Baghdad: Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi on Monday announced the start of an operation to retake Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that looms large in Daesh’s mythology.
Here are five essential facts about Fallujah:
Rebel city
Fallujah was once a small trading post on the Euphrates River, 50km west of Baghdad, but its aura in modern Iraq belies its relatively modest size.
Sunni tribes were always powerful in Fallujah, whose reputation as a “troublesome” city predates the 2003 US invasion.
In 1920, the murder there of a British officer was one of the sparks that ignited a nationwide revolt against the colonial power.
The anti-British rebellion was the inspiration for the name of an armed group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which was founded in 2003 and still active in 2014 in the Fallujah area before it was swallowed up by Daesh.
‘City of Mosques’
Fallujah is an important religious hub for Iraq’s Sunni community. Its skyline bristles with hundreds of minarets that have earned it the nickname of ‘City of Mosques’.
Built on a crossroads for routes from Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Fallujah was one of the first places in Iraq where hardline Islamist ideology took root.
Former president Saddam Hussain jailed several radical preachers from Fallujah, although the city was generally not hostile to him and benefited from the policies of the Baath regime that favoured Sunni Arabs.
Blackwater Bridge
On March 31, 2003, insurgents ambushed a convoy carrying four US contractors working for the US private military company Blackwater. They were killed, their bodies dragged on the road and eventually hung from a bridge over the Euphrates.
Photos of the mutilated bodies were beamed around the world, and remain among the most searing images of the US-led war in Iraq.
The bridge became known as ‘Blackwater Bridge’ and the incident jolted the world into an awareness of the violent reality that was going to prevail in Iraq, a year after the fall of Saddam.
‘New Vietnam’
Operation Phantom Fury was launched on November 7, 2004 and turned into the bloodiest battle US servicemen had seen since the Vietnam War.
They went house to house in a bid to retake a city that had already become the capital of Al Qaida in Iraq, a precursor of Daesh that was founded by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.
The battle, in which 95 members of US forces were killed and more than 500 wounded, holds a special place in recent US military history. Varying estimates put the number of insurgents killed between 1,000 and 1,500, and civilian casualties were believed to be in the hundreds.
‘Head of the snake’
Fallujah fell to anti-government fighters in early 2014 after security forces withdrew during unrest that began when they cleared a year-old anti-government protest camp near Ramadi, the capital of Al Anbar, sparking fighting that later spread to Fallujah.
The fall of Fallujah, which later became a key Daesh stronghold, was the first time that anti-government forces had exercised such open control in an Iraqi city since the height of the violence that followed the 2003 US-led invasion of the country.
Daesh’s broad offensive, in which the second city of Mosul was captured, did not happen until June 2014. Fallujah is seen by many Iraqis as the place it all began and is sometimes nicknamed “the head of the snake”.
