the British Ministry of Defence confirmed the use of Mark 77 firebombs by US forces during the initial invasion of Iraq. The Independent said that there were independent reports of civilians from Fallujah suffering burn injuries. One resident said that US forces used "weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud" and that he watched "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns". Dahr Jamail, an unembedded reporter who collected the testimony of refugees from Fallujah, spoke to a doctor who had "treated people who had their skin melted". Indiscriminate violence The film alleges that the US military indiscriminately targeted Iraqi civilians and children during the Fallujah offensive as part of its campaign to exterminate opposition to its occupation. The film interviews former US Army scout Garret Reppenhagen, also from Colorado, who claims that civilian deaths were common and intentional. The US military responded by stating that they gave civilians several days of advance warning of the assault and urged them to evacuate the city. This was done through loudspeakers and leaflets dropped by helicopter. However, men of "fighting age" were stopped from leaving the city, numerous women and children also stayed behind, and a correspondent for the Guardian estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were still in the city when the assault took place. "The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used 'hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population'." On November 16, 2005 the Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable said that "suggestions that U.S. forces targeted civilians with these weapons are simply wrong," but he had to admit to the Financial Times that "it would not be out of the realm of the possible" that civilians were also killed by the white phosphorus. Criticism White phosphorus Critics of the film point out that white phosphorus is not considered a "chemical weapon" under the Chemical Weapons Convention but an incendiary weapon. Even though it has been used as rat poison, it primarily burns its subject. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) states that white phosphorus is still used by military powers around the world, even though it states: Star Wars