In the bloody months of November and December 2004 US and British forces drove through Falluja in operation Phantom Fury and laid it waste.

The city, once referred to as the “City of Mosques”, had 200+ pre-battle mosques of which 60 or so were destroyed in the fighting. Perhaps half the homes suffered at least some damage. Of the roughly 50,000 buildings in Fallujah, 7,000-10,000 were estimated to have been destroyed in the offensive and from half to two-thirds of the remaining buildings had notable damage.

While pre-offensive inhabitant figures are unreliable, the nominal population was assumed to have been 200,000–350,000. One report claims that both offensives, Operation Vigilant Resolve and Operation Phantom Fury, created 200,000 internally displaced persons who are still living elsewhere in Iraq. Reports claim that up to 6000 civilians died throughout the operation.

Reports of US forces using white phosphorus, prohibited by Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (1980), were initially denied and eventually claimed to have been only used on combatants.

In case any mistakes were left undone, the time has come to make them.

US forces and Iraqi government forces are laying waste to Sadr City, the vast –2.5 million souls– sprawling slum extending east from Baghdad.

Four hundred Iraqis, reportedly only 10% militia fighters, are estimated to have died in the onslaught on Sadr City alone.

American soldiers are also dying in and around Baghdad in elevated numbers. … In April, of the 51 American deaths in Iraq, more than twenty evidently took place in the ongoing battle for Sadr City or greater Baghdad

The civilians?

For the Iraqis of Sadr City, of course, this is a living hell. (”Sadr City right now is like a city of ghosts,” Abu Haider al-Bahadili, a Mahdi Army fighter told Amit R. Paley of the Washington Post. “It has turned from a city into a field of battle.”) As in all colonial wars, all wars on the peripheries, the “natives” always die in staggeringly higher numbers than the far better armed occupation or expeditionary forces.

This is no less true now, especially since the U.S. military has wheeled in its Abrams tanks, brought out its 200-pound guided rockets, and called in air power in a major way. Planes, helicopters, and Hellfire-missile-armed drones are now all regularly firing into the heavily populated urban neighborhoods of the east Baghdad slum.

Let Tom Englehardt tell you about it.

Entire sections of Baghdad’s embattled Sadr City district have been left nearly abandoned by civilians fleeing a U.S.-led showdown with Shiite militias and seeking aid after facing shortages of food and medicine, humanitarian groups said Wednesday.

Washington Post