About the video: Journeyman Pictures wrote: Two years ago the Americans unleashed Operation Phantom Fury on Fallujah. Recently emerged new pictures filmed inside the city during the siege show how the operation fuelled the Iraqi resistance.

Bombs explode at the end of a dusty lane as mother hugs her sons in desperation. Attempting to reach safety, they run across a bullet-strewn road. It’s November 2004 and this is the middle of the siege of Fallujah. The story of Fallujah’s civilians was largely unreported at the time. It was claimed those left in the city during the siege were resistance fighters. In fact, the majority were civilians. Sixty percent were children. “My two year old couldn’t sleep. On one side cluster bombs, the other side missiles” explains one mother. Those caught in the city were trapped; “Americans blocked the streets. They said ‘You can’t get in and you can’t get out’”. Those who escaped returned to find Fallujah a changed place. “Snipers were everywhere, and the city smelled really bad. It was the smell of bodies”. To enter the city, residents were subjected to retina scans and fingerprinting. But there is little reason for them to return. Lacking clean water, residents “filter the water through clothing and then we drink”. When they get ill, there are no medical facilities to treat them and no prospect of things improving; “the raiding, the burning, the detentions, the evictions, the killings… it is continuous, every day and night”.