Inside Fallujah

by Ahmed Mansour

The al-Jazeera reporter's account of what happened inside Fallujah during the U.S. siege. A courageous work of journalism by the only reporter to remain in Fallujah during the US siege of the city. In 2004, the United States waged one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. For many the city was a symbol of the resistance to the US war and occupation; since the battle it has become a symbol of the worst of the USA-Iraq war. Only one television station -- Al Jazeera -- stayed in Fallujah to report on the battle, and the horrifying and heartbreaking images seen worldwide came from reporter Ahmed Mansour and cameraman Laith Mushtaq. The images so outraged the world that the US military made Mansour's leaving Fallujah the first condition for a ceasefire. Donald Rumsfeld called his reporting "vicious and inaccurate," and argued that they were propagandists: "What they do is when a bomb goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend t