Led by the 1st Marine Division and supported by U.S. Later re-named Operation New Dawn, it incorporated the painful lessons learned from Operation Vigilant Resolve. 7, 2004, a second, larger campaign was launched: Operation Phantom Fury. Lowry deftly sets the stage, summarizing the situation in Iraq following the defeat of Saddam Hussein and of the pivotal event that launched the concerted campaign against the insurgents in Al Anbar province the ambush, brutal killing, and display of the mutilated bodies of four Blackwater security guards on March 31, 2004.Īmerica’s first response was Operation Vigilant Resolve, and Lowry cogently presents the missteps that contributed to the failure of that short-lived campaign. New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah is an extraordinary and incredibly detailed account of the seven-week campaign by American troops to wrest Fallujah from the fanatical and determined insurgents.Īuthor Richard S. Crucial to that effort was seizing the city that served as the insurgent base of operations and had become a symbol of opposition to the new Iraqi government: Fallujah. Though insurgent attacks occurred throughout Iraq, senior Coalition commanders and Iraqi government officials realized that the key to success for a new Iraq was restoring order in the lawless Al Anbar province. New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah, by Richard S. Exploiting all this was a witches’ brew of well armed and supplied insurgents including al Qaeda, unemployed and angry former Ba’athists, and ex-Iraqi Republican Army troops, as well as a growing flood of anti-American insurgents recruited from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. The general population, still shell-shocked over the wrenching upheaval in their lives, distrusted the new government and resented the American troops, viewing them as occupiers and not liberators. The recently-installed Iraqi government was a fragile coalition whose members were unused to their new nation-building responsibilities the reconstituted Iraqi army and security forces, purged of Ba’ath Party members, were poorly trained, paid, and motivated, and were unreliable the Iraqi infrastructure was in shambles. Less than a year later, in early 2004, America found itself confronting the all-too-real probability that it was about to lose the peace. In 2003, the U.S.-led Coalition in Operation Iraqi Freedom had won the war, toppling dictator Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party regime.
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