system of patronage: Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 277.
home to many military officers: Steven Komarow, “Favored by Saddam, Fallujah Seething Since His Fall,” USA Today, April 1, 2004.
night-vision goggles: Rubin and McManus, “Why America Has Waged.”
another seventy-five injured: “Violent Response: The U.S. Army in al-Fallujah,” Human Rights Watch, June 2003.
compensation even as a gesture: Al-Anbar Awakening: U.S. Marines and Counterinsurgency in Iraq, 2004–2009, vol. I, ed. Chief Warrant Officer-4 Timothy S. McWilliams and Lieutenant Colonel Kurtis P. Wheeler (Marine Corps University Press, 2009), 242.
“the massacre” for years afterward: Ibid., 242.
proud Fallujans rejected it: Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 223. By contrast, after the two large urban battles in Fallujah, the Marines undertook a painstaking process to distribute compensation to the families affected by the violence.
rocket-propelled grenades: Eric Westervelt and Melissa Block, “U.S. General Unhurt as Insurgents Attack Iraqi Facility,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, February 12, 2004.
freed eighty-seven prisoners: Paul Wiseman, “Beleaguered Police Keep Faces Hidden in Fallujah,” USA Today, February 15, 2004.
twenty Iraqi policemen: “Fallujah Mayor Questioned in Police Station Attack,” CNN, February 16, 2004.
“lying in wait for him”: “New ‘al Qaeda’ Warning on Iraq,” BBC, April 6, 2004.
Los Angeles Police Department: Interview with James N. Mattis in Al-Anbar Awakening, vol. I, 25.
through a few weeks earlier: Dexter Filkins, “Up to 16 Die in Gun Battles in Sunni Areas of Iraq,” New York Times, March 27, 2004.
two more with homemade bombs: Dexter Filkins, “Marine and 11 Iraqis Die During Fighting in Sunni Triangle,” New York Times, March 26, 2004.
the cloverleaf to its east: “Marines of RCT-1 conduct offensive actions at the northeastern sector of the city of Fallujah, succeeded in taking control of the Cloverleaf intersection.” Kenneth W. Estes, “U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq, 2003–2006” (occasional paper), United States Marine Corps History Division, 147.
the detainees got away: Interview with task force member.
police chief in Fallujah: Interview with James T. Conway in Al-Anbar Awakening, vol. I, 49.
within seventy-two hours: Interview with James N. Mattis, Al-Anbar Awakening, 34 and 36.
Mosul, Aleppo, and Amman: Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Beacon Press, 2005), xii.
even before the attack began: Carter Malkasian, “Signaling Resolve, Democratization, and the First Battle of Fallujah,” The Journal of Strategic Studies (June 2006), 438.
newspapers repeated these claims: “After U.S. artillery hit a mosque that the Americans said had been sheltering insurgents, [Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed] Mansur reported that a family had been killed in a car parked behind the mosque. He also said 25 members of a family were killed when their house was hit” (Rubin and McManus, “Why America Has Waged”).
did not shoot any artillery: Interview with James N. Mattis, Al-Anbar Awakening, 36.