Sunni insurgents seem largely in control of Fallujah and Iraq’s Anbar province, where an estimated 1,500 of the nearly 4,500 American troops killed in Iraq perished. Fallujah, the province’s second largest city, is the latest prize in the long-simmering war between the Shi‘ite and Sunni strains of Islam. The conflict has now come to a full boil, two years after the last U.S. troops, whose presence kept a lid on such internecine fighting, left Iraq.
Within hours of the city’s fall, Americans who fought or covered the pair of bloody 2004 campaigns to keep Fallujah out of Sunni militant hands expressed concern over whether their fallen comrades had died in vain.
Read more: Al-Qaeda Takes Over Iraqi City That Cost 100 U.S. Lives 10 Years Ago | TIME.com http://swampland.time.com/2014/01/05/who-lost-fallujah/#ixzz2pb2Qqmaj