Fallujans flee from US, Zarqawi fight

The result is new fear that is tearing at family social fabric, which Iraqis say has only hardened attitudes against American efforts.

Throughout the conversation, Salim's young face lights up only once: when describing the purchase of new clothes and schoolbooks for his two oldest children.

Classes began Oct. 1, and lasted just two days. Since then, the children have hardly slept, their parents say, kept awake by the constant crash and vibrations of explosions.

"I'm afraid because the planes bomb our district and we can't go to school," says Salim's 10-year-old son Ala. "We can't go to school for fear of attack."

Salim turns up the volume of the television, as the Al Jazeera channel shows headlines of several wounded children in a Fallujah hospital, and reports that the US bombing intensified on Sunday.

Media reports cited witnesses, who said that during a nine-hour battle Sunday, US forces fired on a family trying to escape, killing all five. News agencies reported Fallujah doctors saying that four civilians were killed, including a child.

"We are just concerned with living in safety," says Salim's wife, who wears a conservative white head wrap over a black shawl. "Sure, when you leave your city you are sad. We've left a father and mother and a house and more family. We are always thinking about them."

Personal experience with civilian casualties during the latest surge of fighting, and the battles last April, convinced the Salim family to go.

"What did this teach us about the Americans?" asks Mrs. Salim. "First we thought the Americans came to liberate our country, but now our conclusion is the opposite. We know they came to destroy our country."

Reversing that perception will not be easy, in a city where US and Iraqi forces are erring on the side of striking first and asking questions later.

One source close to the Iraqi leadership says that US airstrikes are "hitting a lot of people, [and] not that every one is a target. The intelligence isn't great - but there comes a point when you just go."

Though the US asserts that nearly every attack is a "precision strike" on a target related to Zarqawi's network, civilians have inevitably died is the urban environment.

Some were killed two weeks ago, when a huge air-dropped bomb landed a few hundred yards from Salim's house at 2 a.m. - a wake-up call that shook the family to their core. The children came running to their father's bed, looking for sanctuary.

"I held all my family together and said: 'We die just once in this life, not twice. Thank God, [the bombing] was far from us.'" Salim recalls. Within 30 minutes - after waiting, in case of a second US strike - Salim made his way in the dark down to the two-family house that was targeted.

He will never forget the image that greeted him, and never forgive.

"Most of them were children, all of them dead," Salim says, of the families he helped dig out of the rubble with bare hands. "When something happens, everybody runs there to help rescue, like an ambulance - maybe a friend will be [the victim] there."

Salim says he gave blood twice that day. And there are other shortages - especially of anesthetics. The targeted house often hosts weddings and other gatherings. "Maybe the Americans thought: Why are there so many cars there? The father had a trucking business."

Whatever the reasons, the lesson for the Salim family was that their survival was at risk in Fallujah, regardless of their political views.

"I can't describe the feelings of that day," says Mrs. Salim, recalling her husband's vivid description of the bomb scene. "It's not just fear for your family - maybe your neighbor or a relative can be killed, by a misfired rocket, maybe randomly. Even walking in the street."

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