In their battle with resistance fighters in Iraq, the US army is increasingly relying on snipers to pinpoint and kill their opponents. "It's a sniper's dream," says a US marine sniper in a Baltimore Sun article. "You can go anywhere and there are so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are." Said another Marine corporal sniper, "Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies, then I'll use a second shot." "As a sniper, your goal is to completely demoralize the enemy. I couldn't have asked to be in a better place. I just got lucky: to be here at the right time and with the right training."

So what exactly are they shooting at? According to American writer Rahul Mahajan, one thing they are shooting at is ambulances. From his weg log Empire Notes, Mahajan reports:

Al-Nazzal told us about ambulances being hit by snipers, women and children being shot. Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah had become, he said, "I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization.

I had heard these claims at third-hand before coming into Fallujah, but was skeptical. It's very difficult to find the real story here. But this I saw for myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes in the windshield on the driver's side, pointing down at an angle that indicated they would have hit the driver's chest (the snipers were on rooftops, and are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There's no way this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots designed to kill the drivers.