Word: fallujah
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...became clear that the U.S.-led coalition would invade Iraq, he and his family--his mother Haseeba, three brothers, their wives and six children--sold his late father's house near Basra and moved to his mother's ancestral home in a quiet, dusty town west of Baghdad: Fallujah. "We were sure that there would be no fighting there. The Americans would not attack it, and the Iraqi army would not bother to defend it," he recalls, "because there's nothing important in Fallujah. It was like an old car that nobody wanted." As Sunni Muslims, the family thought they...
...year later, with Fallujah turning into a stronghold of the insurgency and gun battles breaking out on their street almost every day, the family moved again--this time to Ramadi, the capital of the restive Anbar province. Ramadi soon went the way of Fallujah, its streets controlled by jihadist gangs fighting pitched battles with U.S. Marines. One day an extremist cleric visited Waddah's home and urged the four brothers to join the holy war against the Americans. When the brothers refused, the cleric threatened to let loose his fighters on the family. The only way out was to move...
While Waddah languished in captivity, his family embarked on an agonizing quest to try to find him. His mother Haseeba, 65, took charge of the situation, as befits a traditional Arab matriarch. Realizing that the search for Waddah would require manpower, she dispatched two of her sons to Fallujah and Ramadi to summon as many cousins and uncles as they could muster. Her oldest son Mohammed's job was to canvass the neighborhood to identify the "sheiks"--older men, heads of important families that had lived there a long time and could be tapped for local knowledge and advice. Their...
Instead Haseeba recruited a distant cousin in Fallujah who was reputed to have contacts with the Sunni insurgency. His job was to inquire whether Waddah was being held by one of them. She was horrified when the cousin asked for a fee for that service: $1,000. He explained that the money was not for him but for his contacts. "I think he put most of it into his own pocket," she says. "But at that time, I could not afford to refuse." The days of waiting turned into weeks, and still there was no ransom demand. Some...
...politic and supported early "off-ramps" from Iraq for our forces. Officers who served in Iraq say they asked for more forces several times, but those requests did not make it to the top. At least twice in meetings with President Bush in 2004 - once before the April 2004 Fallujah attack and again before another operation there in November - the President asked Abizaid if he had everything he needed and Abizaid said...