Operation Phantom Fury: The Turning Point of the Iraq War

Iraq, November 2004. Saddam Hussein had been captured, the Iraqi government had fractured, and the Americans had long since proclaimed victory — but the war still went on. In the city of Fallujah, thousands of well-armed, international insurgents had gathered together to make ready for battle. The man believed to hide at their center: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who had very recently been crowned First Emir of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The troops who would have to go into Fallujah and find him: six and a half thousand US Marines, backed up by the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the British, and the Iraqis. Codenamed Operation Phantom Fury, the Second Battle of Fallujah would be the bloodiest of the entire Iraq War, and the bloodiest in Marine history since Vietnam.

Key Takeaways

• The Second Battle of Fallujah was the bloodiest engagement for the US Marines since Vietnam, with 95 Americans killed and 560 wounded between November 7 and December 23, 2004.
• Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the primary high-value target, likely fled Fallujah before the battle began, leaving the operation’s top objective unfulfilled.
• The US deception campaign successfully oriented insurgent defenses south-southeast using a fake military base, while the main assault came from the north.
• Marines and Army troops cleared approximately 30,000 buildings room-by-room, engaging in hundreds of firefights across six weeks of urban combat.
• Over 300,000 civilians evacuated Fallujah before the battle, but an estimated 800 to as many as 6,000 civilians were killed according to varying sources.
• Al-Zarqawi’s group Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in October 2004 and later became the Islamic State of Iraq, a precursor to ISIS.

From Shock and Awe to Insurgency: How Iraq Unraveled After the Invasion

When it first kicked off in mid-March of 2003, the Iraq War was supposed to be an open-and-shut affair. It would be a repeat of what the United States had done at the head of a global coalition in Kosovo, and what they’d done in this same nation of Iraq during the Gulf War. A first wave of airstrikes would decapitate Iraq’s leadership, and ground troops from a coalition of nations would sweep in afterward to mop up the remains. The reality, of course, was anything but. After the early rounds of airstrikes failed to take out Saddam Hussein and his generals, the Western coalition had been forced to go to Plan B in tougher circumstances than anticipated, and while the excess meat of the Iraqi Army was overwhelmed rather quickly, its most loyal troops spread themselves out across the country, taking root and becoming conduits for a far more dangerous insurgency. For the disenfranchised and the angry across Iraq, the excesses of the Western coalition bred a powerful resentment, and when those same angry Iraqis started to look for the polar opposite of the Westerners, they found al-Qaeda, and the terror organization’s ranks swelled rapidly from there. By May, the coalition was making major missteps. On the first of the month, American President George Bush declared victory from aboard a US aircraft carrier, and two weeks later, the Iraqi Army and intelligence apparatus were both disbanded amidst an ongoing purge of Ba’athists, members of Saddam Hussein’s political party. As the coalition let its guard down, hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers flooded Iraq in search of a place to go. By the time Saddam Hussein was eventually captured in December of that year, the Iraqi resistance had already become a multi-headed hydra, and one that the United States seemed not to know how to deal with. Just weeks afterward, the United States took its first of several major black eyes across the course of the war: publicly, the Bush administration was forced to concede that its claims of weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpiles in Iraq had been a farce.

The Blackwater Ambush and the First Battle of Fallujah

By the time Operation Phantom Fury began, wartime momentum was no longer on the Americans’ side. Bogged down and forced to withstand suicide bombings, roadside explosives, and an increasingly hostile population, the United States settled into a defensive posture. They would strike outward when possible with raids and small-unit actions, but otherwise they’d try to keep some semblance of control over where they’d already developed a strong presence. On March 31, 2004, America’s situation went from bad to worse. The attack in question didn’t target uniformed American troops, but instead, a group of four contractors from the private military company, or PMC, known as Blackwater. The Blackwater team of four was tasked with protecting a convoy of food trucks on their way through Fallujah, a city with a pre-war population of about 250,000. In recent months, Fallujah had become a hive for insurgent activity, and as this particular convoy made its journey, those insurgents chose their moment to strike. The convoy traversed a major street in a neighborhood loyal to the Hussein government, and it was ambushed by a group of masked gunmen, who used not just AK-47s but rocket-propelled grenades to lay waste to the American trucks. Before long, the neighborhood was up in arms, but not against the insurgents; instead, an angry mob attacked the Blackwater contractors. Within minutes, they’d been killed, their bodies incinerated, and their corpses continued to be attacked by the crowd. One of the first reporters on the scene, Michael Georgy, would write later: “I was taking notes, trying to make sense of the furore, when a boy, who was probably aged about nine, approached. Standing over two blackened bodies, he offered to help me out. ‘We hung the others from a bridge. Would you like to see them? I can take you there.’” The Iraqi public’s brutal desecration of the Blackwater contractors’ corpses came as a shock to the global West. As more and more details emerged, the horror only grew worse. More news about the US’ own abuses emerged, including devastating accounts of American conduct and detainee treatment at the Abu Ghraib prison, and the animus that had led an Iraqi neighborhood of civilians to desecrate American corpses only continued to grow. In the United States, political demand escalated on both sides of the aisle to respond to the deaths of the contractors, less because of a desire to avenge them specifically, but far more to answer the symbolic value of their killings. The response they wanted was a full military incursion into the city of Fallujah, but the incursion they got, codenamed Operation Vigilant Resolve, achieved little. Operation Vigilant Resolve had kicked off before the news about Abu Ghraib came out, and happened contrary to the wishes of US Marine leaders on the ground, who were much more in favor of surgical strikes to dismantle the networks that had orchestrated the Blackwater attack. Instead, Fallujah got several weeks straight of American fire and fury, with thousands of Marines pitted against a large number of roving bands of insurgents using police weapons from RPGs to machine guns to mortars. The battle was marked by high civilian casualties, as well as the widespread capture of foreigners by the insurgents, who alternately executed them or attempted to use them as bargaining chips. When the battle finally concluded, the US withdrew in favor of leaving Fallujah in the hands of Iraq’s interim government — and that lasted for the span of a few weeks at best. By the time the dust settled, the United States’ reputation had been further eroded inside Iraq, the Fallujah Brigade that was supposed to watch over the city had given all their weapons away to a new round of insurgents, and those new insurgents had adopted a far more jihadist stance than had previously existed there. Fighters flooded into the city with impunity, many of them not even Iraqi but streaming in from other nations across the region.

Al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Road to Phantom Fury

With them came one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or, at least, that was according to American sources. Al-Zarqawi was the leader of a group called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which, in October of 2004, pledged itself to al-Qaeda just a couple of weeks before the Second Battle of Fallujah began. That group would later adopt a different name: the Islamic State of Iraq. Many of its members would go on to fight alongside ISIS a decade later. With over five thousand insurgents in Fallujah, America desperately in need of a win, and Iraq planning to hold elections in just two months’ time, the United States decided that it was time to end the ongoing problems in the city. The objective: to turn Fallujah from an insurgent stronghold to an inescapable trap, which the United States and their coalition would crush inward, and inward, and inward until the insurgents inside could not hope to hold out under the pressure. Prior to the start of the battle, the United States had a total of ten thousand, five hundred troops present outside the city of Fallujah. That number included 6,500 combat-ready Marines, supported by 1,500 Army soldiers, who would be tasked with carrying out the brunt of the attack. Backing them up were 2,500 Navy personnel, mostly in support roles. Naval and Air Force fighters and bombers would pitch in for the attack, as well as Marine helicopters and fighter jets. US Special Operations snipers descended upon the city en masse, prepared to support in the fiercest urban fighting that Fallujah would offer. Alongside the Americans were roughly two thousand Iraqi troops loyal to the international coalition; although they were of inconsistent and unpredictable combat quality, they would be invaluable in attempts to cooperate with the locals, evacuate civilians, and hold targets that America’s elite warfighters didn’t have time to bother with. Also on-scene were 850 members of the Black Watch, an infantry battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, although they, as well as members of Britain’s Special Air Service, would be kept out of the ground battle due to political tensions at home. On the other side of the battle, Fallujah was a mess of insurgencies, militias, and other fighting factions, all of which had a mess of competing loyalties and animosity toward each other. Those groups included al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna, the Army of Mohammed, the Army of the Mujahideen, the Secret Army of Iraq, the National Islamic Army, and several others. But despite the wide variety of motivations, beliefs, and shared histories among the groups, they were able to keep infighting to a minimum before and during the fighting. In their arsenal, they had a wide range of high-quality, Western small arms, some of which had been captured, and some that had come from the Iraqi police or even the US-led force that had been intended to watch Fallujah after the earlier fighting there. Among their ranks were Saudis, Libyans, Filipinos, Chechens, Syrians, and a wide range of other nationalities represented in smaller numbers.

Preparations, Deception, and the Emptying of Fallujah

The city itself would be, mercifully, emptied of civilians for the most part before the fighting began. All too aware of what had gone down earlier that same year, the people of Fallujah chose largely to get out of town before the fighting began, with no fewer than 300,000 people departing in a span of weeks. American checkpoints were mostly successful in keeping insurgents inside the city, although military-aged men were banned from leaving or entering even if they were unaffiliated with the insurgents. The US attempted to help the rest of the city’s occupants get out, distributing leaflets and relying on radio and audible outdoor broadcasts, but several tens of thousands of civilians still remained when the battle kicked off. But it wouldn’t just be civilians that the United States would have to contend with. Instead, the entire city of Fallujah would be an indispensable asset for the defenders. Having a large city at one’s disposal is typically a massive advantage to a defending army. The Iraqi insurgents had taken full advantage, setting up booby traps, laying explosives, establishing outposts for snipers and small teams of fighters, and storing caches of ammunition and other supplies in order to sustain a long siege. They would rely on the cover of buildings to avoid satellite and aerial intelligence, they would rely on heavy industrial architecture to withstand bombs dropped from above, and they would set up ambush upon ambush upon ambush, hoping to lure as many Americans as possible to their deaths at close range. In the weeks leading to the battle, the US-led coalition gathered a wealth of intelligence on enemy positions, learning from the lesson of the first battle of Fallujah. They would kick off a concerted deception campaign, trying to disseminate misleading information and send mixed signals to the defending insurgents. The Army and the Marines spent the whole month of October getting into lock-step with each other, to the point that their tactics and operating procedures were fully integrated by the start of the battle. On the other side, the insurgents pivoted their defense to face south-southeast, toward where they believed an attack would come. They planted hundreds of improvised explosive devices throughout the city, dug trenches and tunnels that would grant them room to pivot or escape attack, and they barricaded roads and alleys in an effort to funnel coalition troops into ambushes. But what the insurgents didn’t know is that their defense was pointed in the wrong direction. The United States had constructed a fake military base located south-southeast of the city, and had launched probing deception attacks from that direction, while the real assault would come from an angle the insurgents wouldn’t see coming.

The Battle: Assault from Three Directions

Operation Phantom Fury commenced on the seventh of November, 2004. With their path indicated to them by Navy SEALs and Marine Recon snipers performing reconnaissance around the fringes of the city, a number of US infantry, tank, and armored battalions and companies attacked the city. They were supported by a battalion of Iraqi commandoes, and their handlers from US Special Forces. The units stormed Fallujah’s western outskirts, capturing Fallujah General Hospital, as well as the bridge where the Blackwater contractors had been hung months ago. From there, the troops fired mortars into south Fallujah, and secured a major bridge to cross the Euphrates River into the city proper. Forty-two insurgents died in this phase of the attack. But all this was a diversion. Not only had the US pointed the insurgents into a south-southeast orientation and now attacked from the south and the west, but the real assault was coming from a third direction. After Navy Seabees cut the power at two substations just outside the city, Fallujah’s northern edge came under attack by two Marine regiments, four Marine infantry battalions, and several Army mechanized and cavalry regiments. The force began a major push into the city, while other elements infiltrated Fallujah from different angles and circled around to catch fleeing insurgents. Alongside the main push, three teams of seven Navy SEAL snipers each infiltrated the city as a vanguard, alongside a platoon from Marine Recon. The Air Force sent in Joint Terminal Attack Controllers to organize bombing and attack runs from F-15 and F-16 fighters, A-10 attack planes, B-52 bombers, and AC-130 gunships. Unmanned Predator drones carried out additional precision strikes, while U-2 spy planes kept watch over the entire battlefield. Through the entire early push, Fallujah was lit up with crushing artillery fire, while Navy Seabees used armored bulldozers to plow through streets and disrupt the barricades the insurgents had so carefully organized. The American advance was a careful one, with many combat units choosing to go house-by-house, clearing every building in every city block, rather than only clearing the ones from which they’d been fired upon. Battalion commanders were at liberty to choose how they would proceed, causing some units to advance faster than others — not just because some chose to ingress without clearing every building, but because some had, say, tanks, while others had to wait in long lines to get a strafing run from close air support. Those inconsistencies allowed insurgent forces to infiltrate through holes in the American advance, springing up behind units who thought they’d already cleared an area because the next-nearest battalion hadn’t kept pace. But by the end of the third day of hostilities, the American coalition had largely fixed these issues, and some units had reached as far as halfway into the city.

Six Weeks of Urban Combat: Room by Room Through Fallujah

Although the battle lasted a total of just over six weeks, the real meat of the fighting took place in the first week, with a majority of insurgents cleared out by November 13. But the fighting itself was highly inconsistent. Some districts offered hardly any resistance, including ones that the Americans had thought would be well-defended, while others were heavily saturated with insurgent forces and traps. Rather than risk precious lives in order to clear the most dangerous areas, the US chose to rely on a time-tested approach to urban combat: using airstrikes and heavy artillery to level a city block or a district nearly to the ground, and then advancing through the rubble with a combination of infantry, tanks, combat engineers, and other units to mop up whatever remained. The US also caught a lucky break for much of the battle: the insurgent forces proved unwilling to attack throughout the night, and as a result, coalition troops could enjoy relatively restful evenings before returning to battle. In defense of Fallujah, insurgent forces almost exclusively kept to buildings where they had some cover, and could fight American troops one-on-one or two-on-two rather than try and stand up to entire squads. Small teams of insurgents would attempt to hold individual buildings, sowing chaos with rifles, IEDs, and RPGs before withdrawing to the next building, and the next, and the next. Others, the ones inclined to pursue martyrdom, would carry out suicide bombings or launch kamikaze attacks, sometimes lying in wait until coalition forces believed they’d cleared out an area before making their move. In their own ideal world, the insurgents would have created a close-range fight, so at every opportunity, the Americans pushed for the opposite: wherever possible, defenders who were holed up inside a building would be dealt with by artillery, heavy fighting vehicles, and airstrikes rather than infantry units. In all, the Marines and the Army would have to clear some thirty thousand buildings, going room-to-room and engaging in hundreds of firefights. Their support units would use thousands of artillery and mortar rounds, hundreds of air-to-ground bombs, hundreds of aerial rockets, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of machine-gun fire. Against that firepower, the insurgents couldn’t hope to hold out for long, and after the first week, the battle settled into a far quieter second stage. The coalition’s objective was to root out, corner, and deal with the small pockets of insurgency still holding out throughout the city. Other troops would turn backward and dismantle the insurgent defenses that had been set up across Fallujah, defusing IEDs and finding any enemy fighters still trying to hide out. Civilians were processed and brought back into the city, humanitarian efforts kicked off, and by December 23, 2004, the Second Battle of Fallujah had concluded.

Casualties, Destruction, and the Elusive Al-Zarqawi

Although the battle would be remembered as a resounding victory by the US coalition, it would also be the bloodiest battle, on the American side, of the entire war. The United States would see ninety-five of its troops killed, including fifty-four who had died during the early days of heavy fighting, and 560 more wounded. Four British troops were killed, ten wounded, while eight Iraqis were killed and forty-three wounded. On the insurgent side, the totals were far greater: somewhere between 1,200 and upward of two thousand killed, with another 1,500 captured. According to the Red Cross, 800 civilians were killed in the bloodshed, while many thousands of people were permanently displaced. The city of Fallujah was destroyed; countless homes had been razed to the ground, along with sixty mosques, many of which had been used as ammunition caches by the insurgency. Some three-quarters of buildings in the city would sustain some form of damage, with a full fifth of them nearly or completely destroyed. It would take years for the population to return, and even today, the city has not fully recovered. In terms of America’s combat objectives, the death or capture of several thousand insurgents was certainly a success in itself, but even with the devastation they’d left behind, many of their higher objectives had gone unfulfilled. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had never been located; later estimates would suggest that he likely left the city before the battle ever started. Most of the high-level insurgents believed to be inside Fallujah had done the same.

Long-Term Impact: From Fallujah to the Rise of the Islamic State

Iraq’s many militias and jihadist organizations would learn their lesson; rather than try and hold out in city strongholds, they took to the countryside, and waged a far more asymmetrical campaign. Within two years of the battle, the entire province around Fallujah had descended into the control of insurgents, and the nearby city of Ramadi had been taken over — even as Fallujah, now thoroughly beaten into submission, stayed quiet. The city would be turned over to Iraq in 2007, by which time jihadists around the city had learned to use the American presence in Fallujah to their own advantage. By then, Iraqi and American troops had sustained a long barrage of attacks anytime they left the city. Politically, the battle wasn’t nearly the win that the United States had hoped for. The US and the rest of their coalition drew heavy criticism for their use of white phosphorus during the battle, a substance that melts the skin and innards of those it’s used against. Video footage would later emerge of civilians, including children, who had sustained horrific chemical burns from the substance. Other US troops would face condemnation for their killing of wounded insurgents, their decision to stop fighting-age men from leaving the city regardless of their affiliation to the insurgents, and the high numbers of dead civilians. Some estimates ran far higher than the 800 the Red Cross reported; according to Iraqi non-governmental organizations, the true number may have been as high as six thousand. And when the situation in Iraq continued to sour, and news broke that the highest-profile insurgents hadn’t even been caught up in the fighting, the whole thing began to look more and more like a needless act of bloodletting than a highly competent military incursion. Militarily, the battle was a textbook example of twenty-first-century urban combat, and a lesson for urban attackers in neutralizing the advantages a city confers upon its defenders. But on a much more fundamental level, the battle was one that would leave thousands upon thousands of Iraqis dead, be they insurgents, coalition troops, or civilians. It would leave an indelible mark on the American war effort, and devastate the lives of many US and coalition troops, even those who survived the operation without injury. From the rest of the Iraq War, to the rise and fall of the Islamic State, to the situation in Iraq today, the legacy of Operation Phantom Fury has endured across decades.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Iraq War documentary on Netflix?

The context provided does not specify the title of an Iraq War documentary on Netflix, but it mentions Operation Phantom Fury, which took place in November 2004, seven months after the First Battle of Fallujah, an attempt to capture or kill insurgent elements involved in the 2004 conflict.

Why did America bomb Iraq?

America bombed Iraq as part of the Iraq War, which began in March 2003, with the goal of decapitating Iraq’s leadership, including Saddam Hussein, and defeating the Iraqi Army, but the war evolved into a complex conflict involving insurgency and sectarian violence.

Why did the Second Battle of Fallujah happen?

The Second Battle of Fallujah, codenamed Operation Phantom Fury, occurred in November 2004, as a response to the growing insurgency in Fallujah, where thousands of well-armed international insurgents had gathered, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

What happened during the battle of Fallujah?

During the Second Battle of Fallujah, which began on November 7, 2004, a coalition of American, British, and Iraqi forces, including 6,500 US Marines, launched an offensive against insurgent strongholds in the city, resulting in intense urban warfare, with 110 coalition forces killed and 600 wounded, making it the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War.

What percent of Fallujah was destroyed?

The context provided does not specify the exact percentage of Fallujah that was destroyed during the Second Battle of Fallujah, but it is known that the city suffered significant damage and destruction, with many buildings and homes reduced to rubble.

What is the story behind Saddam Hussein?

Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iraq from 1979 until his overthrow in 2003, and his capture in December 2003, he was a key figure in the Iraq War, and his regime was accused of human rights abuses and possessing weapons of mass destruction, which was later found to be a false claim.

Why did the US dislike Saddam Hussein?

The US disliked Saddam Hussein due to his authoritarian regime, human rights abuses, and perceived threat to regional stability, as well as his refusal to comply with UN inspections and sanctions, which led to the Iraq War, with the goal of removing him from power and preventing the potential use of weapons of mass destruction.

What do the US Marines do?

The US Marines are an elite fighting force and a branch of the US military, founded in 1775, with the primary mission of conducting amphibious and expeditionary operations, and they played a key role in the Iraq War, including the Second Battle of Fallujah, where they were the main ground force involved in the operation.

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