The long-awaited liberation of Fallujah this week came with minimal damage to the city’s infrastructure, Iraqi officials claim, unlike the disastrous campaign to free Ramadi from ISIS, in which bomb damage and civilian casualties amounted to a Pyrrhic victory.
(FOX)– Backed by U.S. air power – which on Wednesday took out a convoy of 250 fleeing ISIS fighters on the outskirts of the city — government forces carefully recaptured Fallujah over a five-week period. Photos obtained by FoxNews.com show damage to the city, but nothing like the destruction seen in last December’s retaking of Ramadi, some 30 miles west.
“The city is damaged, but nothing like [others where ISIS has been dislodged],” said an Iraqi with direct knowledge of the Fallujah campaign. “This was a well-planned operation, led by [Iraq’s U.S.-trained] Golden Division.”
Grateful residents are eager to move back into their city to rebuild it, as well as their lives.
“Many sacrifices have been made by the army, police and the crowd,” said Mojtahid Alanbar, a Fallujah resident who survived the two-year occupation by ISIS. “If the decision was mine I would have made a statue for every fighter in the [battle] against terrorism. These heroes are examples of courage when faced with Da’esh.”
Most of the city’s population, which once numbered more than 300,000, is being housed in desert camps outside its borders while the army clears streets and buildings of mines and booby traps. That work could only begin after the last of the ISIS fighters were driven from the city that once served as the jihadist army’s Anbar Province stronghold.