'm afraid at what we're going to find when we get there. Today, I was able to get just inside the city, to a checkpoint where U.S. Marines are vetting families who are trying to leave.

(Women, children and the elderly may all leave, but any family may take only one male, aged 15 to 50, with them. The Marines say they will hold all other men of fighting age in the town until they can set up a process to check them and ensure that they have not been fighting with the guerrillas.)

The streets were utterly empty. In an hour and a half, no car passed within view on the city's main street. People say they have little or no food left, have had no electricity for weeks, and little water. The hospital is reported in chaos.

And while we (Western journalists) have not been able to get into the center of town, the Arab television networks al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya have been there, and their pictures of civilian dead and wounded (on their websites, for example) are horrific.

The world is divided into two universes on this -- the one that speaks Arabic, can watch Arab TV and thus has obsessed about this humanitarian disaster 24 hours a day for the past weeks. And the part that does not speak Arabic, hence does not watch al-Jazeera, and for which the horrors of this siege are largely hidden. It is a dangerous divide.