A year after President George W. Bush launched the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, four U.S. civilian security contractors in SUVs took an ill-fated turn into the Iraqi city of Falluja.
I was taking notes, trying to make sense of the furore, when a boy, who was probably aged about nine, approached. Standing over two blackened bodies, he offered to help me out.The attack in Falluja, 32 miles west of Baghdad, and those violent scenes heralded not just more attacks on U.S. troops but a broad insurgency that swelled the ranks first of Al Qaeda and then Islamic State, miring Iraq in conflict andFalluja still bears the scars of battles that have raged through its streets.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and insurgents were killed in the years that followed the U.S. invasion, launched on the basis of a U.S. charge that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, a claim that proved a chimera. Paul Bremer, who governed Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority for 13 months after Saddam Hussein was toppled, said the Falluja attack was "certainly a horrendous act" but he told Reuters in a March 14 interview that U.S. forces were not deployed in sufficient number in Iraq to prevent the worsening of security.Ultimately Bremer disbanded Iraq's army, leaving 400,000 soldiers without jobs, which Western and Iraqi critics of the U.S.
"I am happy to see this," said one 12-year-old onlooker, a boy called Mohammad. "The Americans are occupying us so this is what will happen." Under Saddam Hussein's repressive rule, Sunnis in Falluja and across Iraq had been the main beneficiaries of official patronage in business, government posts and the army, while Shi'ites were sidelined. That changed after the U.S. invasion.
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