page_title: Fallujah
section_title: Modern era
hierarchical_section_title: Fallujah / History / Modern era
caption_attribution_description: English: Caravanserai in Fallujah, Iraq, 1914
context_page_description: Fallujah is a city in the Iraqi province of Al Anbar, located roughly 69 kilometers 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 a small town in 1947 to a population of 275,128 inhabitants in 2011. Within Iraq, it is known as the "city of mosques" for the more than 200 mosques found in the city and the surrounding villages.
  In January 2014, the city was captured by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and suffered major population loss. On 23 May 2016, Iraqi forces announced the beginning of their attempt to retake Fallujah from ISIS. On 26 June 2016 the city was declared fully liberated by the Iraqi army.
context_section_description: Under the Ottoman Empire, Fallujah was 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 Lieut.-Colonel Gerard Leachman, a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer, to meet with local leader Shaykh Dhari, perhaps to forgive a loan given to the sheikh. Exactly what happened depends on the source, but according to the Arab version, Gerard Leachman was betrayed by the sheikh who had his two sons shoot him in the legs, then behead him by the sword.
  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 US military as the "Sunni Triangle". Many residents of the primarily Sunni city were employees and supporters of Saddam's government, and many senior Ba'ath Party officials were natives of the city. Fallujah 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 Saddam's infrastructure initiatives) circumvented Fallujah and gradually caused the city to decline in national importance by the time of the Iraq War.
caption: Fallujah's Caravanserai, ca. 1914
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