Ramadi is located in a fertile, irrigated, alluvial plain, within Iraq's
Sunni Triangle. A settlement already existed in the area when the British explorer
Francis Rawdon Chesney passed through in 1836 on a steam-powered boat during an expedition to test the navigability of the Euphrates. He described it as a "pretty little town" and noted that the black tents of the
Bedouin could be seen along both banks of the river all the way from Ramadi to
Fallujah. The modern city was founded in 1869 by
Midhat Pasha, the
Ottoman Wali (Governor) of Baghdad. The Ottomans sought to control the previously nomadic
Dulaim tribe in the region as part of a programme of settling the
Bedouin tribes of Iraq through the use of land grants, in the belief that this would bind them more closely to the state and make them easier to control. Ramadi was described in 1892 as "the most wide awake town in the whole Euphrates valley. It has a telegraph office and large government barracks. The bazaars are very large and well filled." Sir
John Bagot Glubb ("Glubb Pasha") was posted there in 1922 "to maintain a rickety floating bridge over the river [Euphrates], carried on boats made of reeds daubed with
bitumen", as he put it. By this time the Dulaim were mostly settled, though they had not yet fully adopted an urbanised lifestyle. Glubb described them as "cultivators along the banks of the Euphrates, watering their wheat, barley and date palms by
kerids, or water lifts worked by horses. Yet they had but recently settled, and still lived in black goat-hair tents."
World Wars I and II Ramadi was twice fought over during the
Mesopotamian Campaign of
World War I. It was held initially by the forces of the
Ottoman Empire, which garrisoned it in March 1917 after losing control of
Fallujah to the east. The
British Army's
Lieutenant General Frederick Stanley Maude sought to drive out the garrison in July 1917 but faced severe difficulties due to exceptional heat during both day and night. A force of around 600 British soldiers plus cavalry units faced 1,000 Turks with six artillery pieces. The attack was a costly failure and a combination of exhaustion, disorganisation, Turkish artillery fire and an unexpected sandstorm forced Maude to call off the attack with heavy losses. More than half of the 566 British casualties were caused by the heat. Maude tried again during a cooler period in September 1917. This time the attacking force, led by Major General H.T. Brookings, was better organised and the British force was able to cope with the temperatures. The British mounted their attack from a direction that the Turks had not expected and managed to cut off their enemy's line of retreat. Many members of the Turkish garrison were killed or forced to surrender and the British were able to take control of Ramadi. The force succeeded in relieving RAF Habbaniya and Iraqi resistance rapidly crumbled as their counter-attacks were defeated, allowing a British column to seize control of Ramadi.
Post-war The
Ramadi Barrage was built near the city in 1955 to feed water into
Lake Habbaniyah to the southeast. Ramadi was the scene of large-scale demonstrations against
Saddam Hussein in 1995. This made it virtually unique in Sunni Iraq, where support for Saddam was strongest. The demonstrations were prompted by Saddam's execution of a prominent member of the Dulaim tribe from Ramadi,
Iraqi Air Force General Muhammad Madhlum al-Dulaimi, and three other Dulaimi officers. The four had criticized the regime and Saddam's notoriously violent and dissolute son
Uday. After their execution, the bodies were sent back to Ramadi. The regime's security forces put down the demonstrations which ensued and Saddam subsequently viewed the Dulaimis with suspicion, though he was unable to purge them without risking a full-scale tribal revolt.
U.S. invasion and Iraqi insurgency review in front of the government headquarters in Ramadi, 2007The policy of
de-Ba'athification and the disbandment of the Iraqi Army, implemented by the
United States following the
2003 invasion of Iraq, hit Ramadi particularly hard because of its links to the party and the army. Many senior officials and military figures in the city suddenly found themselves excluded from public life. This gave them both the motivation and the means, given their connections and technical expertise, to mount a campaign of violence against coalition forces. As a result, Ramadi became a hotbed of insurgency between 2003 and 2006 and was badly affected by the
Iraq War especially during the
2006 Battle of Ramadi. By 17 May 2015 Ramadi had been completely captured by IS forces. Since the IS occupation of Ramadi, efforts have been made to re-take the city. In November 2015, Iraqi government forces completed an encirclement of Ramadi. On 28 December, Iraqi forces advanced into the centre of the city of Ramadi and liberated it.
Iraq's recapture of the city On 28 December 2015, Iraq's government claimed that it retook the city from the Islamic insurgency group IS. The operation started in early November. The city's recapture is seen as a major reversal for IS. IS occupied the city beginning in May 2015. The IS occupation of the city was a major defeat for the Iraqi government forces. The recapture of Ramadi was backed by
US-led coalition air strikes and an Iraqi advance into the city, but made slow progress, mainly due to stiff resistance from IS militants inside the southern half of the city and also because the government chose not to use the powerful Shia-dominated paramilitary force
PMF that had previously helped it regain the mainly Sunni northern city of
Tikrit, to avoid increasing sectarian tensions. The military said remaining IS militants have headed out to the north-east of Ramadi. The PM of Iraq declared that 30 December as celebrations of the recapture of Ramadi. However, Ramadi was highly damaged afterwards, with some estimates as high as 90% of the city being destroyed during the fighting. ==Transportation==