city of 285,000: Rubin and McManus, “Why America Has Waged.”
boasting 133 of them: Multi-National Forces–Iraq, “Operation Al Fajr: Roll Up” (briefing), November 28, 2004.
produced chemical weapons: Jon Lee Anderson, “Letter from Baghdad: Invasions,” New Yorker, March 24, 2003.
a long, combustible history: Iraqis with a better historical memory than our own knew this was not the first time the Fallujah area had been scene to a murder that drew the ire of a superpower and altered geopolitics. Much of this story is found in H. V. F. Winstone, Leachman: “O.C. Desert”: The Life of Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Leachman DSO (Quartet Books, 1982), 215–20.
In August 1920, eighty-four years before the contractors’ SUVs merged onto the asphalt of Highway 10, a British lieutenant colonel named Gerard Leachman and his Iraqi driver motored the same road from Baghdad toward Fallujah, stopping at a police station outside the city. A contemporary of T. E. Lawrence, Leachman was a skilled Arabist who had been deployed to the Middle East during the First World War. Now, with Mesopotamia under British control, Leachman was the political officer responsible for a stretch from Najaf to Ramadi in Anbar, or as the desert district was known then, due to its largest confederation, Dulaim. With what Lawrence described as “a plucked face and neck,” Leachman “was full of courage” but had “an abiding contempt for everything native,” (T.E. Lawrence to Alec Dixon, The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett [Jonathan Cape, 1938], 489–91). Years earlier, in the midst of the First World War, Lawrence had sent Leachman away from his desert camp because he treated his Arab servant “so unmercifully.”
On the day the thin tires of Leachman’s armored Rolls-Royce scratched to a stop in the sandy lot of a police station outside Fallujah, Iraq was upset by revolt. The Shia tribes in the south were rising against British occupation following their exclusion from the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, which had given the British mandate over the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra—thus creating Iraq. Hostility toward the British occupation had blown north, and some of the Sunni sheikhs in the Anbar stretch were considering joining the revolt alongside the southern Shias. Leachman was there to meet with a local tribal leader, Sheikh Dhari. The meeting did not go well: Dhari had just met in secret with “hostile shaikhs,” while Leachman was now advocating “wholesale slaughter” against insurrecting tribes. Whether the sheikh or his son fired the shot isn’t clear, but Leachman took a bullet in the back and died. News of Leachman’s murder uncorked the rebellion, and within two weeks the upper Euphrates was under revolt.
The revolt inaugurated a long and uncomfortable relationship between Iraqis and foreign forces. By the time Britain regained control of the provinces, it had deployed one hundred thousand British and Indian troops and spent tens of millions of pounds sterling. Faced with the rising cost of occupation and a diminishing defense budget, then–War Secretary Winston Churchill suggested that employing the Royal Air Force would offer “a prompt and drastic curtailment of expenditure” in Iraq. (Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume IV Companion, Part Z, Documents July 1919–March 1921 [William Heinemann, 1977], 1078). For the rest of the mandate, the British policed Iraq’s vaster tribal areas through aerial surveillance and bombing runs.
British planes returned to Fallujah twice more before the century was over. Following a coup in 1941 in which the Iraqi government in Baghdad sought to align with the Axis powers, British relief forces coming east from Palestine through Syria fought a series of battles against the Iraqis, pushing them down through Anbar toward Baghdad. Fighting bunched up at Fallujah, and the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe bombed each other in and around the city, pummeling the area. The British bombed the city again in the 1991 Gulf War, aiming for its bridges across the Euphrates, but an errant bomb reportedly killed scores of civilians. (Ahmed Hashin, Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq [Cornell University Press, 2006], 27).