The Second Battle of Fallujah

The United States Marines were fighting the Second Battle of Fallujah, a major city in the heart of Iraq’s Anbar Province in the so-called Sunni triangle. It was one of the fiercest battles of the war, the fiercest of many recent wars. It was urban warfare at its bloodiest—a block-by-block, house-by-house, room-by-room infantry battle that has been compared to the World War II Battle of Stalingrad.

In the middle of the battle, an incident occurred that had the potential to become a defining atrocity of the Iraq War. It was November 13, 2004, about 18 months after the United States invaded the country, more than a year after a full-bore insurgency arose, and 6 months after evidence of U.S. abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib had provoked outrage in Iraq, the region, the U.S., and the rest of the world.