The Iraqi city of Fallujah is situated along the Euphrates River at the crossroads of ancient trade routes with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. Religiously conservative, tribal, and traditional, Fallujah was something of an urban oasis resting in the secluded, western province of Anbar—the largest of Iraq’s nineteen governorates. Long regarded as a backwater of Iraq, Anbar was until recently a vast stretch of desert of little political importance, with agriculture limited to a thin strip of fertile land hugging the banks of the Euphrates. Commonly referred to as madīnat al-masājid, “the city of mosques,” Fallujah once bristled with over a hundred minarets that defined its cityscape. The famous Omar Bin Khattab Mosque with its beautiful blue minarets sat resplendent in the center of the city, overlooking the dense urban sprawl beneath. Single-family houses built in the traditional Arab style with stucco walls and flat rooftops nestled around the mosque, each jammed against the other, forming a maze of city blocks, walled courtyards, and narrow alleyways. As a thriving center of commercial and cultural activity, Fallujah had a vibrant population, until recently, between 300,000 and 435,000.1

Whether because of its proximity to neighboring countries with unguarded borders across vast stretches of desert, its rugged urban terrain, or the character of its people, Fallujah has more than once been the bane of foreign invaders. The city played a leading role in anticolonial struggles against the British in the 1920s, earning itself a reputation throughout Iraq for its patriotism, bravery, and rebellious spirit.2 Perhaps not surprisingly, when the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq began in 2003 the city reemerged as a key site of armed resistance, as it did a decade later when the Iraqi government vied with the Islamic State for control over Anbar province.

Today, the city is emerging from fifteen years of devastating conflict. At the time of writing (2018), much of Fallujah lies in ruins, its people slowly returning from refugee camps inside and outside of Iraq. The character of the city, its former beauty and vibrancy, are—for now at least—a thing of the past.

The roots of this most recent conflict and ensuing devastation are to be found in the early years of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation. In April 2004, U.S. forces surrounded Fallujah and launched a major assault, code-named Operation Vigilant Resolve, in an effort to bring the recalcitrant city back under the control of the occupation. The operation caused widespread destruction to the city and resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties. Due in part to Arab TV network Al Jazeera’s coverage of the operation, which revealed American atrocities to the world, enraging the international community, and partly due to the unexpected skill and tenacity of Fallujah’s rebel fighters, the world’s most powerful military was forced to retreat. Overnight, Fallujah came to symbolize the struggle of oppressed peoples the world over, a testament to those who refused to be cowed by military might.

The dramatic victory in Fallujah and the high price paid in terms of civilian casualties attracted international attention as well as considerable support to its cause. Muslims from outside Iraq traveled to Fallujah out of solidarity with their besieged brothers and sisters. Others came with their own agendas, including Al Qaeda. Sensing the growing movement of resistance, the Coalition3 quickly regrouped and began preparing to launch a second assault to recapture Fallujah and bring it back under U.S. military control. In the buildup to this operation, U.S. forces waged a campaign of information warfare—militarized propaganda—in an effort to discredit Fallujah’s insurgents, linking them with Al Qaeda and terrorism more generally. In November 2004, the Coalition launched Operation Phantom Fury, the second siege of Fallujah, deploying the full panoply of its military might to destroy the city’s resistance and its symbolic power. Vast tracts of Fallujah were flattened, thousands of civilians killed and injured, and tens of thousands more displaced. Despite the unfolding realities on the ground, Western audiences, encouraged by a compliant and uncritical mainstream media, cheered what they believed to be a victory against Al Qaeda—the archenemy of the United States.

These operations came at a time when the strategic focus of the U.S. military shifted from jungles and mountain passes to dense urban centers—the principal sites of contemporary warfare. Fallujah is a potent example of this trend. Indeed, the ancient practice of city sacking has resurfaced, aided by new doctrines of information warfare that legitimize organized state violence and atrocities on a grand scale.

On March 31, 2004, four U.S. “contractors” working for the private security company Blackwater USA were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, their bodies mutilated and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. Jack Wheeler, a former political advisor to President Ronald Reagan, responded by declaring “Fallujah delenda est!” (Fallujah must be destroyed), echoing Cato the Elder’s call for Rome to sack Carthage: “Carthage delenda est!” more than 2000 years earlier. Though Wheeler was writing for a small, far-right-wing online magazine, his rhetoric was more than an isolated case of reactive hyperbole. He was joined by a bipartisan chorus of baying voices calling for Fallujah’s total destruction. Sacking Fallujah was widely entertained among media commentators and some politicians as a credible policy option. For some, the city, its residents, and the “insurgents” and “terrorists” who apparently inhabited it were regarded as hostile and dangerous to U.S. and Iraq interests and therefore had to be dealt with as a whole. This of course blurred the lines between those regarded as “civilians” and “terrorists.” The symbolism of Fallujah, its cultural importance and historic resistance to colonial rule, was, for the U.S. political and military leadership, as resonant and threatening as the bombs and bullets of insurgents. Something had to be done to bring the city to heel.

And so it was that four days after the Blackwater killings, Coalition forces launched the first siege of Fallujah. It was to prove an assault very different in both method and scale to sieges carried out in antiquity, or more recently in cities like Leningrad. The portents for this modern-day form of siege warfare were evident years before the 2004 operation. In 1996 Major Ralph Peters—now a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, author, and regular media commentator—observed that “we may be entering a new age of siege warfare, but one in which the military techniques would be largely unrecognizable to Mehmet the Conqueror or Vauban, or even to our own greatest soldiers and conquerors of cities, Ulysses S. Grant and Winfield Scott.”4 With extraordinary prescience, Peters noted the “diminishing . . . strategic, operational, and even tactical importance” of “nonurban terrain.” The new siege warfare, he argued, would focus on achieving “control” over “indigenous populations” through the deployment of a range of weapons, tactics, and capabilities, with psychological operations playing a central role in the military’s arsenal.5

In 2006 General David Petraeus penned the U.S. Army’s much vaunted counterinsurgency field manual, promising a more “humane” form of warfare to meet the U.S. military’s strategic objectives in the Global War on Terror.6 Petraeus’s “population-centric counterinsurgency” articulated an evolving trend of warfare that Peters hinted at a decade earlier. Today’s wars, he argued, were to be won not simply by capturing and controlling terrain—although these remained critical—but also by achieving political control over populations.7 Despite the platitudinous nature of Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual, and earlier promises from Pentagon bureaucrats that high-tech, precision weaponry would make urban operations more “clinical,” contemporary siege warfare has proved no more humane and no less destructive than earlier military incursions. The result has been nothing short of urbicide8—the decimation of an entire city, played out again and again in cities like Sarajevo, Gaza, Aleppo, Mosul, Raqqa, and, we argue, Fallujah.

At the same time, the means by which the U.S. military sought to assert itself in Fallujah, to destroy and undermine its enemies, have led to the eradication not of terrorism, but of popular resistance. These operations have split families, neighbors, and communities along the lines of collaborators and patriots: young men have been forced to take on the familial roles of their martyred fathers; women fear bearing children due to a crisis of birth defects allegedly caused by war pollution; and nearly all Iraqis suffer from the traumatic psychological effects of prolonged warfare. The divide-and-conquer tactics of the occupation have plunged the country into sectarian turmoil. Neighbors now fear one another, and religious institutions have become ideological battlegrounds. Schisms, fractures, discord, and distrust are now an endemic feature of everyday life in Fallujah, and Iraq more generally. In short, the Anglo-American occupation of the country has resulted in sociocide—“the obliteration of an entire way of life.”9

U.S. information operations were instrumental not only in obscuring the vicious nature of the occupation from the American public but in the conduct of the violence itself. What makes the use of propaganda in the second siege of Fallujah in November 2004 unique is that the way in which the story was articulated—the carefully choreographed narrative, the characterization of the actors involved, the focus on strategic themes, the tactical use of language—was as much a part of the battle plan as the use of bombs and infantry. That is, the U.S. propaganda campaign achieved far more than simply legitimizing the operation to domestic audiences. Propaganda was also integral to the violence itself, shaping, facilitating, and motivating it—a point that has yet to be fully appreciated, even by some of the most incisive of observers. Not only was the official story of Fallujah largely false and devoid of reference to Iraqi suffering, but the second siege of Fallujah marked a turning point in the weaponization of information.

To be sure, while in 2004 information operations was at the cutting edge of military thinking, breaking new ground in cooperative military-media relations, the use of propaganda in theaters of war was hardly novel. Armies have long exaggerated their victories and the crimes of their enemies. But as the methods of communication have changed over the years—from couriers, to print journalism, to broadcast crews on the battlefield—armies have become increasingly sophisticated in their messaging techniques. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 occurred after a period of rapid change in U.S. military doctrines, prompted in part by the integration of new information technologies. Information warfare as a form of “soft power” would become “a primary effort of future conflicts” according to the U.S. military,10 and the pursuit of “information dominance” would lead to ways of thinking that extended warfare well beyond the boundaries of the traditional battlefield to the “hearts and minds” of civilians living in war zones and on the home front. Dr. Dan Kuehl of the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., wrote in 2004 that information warfare takes place in a “battlespace” that reaches into “the ‘gray matter’ of the brain in which opinions are formed and decisions made,” thus elevating information dissemination as “the most, and perhaps only, effective weapon.”11

The transformation of the battlefield into a battlespace has had far-reaching implications, extending the scope of military operations to actors and domains traditionally thought of as civilian. The hackneyed metaphor of a “battle of ideas” has furnished the U.S. military with the rationale to treat journalists, doctors, clergy, and anyone else in a position to release information about U.S. military actions as combatants if they somehow threaten operational objectives. This is exactly what happened in Fallujah. Yet most of us watched the operation in Fallujah play out on our screens unaware of the doctrines guiding U.S. actions, least of all of our role as civilians in this new battlespace. U.S. information warfare now regards the colonizing of hearts and minds, whether in war zones or on the home front, as a military objective. Arguably, this is just a more aggressive, better organized, and more resourceful attempt by the U.S. military to manufacture consent for its military actions. But these innovations are also deeply antidemocratic and dangerous, denying ordinary citizens the vital, balanced information they need to assess the actions of their governments.

The success of U.S. information warfare in Fallujah is evidenced in the Western world’s continued appraisal that U.S. forces liberated Fallujah from the control of Al Qaeda terrorists. This self-justifying account was carefully crafted by the U.S. military, disseminated by Western journalists, and mythologized by U.S. military historians who churned out numerous skewed histories of the operations, such as No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (2005) by former U.S. Marine Bing West; Fallujah with Honor: First Battalion Eighth Marine’s Role in Operation Phantom Fury (2006) by Gary Livingston; Fighting for Fallujah: A New Dawn for Iraq (2006) by Colonel John R. Ballard; Operation Phantom Fury: The Assault and Capture of Fallujah, Iraq (2009) by retired Colonel Dick Camp; and New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah (2010) by Richard S. Lowry. Now entrenched in cultural memory, these accounts have found expression in other mediums such as the cinematic blockbuster American Sniper (2014), which depicts Fallujah’s residents as living sheepishly under the tyranny of extremist warlords until the arrival of American liberators—a story that resonates with the usual hero-villain binary.

When ISIS emerged in Fallujah in January of 2014, the Western mainstream media and political leaders rarely asked why. The image of Fallujah as a city teeming with Islamic extremists was familiar and convenient, dovetailing neatly with Islamophobic sentiments. Western journalists took it as given that ISIS was the cause of this new conflict and not the outcome of one more than a decade old. It mattered little that ISIS had emerged after the Iraqi government had begun laying siege to Fallujah, and it mattered even less that for the entire previous year Fallujah had been at the center of a nationwide, nonviolent protest movement against the Iraqi government’s corruption and internal repression. The suffering and resistance of ordinary Fallujans was ignored in favor of a sensationalist narrative that elevated religious extremism over geopolitical maneuvering. This made sense in the dualist vernacular of the mainstream media and to U.S. cinemagoers, but it jarred somewhat with people’s experiences on the ground in Fallujah.

The new Iraqi government, dominated by sectarian, Shia political parties, and sponsored by both the United States and Iran, had in various ways contributed to the persecution of Sunnis since 2005. By January 2014, Anbar and other Sunni provinces were in full revolt against the government in Baghdad. At the time, ISIS was simply one militant force among many in this bloody conflict, and its influence was minimal. The ascent of ISIS to a serious military force on par with the armies of neighboring states was far from inevitable. We contend that ISIS’s success cannot be attributed simply to the quality of its propaganda videos, its ability to flood internet chat rooms with recruiters, or the allure of its violent ideology. The fundamental questions that need to be addressed here are, Why were nonviolent protesters in Fallujah willing to partner with an organization whose political goals were inimical to their own? How was ISIS able to grow and eclipse other rebel factions in the Sunni uprising? And why did a medium-sized city like Fallujah become such a strategic possession for them?

The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History seeks to answer these and many other questions by tracing the roots of the Iraqi government-led siege in 2014–16 back to the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 and the sieges of 2004. One of the challenges of writing a history of this conflict is that so much of the primary source material available was produced by the U.S. military’s propaganda apparatus. To counter this, we have relied on mixed methods, combining people’s history with “new military history.”12 We center the experiences of Fallujans, include their voices as much as possible, and situate their accounts within the context of evolving U.S. military doctrines, U.S. foreign policy, and the pernicious narratives promoted by the global mainstream media. For too long, Fallujah and its people have been depicted as passive onlookers to the political machinations of Baghdad or as the hapless victims of extremists asserting their will. For these reasons we have chosen to highlight the perspectives of Fallujans and their resistance to occupation and oppression by civil, political, and military means.

The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History is, however, more than a revisionist history. It is also a call to action. We assert that the way in which this conflict is remembered is of great political, legal, and moral significance, particularly if we are serious about addressing the injustices heaped upon ordinary Iraqis. Current U.S. foreign policy in Iraq continues to ignore how the invasion of 2003 and subsequent occupation contributed to Iraq’s ongoing problems, refusing to acknowledge how the crimes of the United States’ closest allies in Iraq—the Iraqi government and sectarian militias—are making resolution and reconciliation impossible. The United States’ current strategy is in many ways a more limited version of previous mistakes and miscalculations. Its apparent inability or unwillingness to understand how each operation in Fallujah set the conditions for the next, contributing to what became a regional conflagration, has at times been breathtaking. The history of what happened in Fallujah illustrates the time-honored folly of seeking to apply external colonial-military solutions to the complex political problems of other nations—a historical lesson that, sadly, the powerful seem unable or reluctant to learn.

Chapter 1 discusses the sieges of Fallujah in the broader historical context of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. It also focuses on Orientalist discourses and their role in shaping the military conflict and U.S. information operations. Beginning with a discussion of U.S. imperialism in the post-World War II era, we focus on how the United States’ early and enduring relationships with Middle Eastern states have shaped its contemporary foreign policy in the region.

Chapter 2 focuses on Western media discourses concerning the Fallujah conflict from March 2003 to April 2004, contrasting these with the lived experiences of Fallujans whose voices, we argue, were largely ignored or discredited by the Western media and, as a consequence, rarely reached U.S. domestic audiences. Thus, the story of the conflict was restricted largely to the accounts provided by Coalition spokespersons and embedded journalists.

Chapter 3 details the first siege of Fallujah, beginning on April 5, 2004, followed by the ceasefire and U.S. withdrawal, and ending with the creation of the Fallujah Brigade. Of central importance is the role of the media in representing and shaping this operation. U.S. forces later regarded their inability to control the media as their biggest failure in the operation. This was compounded, as we show, when Al Jazeera began broadcasting footage unfavorable to U.S. military interests. The political backlash forced the United States to negotiate a withdrawal from the city but also set in train the next operation in which the U.S. military would seek to control all media coverage.

In chapter 4 we discuss U.S. information operations in preparation for the second siege of Fallujah. After its experience with Al Jazeera during the first siege, the military came to believe that controlling the information sphere was essential to achieving victory. This led to several specific actions, including a psychological operation that exaggerated the role of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Fallujah, allegedly the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, as a pretext for a second assault. We also report how the Coalition blocked a peace delegation from Fallujah’s leadership, which hoped to negotiate a settlement, and efforts by Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, to broker peace.

Chapter 5 examines the nature and consequences of the second military assault on Fallujah and the U.S.-imposed media blackout on outlets deemed hostile to American interests. We detail the work of several Fallujans who sought to document the human rights violations committed by U.S. forces. We also draw attention to several controversies surrounding the operation, including the United States’ use of white phosphorous weapons, the reported use of “excessive force,” and the prosecution of individual soldiers for crimes caught on film.

The impact of toxic weapons is explored in chapter 6. We investigate allegations linking the increased rate of birth defects in Fallujah to the U.S. military’s use of depleted uranium, military burn pits, and conventional munitions, as well as the possibility of unknown weapon systems that used “slightly enriched” uranium. We also detail the work of Dr. Samira Alaani, chief of pediatrics at Fallujah’s Maternity and Children’s Hospital. She is the lead author of several reports on Fallujah’s birth defects and has done more than anyone to alert the West to Fallujah’s predicament. Such insider information has been vital to understanding the nature and scale of the health challenges confronting Fallujah, particularly when we consider how Iraqi authorities repeatedly sought to block epidemiological studies.

Chapter 7, covering the third siege of Fallujah, begins by discussing the Iraqi Spring protest movement in 2013 that connected nonviolent protest groups in Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Baghdad, and other cities throughout Iraq. We document the underlying motives of these protests and how, following the Iraqi government’s attack on protest camps in December 2013, this led to the Sunni uprising of 2014. This uprising ended with Iraqi security forces placing Fallujah under siege. It is against this backdrop, we argue, that ISIS first established a presence in Iraq and slowly came to dominate the uprising by waging war on other Sunni militias.

We further contend that the sensationalist media coverage of the Islamic State has obscured the extent to which it was a by-product of specific social and political conditions, rather than simply a movement peddling a messianic vision. Drawing on the available evidence, we show that while the campaign to drive out the Islamic State was applauded in the Western media, the Iraqi-led coalition destroyed entire cities and killed thousands of civilians—all of which served to further inflame an already explosive situation.

Between our chapters we have included short, first-person accounts from Fallujans and other eyewitnesses to the conflict, including brief reflections from students in Fallujah collected and translated by Dr. Asmaa Khalaf Madlool of the University of Anbar; ethnographic interviews conducted by Kali Rubaii with Fallujans living in refugee camps in 2014–15; testimony from Ross Caputi, a U.S. Marine who participated in the second siege of Fallujah (and a coauthor of this book); and short-form journalism from Donna Mulhearn (also a coauthor of this book), who returned to Fallujah in 2012 and 2013 to report on the crisis of birth defects. These accounts paint a vivid, multilayered picture of what happened in Fallujah, how its residents experienced repeated military incursions, and what these events meant to them.

Despite the fact that reconstruction projects in Fallujah are slowly underway, most Fallujans continue to live in an environment of fear and trepidation. Sectarian politics and unaccountable, government-aligned militias remain a constant threat to peace and stability. The conditions that caused Fallujans to rise up in 2014 still exist. For them, the current “peace” feels fragile and transitory. Until the underlying causes of this conflict in Iraq are adequately addressed, future insurgency and bloodletting seem inevitable.

The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History casts a critical light on a tragic conflict founded on questionable, self-serving motives, which, despite all the lofty rhetoric about “freedom” and “liberty,” has delivered anything but. The conflict has lingered for fifteen years, primarily because of a lack of accountability and a failure to pay heed to the needs and aspirations of the Iraqi people. One of the intentions of this book is to establish exactly that—accountability, and to contribute to a lasting memory of what was done to Fallujah.

The Sacking of Fallujah is intended, in part, to provide further impetus for an ongoing, grassroots project to document the experiences of a people subject to aggressive war and to support other forms of solidarity work, including the pursuit of reparations for Iraqi victims. This is the necessary groundwork for peace—peace with justice.