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Two years after Fallujah became one of the first prizes claimed by ISIS, the Iraqi city is a ghost town where fearful residents turn on one another and resistance is met with unspeakable brutality, according to sources trapped inside the Pittsburgh-sized community just 40 miles west of Baghdad.

A Turkish court on Thursday charged a Syrian national suspected of plotting to slam speedboats packed with explosives into cruise ships loaded with Israeli tourists, lawyers and police said. According to The AP, defense lawyer Ilhami Sayan said the suspect, identified in the Turkish media as Lu'ai Sakra, was charged with membership in an "illegal organization." He was arrested earlier this month. Police said Sakra was linked to al-Qaeda. "I have no regrets," Sakra shouted to journalists as he was led into the courthouse. "I was going to attack Israeli ships. If they come, my friends will attack them." "I...

The Islamic State overran an Iraqi military base and killed dozens of soldiers and policemen in an attack near Fallujah in Anbar province, where the government has been trying to dislodge the group for the past year.In a newly released video, the Islamic State showcases its forces overrunning a military outpost near the city. The video shows jihadists attacking the base with armored personnel carriers packed with explosives and a ground assault team. The Islamic State seized tanks, armored personnel carriers, Humvees, and other vehicles. The bodies of dozens of dead Iraqi security personnel are displayed.The exact date the assault...

On Special Report tonight, Charles Krauthammer noted that Obama occasionally stumbles on the truth, as he did when he admitted that his administration does not yet have a strategy to defeat ISIS; but as is always the case with this president it’s never his fault when something goes wrong. “The reason is Obama’s entire strategy rests on the notion that trained Iraqis under this government are going to carry the fight to ISIS,” Krauthammer said, noting that strategy has failed in Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah. “This is a country that was abandoned by Obama in 2011 and threw in its...

Iraqi troops and Shiite militias recaptured key parts of the refinery town of Beiji from ISIS Sunday, a general said. The victory comes a day after Iraqi forces were able to withstand two attacks from ISIS in the hotly contested Anbar province Saturday. The commander of the Interior Ministry's Quick Reaction Forces, Brig. Gen. Nassir al-Fartousi, told state TV that the Iraqi flag was raised on a local government building in Beiji and that troops were advancing to other areas, without elaborating. The spokesman of Joint Operations Command, Brig. Gen. Saad Maan Ibrahim, said the security forces "are now controlling"...

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN)ISIS has closed off a dam to the north of the Iraqi city of Ramadi -- seized by its forces last month -- cutting water supplies to pro-government towns downstream and making it easier for its fighters to attack forces loyal to Baghdad, local officials and residents said. ISIS militants are opening only two or three of the dam's 26 gates on the Euphrates River for brief periods daily, the officials and residents said. The head of the security council in the town of Khalidiyah, Sheikh Ibrahim Khalaf al-Fahdawi, and two residents of the nearby town of Habbaniya...

Let us never forget those who gave their life for our freedoms. Remembering the brave men and women who gave their “last full measure of devotion” for our freedoms requires us to take a moment on this Memorial Day to focus on the individuals behind the numbers and remember they are not just names on a wall. One of those individuals who gave everything he had for us was Marine Captain John J. McKenna IV who was killed on August 16, 2006 during an operation in Fallujah, Iraq. The story of John McKenna’s life and death is the story of...

President Obama’s assertion in his commencement address to cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that the rise of ISIS in Syria and Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the brutality of both, is somehow linked to climate change shows just how dangerously detached from reality U.S. foreign policy has become. For those who wondered why upwards of two hundred thousand have died in Syria, Boko Haram abducts Christian schoolgirls, and ISIS beheads and burns people alive in its reign of terror, the president placed a major part of the blame on fossil fuels and your SUV. I understand climate change...

With every stroke of sculptor John Phelps’ steady hand, the clay began to take shape. First, there was a skeleton that soon began to look more and more like one Marine in uniform; then there were three. Before long, their faces twisted and contorted to depict the horrors of combat. The nonprofit veteran service organization Hope for the Warriors commissioned Phelps to immortalize the now-iconic “Hell House” photo taken by Lucian Read during the battle for Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. The photo depicted two Marine lance corporals carrying a bloodied 1st Sgt. Bradley Kasal out of a house following a...

BAGHDAD - - A year after ISIL fighters captured Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar province, the country’s Shiite-led government remains incapable of mounting a major offensive to retake the city or any of the key areas still held by the group. In January last year, Fallujah, 70 kilometres west of Baghdad, became the first major city to fall to ISIL. This was followed by a summer campaign that seized the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, along with most of northern and western Iraq. Iraq’s slow-moving fight against ISIL has also highlighted the country’s sectarian tensions, given...

Document ISGQ-2003-0044 ISGQ-2003-00044390 390 contains a November/27/2002 Top Secret and Urgent memo from the Baath Party Command in Fallujah and in relation to another letter from the office of the Presidential Secretariat (Saddam Hussein Personal Secretary) and it is addressed to all the People Commands in the Anbar Province (The Western Desert) asking them to watch for Americans or Zionists (Israelis) forces that can potentially bury prohibited materials, WMD, in the Anbar province so it will frame Iraq and find an excuse to punish Iraq according to the memo. The Anbar province which is the hot bed of the terrorists...

Nadiah Sarsour December 17, 2014 FoxNews.comOne Islamic State militant is alone responsible for killing 150 women, including pregnant women and young teenagers, because they refused to marry members of the barbaric militant army, according to Iraqi officials. Abu Anas Al-Libi is suspected of mercilessly gunning down the women,most of whom were Yazidi, because they refused to enter into sham temporary marriages with Islamic State fighters simply to have sex in what the terrorists believe to be a Koranic loophole. “Abu Anas Al-Libi killed more than 150 women and girls, some of whom were pregnant after refusing to accept Jihad marriage,”...

With Fallujah back under the control of Sunni insurgents, the nightmare of Iraq in 2004 is alive again. Today, TMZ published eight horrifying images, allegedly taken nearly a decade ago in Fallujah, which appear to show U.S. Marines posing next to dead bodies, soaking them in gasoline, and lighting them on fire. The gossip site claims to have published just a few of the 41 photos it obtained — "Many are just too gruesome" — and the military has opened an investigation. "The actions depicted in these photos are not what we expect from our service members, nor do they...

Adam Banotai was a 21-year-old sergeant and squad leader in the Marine Corps during the 2004 invasion of Falluja, a restive insurgent-held city in Iraq. His unit — which had seven of 17 men wounded by shrapnel or bullets in the first days of the invasion — seized control of the government center early in the campaign. So when Sunni insurgents, some with allegiances to Al Qaeda, retook the city this month and raised their black insurgent flag over buildings where he and his men fought, he was transfixed, disbelieving and appalled.

Iraq: Late reporting indicates that al-Qaida-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters have begun withdrawing from Fallujah to the suburbs. This report has not been confirmed. The government announced that it would not attack Fallujah for now in order to minimize civilian casualties. At least one source in Iraq, however, reported that government forces have low morale because they lack the supplies and equipment to mount an operation that has any prospect of success. Meanwhile in Ramadi, also west of Baghdad, a government and tribal night operation on 6 January failed to oust Islamists from southern Ramadi, according...

For U.S. Vets, Violence In Fallujah Brings Mixed Feelings BY JAMES SPERRY The home of some of the most ferocious fighting during the U.S. war in Iraq is once again witnessing extreme violence not seen in the country since the last of U.S. troops left two years ago, as al Qaeda insurgents regain control of the city of Fallujah in Anbar Province. In total, almost a third of the 4,486 U.S. troops killed in Iraq died in Anbar Province. Fallujah was the scene of two significant battles in 2004 - Operation Vigilant Resolve and Operation Phantom Fury – where U.S....

It was with a great deal of dismay, and yet a sense of acknowledgement that this was inevitable, that I read that Al-Qaeda terrorists captured the city of Fallujah in Iraq. This is a huge reversal as Iraq slips further into chaos after the United States left the country at the behest of Obama. The Iraqi army is currently surrounding the city and is planning to retake it, but the capture of the city is a huge blow, both militarily and psychologically. Civilians have fled the city as the Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that over 13,000 families have left Fallujah...

Apparently we’re on George W. Bush’s fourth term. And here I’ve been making a fool of myself criticizing some Illinois senator for messing up the country. If only NBC News had told me this piece of breaking news sooner. Introducing a report on Monday’s NBC Nightly News about Al-Qaeda forces seizing control of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, anchor Brian Williams went out of his way to blame the President George W. Bush for the deteriorating security situation: “U.S. fighting forces are gone from Iraq. But as so many predicted when President Bush chose to go to war there after...

Two years after Obama declared that the administration has decimated Al Qaeda worldwide, Al Qaeda has delivered the most devastating blow to the United States since the 9/11 attacks that precipitated America’s war on Islamic terrorism. The fall of the Iraqi Anbar province towns of Ramadi and Fallujah recently to foreign fighters under control of Al Qaeda, called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, represents not just a tactical defeat in Obama’s “Smart Power” strategy, but a strategic surrender of the entire U.S. foreign policy conception for the last 50 years. “US policies and leaders in three...

I have a friend who fought in Fallujah. He is boisterous and confident and full of life. He has the can-do spirit that defines himself and all who have worn the blue cord of the Army Infantry. But yesterday he was broken. As he talked about the Iraq war, and specifically the fight for Fallujah, there was a sadness that doesn’t come out in the speeches and books. There wasn’t the never-say-die confidence of a veteran non-commissioned officer, there was instead the dazed uncertainty of a man who looks back and wonders what the hell it was all about. Why...