The Third Battle of Fallujah
Having retaken the town of Al-Kharmah on February 23 and with a coalition airstrike taking out 30 ISIS militants in the town of Karama, Iraqi forces moved into Fallujah on February 25.The battle did not go well for ISIS and it was reported over 600 of them had fled to neighbouring Mosul. This left, according to sources within the city, less than 400 militants defending it.
Of these, an estimated 150 were killed on April 4 as the Iraqi forces pushed further into the city, backed up by air support from the coalition forces. As usual, civilians fared badly as artillery shells and missiles from aircraft landed in markets and residential areas, however on April 21 the top commander in the city was killed as airstrikes took out most of his command structure, including his base and six of his officers. Three more leaders died on April 28 as a result of airstrikes, a fight broke out over money between two ISIS factions on May 5 (so much for their lofty ideals, huh? When it came down to it they killed each other over gold just as any westerner would) which resulted in the deaths of 10 militants, and another headquarters was destroyed on May 5, taking another 25 enemy combatants with it.
From here on in it was pretty much bad news constantly for the defenders, and the villagers in Albu Huwa and Haisa began to be employed by the surviving ISIS fighters as human shields. As more fell every day, they did have the odd victory, such as the suicide attack in which a reported 100 Iraqi soldiers died, but as May began to wind down the Iraqi military stepped up their attacks, preparatory to a full-scale assault on the city. They advised civilians to be ready to leave through pre-prepared routes they had somehow made for them (don’t ask me how; had they spies inside the city? Was this the remnants of the Sunni tribesmen who had survived the rising trying to help the families?) but ISIS warned that anyone who tried to leave would be killed. As Iraqi forces took town after town and village after village, it was announced on May 25 that their forces were almost at the eastern gate of Fallujah.
By May 31 the city had been breached from three directions, but even so there was a lot of street-fighting yet to be done. ISIS did not, seldom ever do, go quietly, and they seldom if ever surrender, preferring to die and, if possible, take their enemies with them. Fighting continued on through June as the Iraqi army and its allies moved slowly through the shell of a city, street by street and house by house clearing Fallujah of ISIS militants. On June 12 they secured the first escape route for civilians, evacuating about 4,000, and despite what I said above (which just goes to show how much I know!) 546 militants were arrested the next day trying to leave the city disguised as civilians. By June 16 ISIS was in full retreat and flight, as those who could broke and made their way out of the city, although Iraqi forces had at this time recaptured a mere quarter of the city. They had, however, secured the barrage (dam), various bridges, tunnels and all exits from Fallujah. From then on, the Iraqi forces met little to no resistance, and by the end of the day the city was theirs.
Small pockets of resistance remained as die-hards were dealt with in various parts of the city, but by June 26 the battle was over and the city was completely under Iraqi control. Clearly the estimates of how many militants remained in the city in April and May were way off, as Brigadier General Haider al-Obeidei reported the enemy casualties over the period of the siege as 2,500, while as the militants retreated from the city and its outskirts another 2,000 were killed by Iraqi forces while coalition air support took out a further 250, and destroying more than 600 vehicles.
The mopping-up operation included disarming IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, as if you didn’t know) and destroying a laboratory wherein explosives and vehicles intended for use as booby-traps had been manufactured.
Twenty-first Century Stalingrad: The Ordinary People’s Suffering
I mentioned earlier that in any siege, the locals come off worst, or to put it another way, if you live in a town or city that gets besieged, don’t expect it to end well. Usually this is due to outside forces - the army attacking or at least surrounding the city or town or castle, and denying the ordinary folk escape. But in some cases it also comes from within the siege, as defenders may be worried that any who leave the siege may share important secrets such as the town or city’s defences, weak points, personality clashes between leaders and so on, information the enemy can use to gain access to the city and around which they can plan, or reshape their strategy. It’s generally not considered, either by the defending army or the one attacking, that the safety, or even lives of the inhabitants are worth worrying about. Nine times out of ten, they’re thought of as the enemy anyway, so why lose sleep over their predicament? They could have left, if they had wanted, before the siege began, but now they’re stuck there and it’s their own fault.
Such often goes the logic of the commander of a besieging army - if he even thinks about the civilians at all - and it seems Fallujah was no different, with both sides causing mayhem for the villagers and townsfolk. First, the siege was not telegraphed to them in any way by the Iraqi forces: they just cut off the supply lines without making any provision for those within the city who would be trapped there. The many airstrikes conducted by coalition forces made the lives of the citizens unbearable: schools, hospitals, shops and homes were bombed, more or less indiscriminately, and what they missed, the artillery finished off. Power quickly went out. There was no electricity, little water, and without these two vital necessities for life, disease and starvation began to stalk the city. People were forced to sleep outside, with no way to heat or light their homes (assuming those homes still stood) and as mentioned already, food was only for fighters and sympathisers, so if you were neither, then tough, and that very much included children and babies.
No help was forthcoming from within the city either. ISIS did not hold Fallujah to protect its citizens. They gave less of a fu
ck about them than did the Iraqi forces. They were merely in the way. They could be used as human shields, but other than that they were an annoyance, entirely and eminently expendable, and no use to them whatever. They kept them inside the city by threats and force, promising to kill anyone who tried to leave, while at the same time watching them starve and sicken, without a compassionate bone in the body of even one of the fighters. Estimates of how many innocent civilians were trapped in Fallujah varied from 50,000 to almost 200,000; efforts by the Red Cross to gain access to the city for humanitarian purposes were rebuffed by ISIS, and even though the Iraqi army itself had tried to get food in to the citizens they had been thwarted and thrown back by the defenders.
Far from helping the citizenry, ISIS began executing people for the heinous crime of trying to save their lives, and those of their families, by attempting to escape the city. Some of these were burned alive publicly, a report unfortunately accompanied by the above picture as confirmation of the savage punishment . As in all such executions, it’s more the warning it sends than the death of the people involved that is important. The more who saw how brutally ISIS treated those who tried to leave the city, the less would be inclined to copy them. Other citizens, who were accused of collaborating with the enemy and passing information to them (no idea if they were or not; I’m sure no evidence was needed or presented, nor likely any sort of trial held at all) were electrocuted, while many women were killed for trying to escape.
All of this is bad enough, but even some of those who actually made it out of the city - estimated at around 80 families - were detained and later executed by the Iraqi military forces, who accused them - often falsely - of being ISIS fighters, when really they were prosecuting the ongoing sectarian agenda which had and continues to pit Sunni against Shi’ite. Many were abducted but their whereabouts remain unknown to this day, just more of the disappeared.