La deuxième bataille de Falloujah est une bataille urbaine opposant la guérilla irakienne, dans un de ses bastions, aux forces armées des États-Unis, appuyées par l’armée irakienne gouvernementale. Elle est déclenchée dans la nuit du 6 au 7 novembre 2004 sous le nom d’opération Phantom Fury (al-Fajr pour le gouvernement irakien), et se termine par la reprise de contrôle officielle de la ville par les Américains, qui est achevée le 23 décembre 2004.
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The Battle of Ramadi was fought in the spring of 2004, during the same time as the First Battle of Fallujah, for control of the capital of the Al Anbar Governorate in western Iraq. A coalition military force consisting of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines were stationed to defend the city from an insurgent assault.
In April 2004, Fallujah was under siege by Coalition Forces and insurgents were looking to relieve pressure on the city by attempting an offensive of their own. Ramadi, the capital of Al Anbar Province, was seen as a center of gravity to coalition forces, and thus a critical city in western Iraq.
Before the battle started, insurgents cut off the highway out of Al Anbar to Baghdad.
On April 6, 2004, Marines fought with insurgents throughout the city in running gun battles that day. At the end of the first day of fighting, 12 Marines had been killed in action. The following day fighting continued. Over the course of a four-day period, 250 insurgents were killed.
After six months of fighting in Ramadi, 34 Marines and a Navy corpsman had been KIA, and 269 Marines had been wounded. The city remained an unstable environment throughout the course of the 2000s which led to the subsequent battle in 2006. Five NMCB Seabees were killed in action and 31 were wounded.
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Fallujah is a city in Al Anbar Governorate, Iraq. Situated on the Euphrates River, it is located roughly 69 kilometres to the west of the capital city of Baghdad and 50 kilometres from the neighboring city of Ramadi. The city is located in the region defined as Sunni Triangle by the United States, as the majority of its residents are Sunni Arabs. In 1947, Fallujah was a small town with a relatively small population but had grown to a population of about 250,900 people by 2018.
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which triggered the Iraq War, the city became a major centre of resistance during insurgency. The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Iraqi Interim Government twice engaged in fierce urban combat with insurgents throughout the city; the first battle of Fallujah failed to dislodge the insurgents, triggering the second battle, in which the coalition forces successfully took control of the city. However, heavy fighting from these two battles left the city severely damaged, though it remained occupied by the coalition until 2011. In January 2014, three years after the American withdrawal from Iraq, Fallujah was captured by the Islamic State and suffered a major population decline. On 23 May 2016, the government announced the beginning of a large-scale military offensive against the IS militants occupying the city, resulting in the Third Battle of Fallujah. On 26 June 2016, the Iraqi Armed Forces stated that Fallujah had been fully liberated and was free from militant control.
Within Iraq, it is known as the "city of mosques" due to the 200+ mosques that can be found throughout the city as well as in the surrounding villages.
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The First Battle of Fallujah, code-named Operation Vigilant Resolve, was an American-led operation of the Iraq War against militants in Fallujah as well as an attempt to apprehend or kill the perpetrators of the killing of four U.S. contractors in March 2004.
The chief catalyst for the operation was the highly publicized killing and mutilation of four Blackwater USA private military contractors, and the killings of five American soldiers in Habbaniyah a few days earlier.
The battle, and especially the images of Iraqi civilians killed or injured in the fighting, caused many Iraqis to become resentful of the US presence. Western journalists found that even some Iraqis who previously supported the US invasion, and welcomed American state-building efforts, became increasingly alienated and skeptical of such promises.
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The Second Battle of Fallujah, initially codenamed Operation Phantom Fury, Operation al-Fajr was an American-led offensive of the Iraq War that began on 7 November 2004 and lasted about six weeks.
A joint military effort of the United States, the Iraqi Interim Government, and the United Kingdom, the battle was the war's first major engagement fought solely against the Iraqi insurgency, not the military forces of the Ba'athist Iraq government.
Operation Phantom Fury took place seven months after the First Battle of Fallujah, an attempt to capture or kill insurgent elements involved in the 2004 Fallujah ambush that killed four employees of the private military contractor Blackwater. After that battle, control of the city was transferred to an Iraqi-run local security force, which began stockpiling weapons and building complex defenses.
Led by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army, the Second Battle of Fallujah was later described as "some of the heaviest urban combat Marines and Soldiers have been involved in since Huế City in Vietnam in 1968" and as the toughest battle the U.S. military has been in since the end of the Vietnam War. It was the single bloodiest and fiercest battle of the entire conflict, including for American troops.
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The Capture of Fallujah was a brief and strategic military engagement during the Mesopotamian campaign of World War I, where a British brigade successfully seized the town of Fallujah from a small Ottoman garrison.
Forming a crucial component of the Samarra offensive, the seizure of Fallujah ensured that Sir Frederick Stanley Maude's Anglo-Indian force would not have to cope with flooding of the Euphrates plains during their advance further north from Baghdad. Falluja, to the west of Baghdad, formed a flood-control area around the Euphrates River. Garrisoned only by a small force, it was handily seized by a British brigade on 19 March 1917, six days after Baghdad fell to the British.
However, the retreating Turkish force took care to seriously damage the dams protecting floodplains further south. The problem could have been a serious one for the British, but for the fact that the Euphrates was currently low, although repair work was harried by attacks from local Marsh Arabs, who attacked both sides equally, without prejudice. Once repair work—which occupied several days—was completed, the British force was able to rejoin the main offensive.
Cette bataille est considérée comme une des plus importantes de la première décennie du XXIe siècle, à la fois par l’enjeu, la réussite tactique de l’assaillant, mais aussi comme concentré de leçons à tirer pour les guerres futures. Sans que ce point soit totalement éclairci, la bataille attire l'attention sur le nombre élevé de cancers et de malformations dans la population, dû aux combats durant la période 1990-2004. Tout aussi grave à moyen et long terme : malgré le déploiement de forces pendant la bataille et de moyens financiers pour la reconstruction, la société fallouji est détruite, sans aucune cohésion. Ce qui explique que la ville de Falloujah tombe aisément aux mains de l'armée de l'État islamique en 2014 (voir bataille d'Al-Anbar).