Fallujah: 2,500 years of war

[Valin]

Asharq Al Awsat:

From Roman emperors and Sassanid kings to Al-Qaeda and ISIS, the city of Fallujah is no stranger to violence

Amir Taheri

14 Jan, 2014

 

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First, the history. Fallujah has been the site of many battles for the past 2,500 years. Its capture by Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BCE opened the path to the Mediterranean for the Achaemenids, who pressed on to conquer Syria, the Sinai desert and Egypt. It was renamed Hoxt-dezh (“Distant Fort”) until its capture by the Romans in the 3rd century CE, when its name was changed to Misiche (“Middle One”) because, ringed by palm groves, it is surrounded by a loop of the Euphrates River that turns it into a peninsula. At one point, Mark Anthony’s expeditionary Roman force lost its baggage to desert raiders around Fallujah and had to retreat in haste.

 

In April 244 CE, however, the city once again changed hands after a bitter battle in which Roman Emperor Gordian III was slain by the Persians under the Sassanid King Shapur I. The Persian king had news of his victory engraved in three languages in the mountainside of Naqsh-e-Rostam, near present-day Shiraz. He also renamed the city Piruz-Shapur (“Victorious Shapur”) and built up as the principal garrison town in the mid-Euphrates area, starting a martial tradition that has continued ever since.

 

For six centuries after that, Piruz-Shapur was always a prize in the Persian—Roman wars. Emperor Julian captured it before being killed in a successful battle, allowing the Persians to restore their presence in the whole of the Levant. Bahram V, another Sassanid king, built a hunting palace close to the city and adorned it with a garden full of desert animals and exotic flowers based on the Persian parada’us (the origin of the word “paradise” and, in Arabic, “firdaws”). In Nezami’s great epic poem The Seven Cupolas, the city represents the palace inhabited by a princess dressed all in green. The city was lost to the Romans soon afterwards, but regained by Khosrow-Parviz, the fun-loving Sassanid monarch who was a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). There, Khosrow-Parviz built a fire temple, the remains of which have provided a major archaeological site in Mesopotamia for decades.

 

The Arab conquest of Mesopotamia in the 7th century CE marked the start of the city’s decline from which it did not recover until the 1940s. The conquerors sacked the city, burned its big buildings and bazaars, and destroyed its gardens and palm groves. Gradually, the name Fallujah, referring to a particular type of dates, began to be used.

 

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