Fallujah

From Free net encyclopedia

This article is about the city of Fallujah in Iraq. For detailed information on the events of war in Fallujah, see US occupation of Fallujah.

Fallujah (Template:Lang-ar; sometimes transliterated as Falluja or Fallouja) is a city in the Iraqi province of Al Anbar, located roughly 69km (43 miles) west of Baghdad on the Euphrates. Fallujah dates from Babylonian times and was host to important Jewish academies for many centuries. The city grew from an unimportant town in 1947 to a pre-war population of about 350,000 inhabitants in 2003. The current population is unknown but estimated at less than 200,000. Within Iraq, it is known as the "city of mosques" for the more than 200 mosques found in the city and surrounding villages. It is one of the most important places to Sunni Islam in the region. The war has reportedly damaged 60% of the city's buildings, with 20% totally destroyed including 60 of the city's mosques.

1 History
2 See also
3 External links

[edit]

History

The region has been inhabited for many millennia and there is evidence that it was inhabited in Babylonian times. The origin of the town's name is in some doubt, but one theory is that its Syriac name, Pallugtha, is derived from the word division. The city's name in Aramaic is Pumbedita.

The city played host for several centuries to one of the most important Jewish academies, the Pumbedita Academy, which from 258 AD to 1038 AD was one of the two most important centers of Jewish learning worldwide.

Under the Ottoman Empire Fallujah was a little more than a minor stop on one of the country's main roads across the desert west from Baghdad. In the spring of 1920, the British, who had gained control of Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, sent Lt. Col. Gerard Leachman, a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer, to quell a rebellion in Fallujah. Leachman was killed just south of the city in a fight with local leader Shaykh Dhari. The British sent an army to crush the rebellion, and the ensuing fight took the lives of more than 10,000 Iraqis and 1,000 British soldiers.

During the brief Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941, the Iraqi army was defeated by the British in a battle near Fallujah. In 1947 the town had only about 10,000 inhabitants. It grew rapidly into a city after Iraqi independence with the influx of oil wealth into the country. Its position on one of the main roads out of Baghdad made it of central importance.

Under Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq from 1979 to 2003, Fallujah came to be an important area of support for the regime, along with the rest of the region labeled by the U.S. military as the Sunni Triangle. Many residents of the primarily Sunni city were employees and supporters of Saddam Hussein's government and many senior Ba'ath Party officials were natives of the city. The city was heavily industrialised during the Saddam era with the construction of several large factories, including one closed down by United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in the 1990s that may have been used to create chemical weapons. A new highway system (a part of Hussein's infrastructure initiatives), however, circumvented Fallujah and gradually caused the city to greatly decline in national importance by the time of the Iraq War. Image:BrooklynBridgeFallujah.JPG

[edit]

Gulf War, 1991

During the Gulf War, Fallujah was one of the cities in Iraq with the most civilian casualties. Two separate failed bombing attempts on Fallujah's bridge across the Euphrates River hit crowded markets, killing an estimated 200 civilians, enraging city residents.

The first bombing occurred early in the Gulf War when a British jet intending to bomb the bridge dropped two laser guided bombs on city's crowded main market. Between 50 and 150 civilians died and many more were injured. In the second incident, Coalition forces attacked Fallujah's bridge over the Euphrates River with four laser-guided bombs. At least one struck the bridge while one or two bombs fell short in the river. The fourth bomb hit another market elsewhere in the city, reportedly due to failure of its laser guidance system.

[edit]

Iraq War, 2003

See main article, US occupation of Fallujah

Image:Downtown fallujah.jpg Fallujah was one of the least affected areas of Iraq immediately after the 2003 invasion by the U.S. led Coalition. It had not witnessed any major fighting as Iraqi Army units stationed in the area abandoned their positions, blending themselves into the local population and leaving a lot of unsecured military equipment to the hands of whoever wanted it. Al Fallujah was also the site of a Ba'athist resort facility called 'Dreamland', located only a few kilometers outside the city proper. The Iraqi military's desertion of the Ba'athist compound and the dissolution of nearby military units dispersed a large number of military and para-military personnel into the local Fallujah-area population.

The damage the city had avoided during the initial invasion, was negated by damage from looters, who took advantage of the collapse of Saddam's regime to help themselves. The looters targeted former government sites, the 'Dreamland' compound and the nearby military bases, who stripped buildings of anything of value including floor tiles, window frames, and door frames. Aggravating this situation was the proximity of Fallujah to the infamous Abu G'raib prison, where Saddam, in one of his last acts, had released all prisoners. While many prisoners of the Ba'athist regime may have been unjustly imprisoned political opponents, this act freed both political prisoners and criminal prisoners alike.

Citizens of Al Fallujah had to defend their own homes and property from these looters and criminals in the absence of peace-keeping authorities. The new mayor of the city—Taha Bidaywi Hamed, selected by local tribal leaders—was staunchly pro-American. When the U.S. Army entered the town in April 2003, they positioned themselves at the vacated Ba'ath Party headquarters—an action that erased some goodwill, especially when many in the city had been hoping the U.S. Army would stay outside of the relatively calm city. A Fallujah Protection Force composed of local Iraqis was set up by the U.S.-led occupants to help fight the rising resistance.

On the evening of April 28, 2003, a crowd of 200 people defied a curfew imposed by the Americans and gathered outside an occupied local secondary school to protest the presence of Coalition forces in the city and demand its reopening. Following the discharge of some demonstrators' firearms into the air, soldiers stationed at the roof of the building opened fire upon the crowd resulting in the deaths of 13 civilians. A protest against the killings two days later was also fired upon by US troops resulting in two more deaths.

In a highly publicized attack on March 31, 2004, four private military contractors from the U.S. company Blackwater USA were dragged from their vehicle and killed. Their bodies were then mutilated and burned. A crowd of militants and townsfolk, estimated to number over a thousand, beat and dragged the burnt corpses behind automobiles, then hanged the dismembered remains from the girders of Fallujah's bridge over the Euphrates River. These acts were videotaped by journalists and broadcast worldwide. This led to an abortive US operation to recapture control of the city in Operation Vigilant Resolve, a siege of the city called Operation Plymouth Rock and a successful recapture of the city, resulting in the death of over 1,000 insurgent fighters and the loss of 92 american soldiers KIA and over 500 wounded, in November 2004 called Operation Phantom Fury.

[edit]

Current situation

Residents were allowed to return to the city in mid-December after undergoing biometric identification, provided they wear their ID cards all the time. US officials report that "more than half of Fallujah's 39,000 homes were damaged, and about 10,000 of those were destroyed" while compensation amounts to 20 percent of the value of damaged houses, with an estimated 32,000 homeowners eligible, according to Marine Lt. Col. William Brown [1]. According to the NBC [2], 9,000 homes were destroyed, thousands more were damaged and of the 32,000 compensation claims only 2,500 have been paid as of April 14, 2005. According to Mike Marqusee of Iraq Occupation Focus writing in the Guardian [3], "Falluja's compensation commissioner has reported that 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines". Reconstruction is only progressing slowly and mainly consists of clearing rubble from heavily-damaged areas and reestablishing basic utility services. This is also due to the fact that only 10% of the pre-offensive inhabitants had returned as of mid-January, and only 30% as of the end of March 2005 [4].

Pre-offensive inhabitant figures are unreliable; the nominal population was assumed to have been 200-350,000. Thus, over 150,000 individuals are still living as IDPs in harsh conditions in tent cities outside Fallujah or elsewhere in Iraq.

In the aftermath of the offensive calm was restored to Fallujah. However, the number of insurgent attacks has gradually increased in and around the city, and although news reports are often few and far between, several reports of IED attacks on Iraqi and U.S. troops have been reported in the press.

By the end of 2005 several US soldiers had been killed by snipers and roadside bombs in and around Falluja and in January 2006 the US army base located outside Fallujah has come under heavy mortar fire.

[edit]