25 December 2004 - THIS has been a bad year for war correspondents. The war in Iraq is, of course, not over and yet we know less about it than ever before. Even events such as the major assault on Fallujah seem to have moved to the back pages of the Western media. As one British columnist put it before the assault began, "We won’t hear the screams of the civilians".

One major reason for this is that the assault has been reported by correspondents "embedded’ with American military units". So we have seen lots of TV footage of American marines running through the streets of Fallujah firing apparently indiscriminately. Only occasionally have we seen the results of this firing — including a group of Iraqis shouting defiantly 'Allahu Akbar’ as an American mortar shell collapsed a ceiling over their heads. One might think that from the Western point of view the war against insurgents has been going well. That is certainly the view propagated in Washington and London. The truth is that it has been going very badly but is now so dangerous for independent Western war correspondents and even representatives of the Arab media to move freely around Iraq, that no one really knows what is happening.

Under the regime of the interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, Iraqi exiles report that the multinational forces 'remain immune from legal address and are only rarely held accountable for crimes against Iraqis. And while cabinet ministers and the US and UK embassies huddle inside a fortified green zone, Iraqis are denied the basic right of walking safely in their own streets. US tanks rumble by with signs saying "If you pass this convoy you will be killed."

Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi novelist now in London, reports that lack of security and fear of kidnapping make Iraqi women prisoners in their own homes. "They witness the looting of their own country by Halliburton and Bechtel, US NGOs, missionaries and mercenaries and local sub-contractors while they are denied clean water and electricity."

Where in the Western media have you read that under Western occupation acute malnutrition has doubled amongst children, prostitution, back street abortion and honour killing have grown? Where have you read about the napalm, cluster bombing and phosphorous bombing by US planes? The death toll is now more than 100,000 — half of them women and children.

The response of the US has been to launch a $10,000,000 Iraq Women’s Democracy initiative. The aim, according to the State Department, is to "give Iraqi women the tools, information and expertise they need to run for office in the forthcoming elections and lobby for fair treatment". Where have you read that the money will be given mainly to organisations "embedded" with the Americans such as the Independent Women’s Forum? Where have you read that the IWF was founded by Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynn, and how patronising it is to suggest that Iraqi needed this sort of information when Iraqi women were actively involved in public life even under the Ottoman empire?

Iraqi women had schools for girls as early as 1899 and by 1933 Unicef was reporting that rarely had women in the Arab world enjoyed as much power as they did in Iraq. By the early 90’s, Iraq had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world and had more professional women in positions of power than in other Middle Eastern nations. These are just a few of the aspects of life in Iraq. How many more are we not being told about?

Phillip Knightley is a London-based political commentator