purple heart recipients phantom fury fallujah

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The majority still lacked electricity, and the city’s sewage and water systems, badly damaged in the campaign, were not functional. Five months after the campaign, only 90,000 of the city’s evacuated residents had returned. As The Washington Post reported in April 2005, more than half of Fallujah’s 39,000 homes were damaged, of which 10,000 were no longer habitable. Though the military did not tally civilian casualties, independent reports put the number somewhere between 800 and 6,000. Caputi later co-founded the group Justice for Fallujah, which dedicated the week of November 14 to a public awareness campaign about the impact of the war on the city’s peopleīy the end of the campaign, Fallujah was a ghost town. Ross Caputi, who served as a first private Marine during the siege, has said that his squad and others employed “reconnaissance by fire,” firing into dwellings before entering to make sure nobody inside was still alive. Ground forces then combed through targeted neighborhoods house by house.

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military launched a series of airstrikes, dropping incendiary bombs on suspected insurgent hideouts. Thirty to fifty thousand people were still inside the city when the U.S.

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forces temporarily withdrew from Fallujah and planned for a full onslaught.įollowing the evacuation of civilians, Marines cordoned off the city, even as some residents scrambled to escape. The following February, amid mounting tensions, a local militia beheaded four Blackwater employees and strung their bodies from a bridge across the Euphrates River. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne division fired into a crowd of protesters demonstrating against the occupation and the closure of their local school building, killing 17 civilians and injuring 70. The first sign of serious hostility appeared in April 2003, after U.S. The United States did not expect to encounter resistance in Fallujah, nor did it initially face any in the early days of the war. military forces launched Operation Phantom Fury 50 miles west of Baghdad in Fallujah, a city of 350,000 people known for its opposition to the Saddam regime. But the crisis, and its possible connection to weapons deployed by the United States during the war, remains woefully under-examined. invasion of Fallujah, there are reports of an alarming rise in the rates of birth defects and cancer.