Fallujah struggles to rebuild after ISIS
City initially embraced militants; fighters left explosives rigged to kill people returning home
FALLUJAH, Iraq — Even as Iraqi forces in Mosul close in on the last pockets of urban territory still held by the Islamic State group, residents of Fallujah in Iraq’s Sunni heartland are still struggling to rebuild nearly a year after their neighborhoods were declared liberated from the extremists.
After declaring the city liberated last June, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called the victory a major step toward unifying Iraq more than two years after nearly a third of the country fell to ISIS. “Fallujah has returned to the nation,” he declared in a speech broadcast nationwide.
But in the months that followed, while the Iraqi government compiled databases and set up tight checkpoints on the main roads in and out of Fallujah to screen residents for suspected ties with ISIS, it provided little in the way of reconstruction money, local officials say. Sheikh Talib Al-Hasnawi, the head of Fallujah’s municipal council, said international aid is what has provided electricity, repaired water pumps and built filtration systems.
“We have a real problem with [ISIS] sleeper cells,” he said, adding that what Fallujah needs most is a strong security force to prevent the extremists from re-establishing a foothold in the city some 40 miles west of Baghdad. “Honestly the support from Baghdad has been very weak,” he added, noting that his repeated requests for more equipment and arms for the city’s local police have gone unheeded.
“So mostly we are relying on the civilians to alert us to threats,” he said. “All we can provide are the very basics.”
Dr. Mahdi al-Alak, the Secretary-General of the Iraqi Cabinet, said the government has budgeted about $19.5 billion for stabilization-related projects in Anbar Province, where Fallujah is located.
Al-Alak said two new water plants in the al-Baghdadi and Fallujah area have been built, with seven others “rehabilitated.”
Al-Alak acknowledged the budget does not cover health care infrastructure, for which about $39.8 million is needed to repair 22 damaged health centers.
Located in the heart of the province, Fallujah has a long history of anti-government sentiment. After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 toppled Saddam Hussein, many of the city’s residents supported a Sunni insurgency that rose up against U.S. forces and the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
In 2014, many in Fallujah welcomed ISIS when the militants took over following a bloody government crackdown on thousands of protesters camped out on the city’s outskirts to challenge the increasingly sectarian rule of then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
After the fight to retake Fallujah from ISIS, the city was left a ghost town. It had been entirely emptied of its civilian population by Iraqi security forces and ISIS fighters had left behind hundreds of explosives rigged to kill those who tried to return.
“I had never seen anything like it and I can assure you no one else has,” said Pehr Lodhammer, a demining expert with the U.N.’s Mine Action Service who has worked in the field for decades. In Fallujah he said his team cleared 289 explosive remnants and 333 so-called improvised explosive devices, bombs that ISIS now produces on an industrial scale.
On Fallujah’s main streets, shops and buildings are a patchwork of destruction and revival.
As the fight for Mosul continues — closely backed by the U.S.-led coalition and heavily reliant on airpower to clear territory — reconstruction costs will only mount.
Rebuilding Mosul will cost between $50 billion and $100 billion, according to initial estimates from the Nineveh governor’s office and the provincial council.
Khaldoon Ibrahim, a teacher from Fallujah’s Shurta neighborhood said he returned to the city with his family last September, the day he heard civilians were being allowed back in.
“Of course not everything is available,” he said. “But if we waited for everything to be fixed we would never be able to come home.”