A human shield is a non-combatant who either volunteers or is forced to shield a legitimate military target in order to deter the enemy from attacking it.
Events in the year 2004 in Iraq.
Fallujah is a city in Al Anbar Governorate, Iraq. Situated on the Euphrates River, it is located roughly 69 kilometres (43 mi) to the west of the capital city of Baghdad.
The Hama massacre occurred in February 1982 when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies, under orders of president Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Ba'athist government. The campaign that had begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, was brutally crushed in an anti-Sunni massacre at Hama, carried out by the Syrian Arab Army and Alawite militias under commanding General Rifaat al-Assad.
The First Battle of Fallujah, code-named Operation Vigilant Resolve, was an operation against militants in Fallujah as well as an attempt to apprehend or kill the perpetrators of the killing of four U.S. contractors in March 2004.
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq was completed and the regime of Saddam Hussein was toppled in May 2003, an Iraqi insurgency began that would last until the United States left in 2011. The 2003–2006 phase of the Iraqi insurgency lasted until early 2006, when it escalated from an insurgency to a Sunni-Shia civil war, which became the most violent phase of the Iraq War.
The Second Battle of Fallujah, initially codenamed Operation Phantom Fury, Operation al-Fajr was an American-led offensive of the Iraq War that lasted roughly six weeks, starting 7 November 2004. Marking the highest point of the conflict against the Iraqi insurgency, it was a joint military effort carried out by the United States, the Iraqi Interim Government, and the United Kingdom. Within the city of Fallujah, the coalition was led by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army, the battle was later described as "some of the heaviest urban combat Marines have been involved in since Huế City in Vietnam in 1968" and as the toughest battle the U.S. military has been in since the end of the Vietnam War. It was the single bloodiest and fiercest battle of the entire conflict, including for American troops.
Giuliana Sgrena is an Italian journalist who works for the Italian communist newspaper il manifesto and the German weekly Die Zeit. While working in Iraq, she was kidnapped by insurgents on 4 February 2005. After her release on 4 March, Sgrena and the two Italian intelligence officers who had helped secure her release came under fire from U.S. forces while on their way to Baghdad International Airport. Nicola Calipari, a major general in the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service (SISMI) was killed, and Sgrena and Andrea Carpani, the other Italian officer taking her to the airport, were wounded in the incident. The event caused an international outcry.
Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre is a documentary film by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta which first aired on Italy's RAI state television network on November 8, 2005. The film documents the use of chemical weapons, particularly the use of incendiary bombs containing white phosphorus, and alleges that insurgents and civilians, including children, had been killed or injured by chemical burns by military forces of the United States of America in the city of Fallujah in Iraq during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004.
The United States bombardment of Fallujah began in April 2003, one month after the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. In April 2003 United States forces fired on a group of demonstrators who were protesting against the US presence. US forces alleged they were fired at first, but Human Rights Watch, who visited the site of the protests, concluded that physical evidence did not corroborate US allegations and confirmed the residents' accusations that the US forces fired indiscriminately at the crowd with no provocation. 17 people were killed and 70 were wounded. In a later incident, US soldiers fired on protesters again; Fallujah's mayor, Taha Bedaiwi al-Alwani, said that two people were killed and 14 wounded. Iraqi insurgents were able to claim the city a year later, before they were ousted by a siege and two assaults by US forces. These events caused widespread destruction and a humanitarian crisis in the city and surrounding areas. As of 2004, the city was largely ruined, with 60% of buildings damaged or destroyed, and the population at 30%–50% of pre-war levels.
The 325th Infantry Regiment is an infantry regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. The regiment serves as the 82nd Airborne's light infantry parachute insertion fighting force of the United States Army, with a long and distinguished history, having taken part in World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the invasions of Grenada and Panama, as well as the Gulf and Iraq Wars. The subordinate units of the regiment constitute the bulk of the infantry elements assigned to the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.
Occupation: Dreamland is a "grunt's-eye view," 2005 documentary film focused on a company of the 1/505 of the 82nd Airborne Division in Fallujah, Iraq, in early 2004. It is directed by Ian Olds and Garrett Scott.
Camp Baharia, also known as Dreamland or FOB Volturno, was a U.S. military installation that was just outside the city of Fallujah, Iraq. It was the smaller of two major U.S. military bases maintained just outside the Fallujah city limits, during the Iraq War.
The Battle of Samawah took place during the 2003 invasion of Iraq as American troops fought to clear the city of Iraqi forces. The city had been bypassed during the advance on Baghdad, leaving the task of clearing it to American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division with mechanized infantry and armor provided by units of the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, and 2-70th Armor Battalions, along with 3rd platoon 59th Chemical Company tasked with finding and removing any potential chemical or biological weapons. The battle was the largest sustained urban combat that paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne had been involved in since World War II.
The Anbar campaign consisted of fighting between the United States military, together with Iraqi security forces, and Sunni insurgents in the western Iraqi governorate of Al Anbar. The Iraq War lasted from 2003 to 2011, but the majority of the fighting and counterinsurgency campaign in Anbar took place between April 2004 and September 2007. Although the fighting initially featured heavy urban warfare primarily between insurgents and U.S. Marines, insurgents in later years focused on ambushing the American and Iraqi security forces with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), large scale attacks on combat outposts, and car bombings. Almost 9,000 Iraqis and 1,335 Americans were killed in the campaign, many in the Euphrates River Valley and the Sunni Triangle around the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
The 19 March 2013 Iraq attacks were a series of coordinated bombings and shootings across the capital Baghdad and several major cities in the north and central parts of the country. At least 98 people were killed and more than 240 others injured in the wave of violence, which took place on the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War.
The Beitunia killings refers to the consecutive killings of two Palestinian teenagers which took place on the occasion of the annual Nakba Day protests on May 15, 2014, near the Israeli Ofer Prison outside Beitunia in the occupied West Bank. Israel described the protest as a riot in which a crowd refused to disperse, and initially denied responsibility, saying the cause of the deaths was unknown, the deaths were faked, that video clips of the killings either failed to capture the violence of the scene shortly before or might have been manipulated, that soldiers had been provoked, and that only rubber bullets had been fired.
The 2013 Hawija clashes relate to a series of violent attacks within Iraq, as part of the 2012–2013 Iraqi protests and Iraqi insurgency post-U.S. withdrawal. On 23 April, an army raid against a protest encampment in the city of Hawija, west of Kirkuk, led to dozens of civilian deaths and the involvement of several insurgent groups in organized action against the government, leading to fears of a return to a wide-scale Sunni–Shia conflict within the country. By 27 April, more than 300 people were reported killed and scores more injured in one of the worst outbreaks of violence since the U.S. withdrawal in December 2011.
The Syrian revolution, also known as the Syrian Revolution of Dignity, was a series of mass protests and uprisings in Syria – with a subsequent violent reaction by the Syrian Arab Republic – lasting from March 2011 to June 2012, as part of the wider Arab Spring in the Arab world. The revolution, which demanded the end of the decades-long Assad family rule, began as minor demonstrations during January 2011 and transformed into large nation-wide protests in March. The uprising was marked by mass protests against the Ba'athist dictatorship of president Bashar al-Assad meeting police and military violence, massive arrests and a brutal crackdown, resulting in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands wounded.
Beginning in December 2012, Sunnis in Iraq protested against the Maliki government. On 28 December 2013, a Sunni MP named Ahmed al-Alwani was arrested in a raid on his home in Ramadi. Alwani was a prominent supporter of the anti-government protests. This incident led to violence in Al Anbar Governorate between the Iraqi Army and a loose alliance of tribal militias and other groups fighting alongside the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
