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JEDDAH, 10 November 2004 — A long history of war, a radical religious attitude, and an unfortunate accident may well have served as ingredients of the deadly cocktail that has turned Fallujah into the capital of insurgency in Iraq and the scene of the only major battle fought by the US-led coalition for the control of the country. First the history. Fallujah has been the site of many battles for the past 2,500 years. Its capture by Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC opened the path to the Mediterranean for the Achaemenids who pressed on to conquer Syria, the Sinai desert and Egypt. It was renamed Hoxt-dezh (Distant Fort) until its capture by the Romans in the 3rd century AD when its name was changed to Misiche (The middle one) because it is surrounded by a loop of the Euphrates River that turns it into a peninsula. In April 224, however, the city once again changed hands after a bitter battle in which Roman Emperor Godrian III was slain by the Persians under the Sassanid King Shapour I. The Persian king had news of his victory engraved in three languages in the mountainside of Naqshe-Rostam, near present-day Shiraz. He also renamed the city Piruz-Shapour (Victorious Shapour) and built up as the principal garrison town in the mid-Euphrates area, starting a martial tradition that has continued ever since. For six centuries after that Piruz-Shapour was always a prize in the Persian-Roman wars. Emperor Julian captured it before being killed in a successful battle, allowing the Persians to restore their presence in the whole of the Levant. Bahram V, another Sassanid king built a hunting palace (Kushk) close to the city and adorned it with a garden full of desert animals and exotic flowers based on the Persian parada'us (the origin of the word paradise and, in Arabic, ferdows). In Nezami's great epic poem "The Seven Cupolas", the city represents the palace inhabited by a princess dressed all in green. The city was lost to the Romans soon afterward but regained by Khosrow-Parviz, the fun-loving Sassanid monarch who was a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). There, Khosrow-Parviz built a fire temple the remains of which have provided a major archaeological site in Mesopotamia for decades. The Arab conquest of Mesopotamia in the 7th century AD marked the start of the city's decline, from which it did not recover until the 1940s. The conquerors sacked the city, burned its big buildings and bazaars, and destroyed its gardens and palm groves. Gradually, the name Fallujah, referring to a particular type of dates, began to appear. Because of its location, however, Fallujah, was bound to make a comeback. It is an almost natural halting place for caravans from the Arabian Desert hinterland on their way to the shores of the Mediterranean. Because it is well watered, the location can also sustain a relatively high level of agricultural activity. Fallujah attracted Saddam Hussein's attention for a number of reasons. First, it is located in what is known as the Sunni Triangle, a narrow swathe of territory that provided the bulk of the Iraqi military elite under the Ottomans. Saddam, convinced that he would never win support among Iraqi Shiites, went out of his way to court the Sunni Triangle. Fallujah also provides the western wing of a system of military bases and garrison towns developed under Saddam, with the eastern wing represented by Baqubah. Located just 58 kilometers west of Baghdad, Fallujah is one arm of a pincer of which the other arm is Baquba, some 50 kilometers to the east of the Iraqi capital. Suspicious of a possible coup against him inside Baghdad, Saddam always kept substantial forces in both Fallujah and Baqubah to counter any uprising in the capital. Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay loved Fallujah because of its natural beauty and closeness to both the Euphrates and the desert. The two sons built palaces there, including an artificial lake, with an artificial island in the middle, where they set up a boat club, organized boat races, and practiced water-sports. In the year 1995 Saddam Hussein himself built one of his 22 new palaces there. All the palaces of the Tikriti clan are now in the hands of the American military. Qusay's palace is the headquarters of the 361 Psychosocial Operations Unit of the US Army whose task is to win the hearts and minds of the people in the city. The late Qusay's palace is at the center of Camp Orharm, another US Army facility in the mid-Euphrates area. Because of its role as a garrison city, Fallujah was home to large numbers of military families. According to some estimates at least a quarter of the city's 300,000 inhabitants consisted of the Iraqi military, including the Republican Guards, and the various paramilitary forces set up by Saddam and his sons. The largest number of families from the Popular Army (Haras Al-Qowmi) set up by the Baathists in the 1960s was also located there. Fallujah's history has given it a martial tradition that few other Iraqi cities share. But to that must be added the city's religious personality as the biggest concentration point for the Salafi radicals since the 19th century. The city was heavily proselytized in the 18th century by preachers from Najd who disliked the way the Mesopotamian Shiites worshipped their imams. In 1802 a Najdi army, with Fallujah volunteers, raided the Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf and destroyed their shrines. Since then Fallujah has been home to most of Iraq's radical Salafi clerics and their madrasas. The religious character of Fallujah was bound to clash with its personality as a military center. The first clash came in the mid-1980s when the government ordered that all mosque sermons must end with praise and prayers for Saddam Hussein. The Fallujah clerics refused, many of them ending up in prison. Saddam also put the financial squeeze on the city's religious seminaries by cutting off government subsidies. But this was partly compensated thanks to donations from the oil-rich Gulf states where Salafi organizations and charities are strong. Several Gulf states also built hospitals, orphanages and other social facilities in Fallujah as a tribute to its Salafi personality. When the 2003 war started, Fallujah had no reason to side with Saddam. But then a number of unfortunate accidents happened. The first of these came in March 2003 when a British bomber fired four laser-guided missiles against a bridge over the Euphrates to the south of Fallujah. Three of the missiles missed the target and fell into the river. The fourth went astray and hit an open-air bazaar inside Fallujah killing some 150 innocent civilians. The accident was seized upon by the local Salafis and the remnants of Saddam's army and Republican Guards to foment hatred against the US-led coalition. At first, afraid that the coalition may be as brutal as Saddam Hussein, Fallujah demonstrations were small and limited to the main city square. Soon, however, the Fallujah leaders realized that the coalition could not come in and kill as Saddam often did, and that the presence of hundreds of foreign journalists and televising c |
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