This is what victory looks like in the Iraqi city of Ramadi: In the once thriving Haji Ziad Square, not a single structure still stands. Turning in every direction yields a picture of devastation.
A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream shops — reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair garages — obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The square’s Haji Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats — flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger, fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile of concrete and twisted iron rods.
The destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1 million people and now virtually empty. A giant highway cloverleaf at the main entrance to the city is partially toppled. Apartment block after apartment block has been crushed. Along a residential street, the walls of homes have been shredded away, exposing furniture and bedding. Graffiti on the few homes still standing warn of explosives inside.
When Iraqi government forces backed by U.S.-led warplanes wrested this city from Islamic State militants after eight months of IS control, it was heralded as a major victory. But the cost of winning Ramadi has been the city itself.
The scope of the damage is beyond any of the other Iraqi cities recaptured so far from the jihadi group. Photographs provided to The Associated Press by satellite imagery and analytics company DigitalGlobe show more than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed between May 2015, when Ramadi fell to IS, and Jan. 22, after most of the fighting had ended. Over roughly the same period, nearly 800 civilians were killed in clashes, airstrikes and executions.
Now the few signs of life are the soldiers manning checkpoints, newly painted and decorated with brightly colored plastic flowers. Vehicles pick their way around craters blocking roads as the dust from thousands of crushed buildings drifts over the landscape. Along one street, the only sign that houses ever existed there is a line of garden gates and clusters of fruit trees.
The wreckage was caused by IS-laid explosives and hundreds of airstrikes by the Iraqi military and the U.S.-led coalition. Besides the fighting itself, the Islamic State group is increasingly using a scorched earth strategy as it loses ground in Iraq. When IS fighters withdraw, they leave an empty prize, blowing up buildings and wiring thousands of others with explosives. The bombs are so costly and time-consuming to defuse that much of recently liberated Iraq is now unlivable.
“All they leave is rubble,” said Maj. Mohammed Hussein, whose counterterrorism battalion was one of the first to move into Ramadi. “You can’t do anything with rubble.”
As a result, U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi officials are rethinking their tactics as they battle IS to regain territory. The coalition is scaling back its airstrikes in besieged urban areas. Efforts are underway to increase training of explosive disposal teams.
The new approach is particularly key as Iraq and the coalition build up to the daunting task of retaking Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city, held by IS for nearly two years.
“They know they can’t just turn Mosul into a parking lot,” said a Western diplomat in Baghdad who has been present for a number of meetings with coalition and Iraqi defense officials regarding the Mosul operation. The diplomat commented on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
In January, after IS was pushed out of Ramadi, thousands of families returned to their homes. But residents have since been barred from coming back because dozens of civilians died from IS booby traps. Officials estimate IS planted thousands of IEDs, improvised explosive devices, across the city. Janus Global Operations, an American firm, began working to remove them last month and said it has so far cleared more than 1,000 square meters — a fraction of a city block.
The vast majority of the city’s population remains displaced.
Ramadi lies on the Euphrates River west of Baghdad and is the capital of Iraq’s Sunni heartland, Anbar province. Even as IS swept over most of the province and northern Iraqin 2014, Ramadi had held out under tenuous government control. After months of fighting, in May 2015, Islamic State fighters captured it by unleashing a barrage of truck and suicide bombs that overwhelmed government forces.
They raised their flag above Anbar Operations Command center, the former provincial police and military headquarters that was once a U.S. military base, then proceeded to largely level the complex with explosives. Over the following days, they methodically destroyed government buildings.
Militants took over homes, converting living rooms into command centers and bedrooms into barracks. They dug tunnels under the streets to evade air strikes, shut down schools, looted and destroyed the homes of people associated with the local government. They set up a headquarters in the campus of Anbar University, on the city’s western edge.
Over the course of the eight-month campaign to push IS out of Ramadi, coalition aircraft dropped more than 600 bombs on the city. The strikes targeted IS fighters, but also destroyed bridges, buildings and roads, the Pentagon has acknowledged. Government forces seized districts on the outskirts and in December launched their final assault.
As Iraqi ground forces moved into Ramadi, IS methodically laid explosives and blew up swaths of the city’s infrastructure. The electrical grid was almost completely destroyed and the city’s water network was also heavily damaged. The jihadis bombed the city’s remaining bridges and two dams. Though most of the population had already left, IS fighters tightened checkpoints along main roads out of the city to prevent civilians from fleeing. They later used families as human shields as they made their escape.
“ISIS made a concerted effort to ensure the city would be unlivable,” said Patrick Martin, an Iraq researcher at the Institute for the Study of War.
As his convoy of troops approached Ramadi, Maj. Hussein said he watched IS fighters set fires in Anbar University to destroy sensitive documents. The fires burned for days.
The complex is now largely destroyed. A gymnasium used by IS to store documents has been torched. Charred sports equipment — a boxing glove, cleats, pieces of a track suit — line the hallways. Iraqi artillery fire punched thick holes into the university’s library. Only the two main reading rooms are safe to visit; the rest of the four-story building is believed to be booby-trapped.
Trying to uproot dug-in fighters, coalition aircraft and Iraqi artillery unleashed devastation. Haji Ziad Square, for example, is a strategic intersection with lines of sight down major thoroughfares by which troops had to approach. So IS fighters deployed heavily there. The new multistory Haji Ziad Restaurant made a prime sniper post. Iraqi troops called in intense coalition strikes on the square to help clear the militants.
Similarly, a complex of around 40 large residential towers stood across from Anbar University on a key route for Iraqi forces entering the city. Before-and-after imageryshows at least a dozen of them were levelled. Multiple bomb craters are evident, including at least two that measure more than 45 feet across.
In a district along the western edge of downtown Ramadi, a dense strip of buildings, homes and bustling shops, not a single building escaped unscathed from the IS occupation and the coalition airstrikes. Key streets throughout the city are blocked by craters as each side tried to hamper the other’s movement.
Tens of thousands of Ramadi’s residents live in camps or with extended family in Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands are in other nearby villages. Thousands more live in a small resort town on Habbaniyah Lake south of Ramadi that has become a sprawling camp.
Where Iraqis came to jet-ski and boat as recently as 2012, the beach is now lined with tents. The 300-room hotel and hundreds of chalets in the complex are filled with people displaced from Ramadi, Fallujah, Hit and smaller villages across Anbar.
Umm Khaled, 30, once lived with her family in a two-bedroom home in Ramadi’s center. Now, pregnant with her fourth child, she lives in a small shelter on the edge of the Habbaniyah resort that her husband built with corrugated metal and plastic tarps.
She said she kept tabs on her Ramadi home since fleeing two years ago. The house remained undamaged. Then the offensive to retake the city began, and she heard from another fleeing family that her home had been hit by a missile or a bomb. The day the city was declared liberated, Umm Khaled said the camp burst into celebration, children set off fireworks and young men danced.
Days later came more sobering news. Her husband returned to Ramadi to see what was left, and he brought back pictures on his phone.
“It was like there was nothing. And it’s not just our house — the entire neighborhood,” said Umm Khaled, who did not want her full name used because she feared for the safety of family members still living under IS rule.
Without a home to return to and no jobs, her family is forced to remain in the camp and is dependent on handouts from aid organizations. The little cash savings her family had was depleted months ago, making it impossible to return to Ramadi and rebuild.
According to the United Nations’ satellite mapping agency, UNITAR, an estimated 5,700 buildings out of the city’s total of around 55,000 were seriously damaged or destroyed.
With an eye to reducing destruction in the fight against IS moving forward, coalition planes are using fewer airstrikes and smaller, more targeted munitions.
In Hit — a small town to the west of Ramadi retaken from IS in April — Iraqi commanders complained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to get requests for airstrikes cleared by coalition forces. Brig. Gen. Sami Khathan al-Aradi said progress in Hit was slower because of the reduced airstrikes.
“Our allies have their own standards, their own regulations,” al-Aradi explained, implying that Iraqi planes would have used airstrikes more liberally.
Mosul is roughly two-thirds larger in area than Ramadi, and some 1 million to 1.5 million residents are still in the city — a far higher number than those who were in Ramadi as Iraqi forces fought to regain it — putting large numbers in harm’s way when an assault is launched.
The destruction of Mosul on the same scale as Ramadi would result not just in billions of dollars of damage. It also would risk further alienating the Sunni minority population. Long oppressed under the Shiite-led central government in Baghdad, some Sunnis originally welcomed IS fighters into Mosul and parts of Anbar province. But after months of increasingly brutal IS rule, the group’s support among Sunnis appears to have eroded.
Widespread destruction also can spark cycles of revenge attacks within Anbar’s communities, where tribal law often demands death and destruction be repaid in “blood money.” In Ramadi’s eastern edge, local security officials have already begun methodically razing homes of suspected IS sympathizers.
Hamdiya Mahmoud’s family home was destroyed by IS militants. Amid the rubble that was once her son’s bedroom, she points to a dresser showered with shards of plaster and concrete that was a gift to her son and his wife on their wedding day.
“I didn’t let my youngest son go to school to save money to build this house,” Mahmoud said, breaking into sobs, “This house is really priceless to me, it’s like one of my sons.” Mahmoud said she would not seek revenge for the damage done to the property. But as her husband looked over the ruins of his house, he was less forgiving.
“I swear to God,” said Ali Hussein Jassim, “if I learn who did this I will not keep silent.” Susannah George, Desmond Butler & Maya Alleruzzo, AP
FILE – Iraqi counterterrorism soldiers raise an Iraqi flag on the ruins of a building near the provincial council headquarters in Ramadi in this Dec. 27, 2015 file photo, during the offensive that freed the Iraqi city from nearly a year of rule by the Islamic State group. Satellite photos show the price that months of fighting wreaked on the city: More than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges damaged or destroyed, with whole city blocks wiped out in some cases, from airstrikes, fighting or intentional destruction by the militants. (AP Photo/Osama Sami, File)
Jinat Ali, 7, left, and her sister Aya Ali, 5, pick their way through the rubble of their destroyed home in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi on April 3, 2016. Months after U.S.-based Iraqi forces freed the city from the control of the Islamic State group, the vast majority of Ramadi’s population of 1 million remain displaced after the extensive destruction wreaked on the city during months of fighting. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
FILE – Smoke rises from Islamic State group positions after an airstrike by U.S.-led coalition warplanes in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in this Dec. 25, 2015 file photo taken during the Iraqi government offensive that drove the militants out of the city. During months of fighting, the U.S.-led coalition dropped more than 600 bombs on the city, artillery pounded districts and retreating militants unleashed a scorched earth policy destroying buildings _ all contributing to vast destruction. (AP Photo, File)
Two buildings in Haji Ziad Square in of the Iraqi city of Ramadi show extensive damage in this March 20, 2016, photo, months after U.S.-backed Iraqi forces freed the city from the Islamic State group. More than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed, and whole city blocks wiped out in some cases, by airstrikes, fighting or intentional destruction by the militants. The massive destruction is forcing officials from Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition to rethink tactics as they move to retake other cities from the militants. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Combat boots lie in the dirt on March 20, 2016, in Ramadi, left behind after a battle weeks earlier between Islamic State group militants and Iraqi security forces. As they fled Ramadi earlier this year, the militants destroyed some buildings and booby-trapped others with explosives in a scorched earth tactic that left behind an empty prize for government forces retaking the city. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
A hotel on the shore of Iraq’s Lake Habbaniya, shown in this March 21, 2016 photo, now shelters thousands of families who fled the Islamic State group in Anbar province, including the provincial capital of Ramadi. Months after Ramadi was retaken from the militants, most of its 1 million residents have not returned because of the widespread destruction of their homes, and some say their savings are running out, leaving them dependent on aid handouts. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
A stairwell at the library of the University of Anbar in the Iraqi city of Ramadi shows heavy damage in this March 20, 2016 photo. The campus served as headquarters for the Islamic State group before Iraqi forces retook the city earlier this year. As they retreated, the militants set fires in some university buildings and blew up others. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
A member of Iraq’s elite counter-terrorism forces walks through the library of the University of Anbar in the city of Ramadi on March 20, 2016. The campus served as headquarters for the Islamic State group before Iraqi forces retook Ramadi earlier this year. As they retreated, the militants set fires in some university buildings and blew up others, part of a scorched earth campaign that contributed to the massive destruction in the city. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
This Jan. 29, 2016 satellite photo provided by DigitalGlobe and analyzed by Allsource Analysis shows heavy damage to the Anbar Operations Command Complex and to the Warrar Dam on the Euphrates River in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, wrested earlier this year from Islamic State group control. When they took over the city in May 2015, the militants blew up many of the buildings in the command compound, which was the main police and military headquarters in the province. The dam is used to divert water from the river into a nearby canal. (DigitalGlobe and Allsource Analysis via AP)
This satellite photo taken in January 2016 and provided by DigitalGlobe and analyzed by Allsource Analysis shows smoke rising from an apparent airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition backing Iraqi forces as they retook the city of Ramadi from Islamic State group militants. Victory came at a heavy cost: More than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed by airstrikes, artillery, fighting, and by militants who blew up buildings as they retreated. (DigitalGlobe and Allsource Analysis via AP)
FILE – Smoke rises from Islamic State group positions after an airstrike by U.S.-led coalition warplanes in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in this Dec. 25, 2015 file photo during the Iraqi government offensive that drove the militants out of the city. Ramadi, the provincial capital of Iraqís Sunni heartland, was declared ìfully liberatedî early this year. But the cost of victory may have been the city itself, with widespread destruction from strikes, artillery and the militants’ scorched earth tactic of destroying buildings and infrastructure as they fled. (AP Photo, File)
FILE – Iraqi security forces and Sunni tribal fighters help trapped civilians cross out of neighborhoods under Islamic State group control in Ramadi in this Jan. 4, 2016, file photo. As they fled the city earlier this year, IS militants methodically destroyed buildings, infrastructure, bridges and dams in a scorched earth tactic that Iraq and U.S. officials fear they will use as they come under attack in other cities, particularly Mosul. (AP Photo, File)
FILE – An injured woman comforts another as they wait for treatment after clashes between Iraqi forces and Islamic State group extremists in a village outside Ramadi, in this March 9, 2016 file photo. Months after Iraqi troops wrested control of Ramadi from the militants, most of the city’s population of 1 million remains displaced, unable to return because of continued fighting in surrounding areas and massive destruction. (AP Photo/Osama Sami, File)
Iraqi counterterrorism forces drive past a ferris wheel in a central district of Ramadi on March 20, 2016. Months after being wrested from the control of the Islamic State group, Ramadi remains devastated with no running water or electricity, entire residential blocks destroyed and no clear picture on when or how it can be rebuilt. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Iraqi workers dig a trench for a new water pipe near Haji Ziad square in the center of Ramadi on March 20, 2016. Months after the city was freed from Islamic State group control, reconstruction has hardly begun in Ramadi, where entire city blocks were leveled and infrastructure was smashed in months of fighting, illustrating the giant task Iraq will face as it recaptures more cities from the extremists. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Hussein Jassim walks through the ruins of his house in the Iraqi city of Ramadi on April 3, 2016, months after the city was retaken from Islamic State group control. More than 3,000 buildings were destroyed and damaged in fighting or by scorched earth tactics by the militants. For many residents, their homes represented their entire life’s savings, and few have the means to rebuild, presenting a massive reconstruction task for an overburdened Iraqi government. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
FILE – Iraqi army Humvees race toward the front lines on the outskirts of Ramadi during heavy clashes with Islamic State group militants in this Sept. 12, 2015, file photo. The fighting eventually led to the recapture of the city from the extremists. After the massive destruction wreaked on Ramadi, Iraqi and coalition officials are rethinking tactics as they prepare for an assault to retake the biggest IS-held prize, the northern city of Mosul. (AP Photo, File)
A family house lies in ruins in the Iraqi city of Ramadi on March 20, 2016, weeks after the city was retaken from the Islamic State group. Entire city blocks were leveled by fighting, airstrikes and by the militants themselves, deliberately blowing up buildings as they fled. For many residents, their homes represented their entire life’s savings, and few have the means to rebuild, presenting a massive reconstruction task for an overburdened Iraqi government. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Books lie strewn around the library of the University of Anbar in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in this March 20, 2016 photo. The campus served as headquarters for the Islamic State group before Iraqi forces retook the city earlier this year. As they retreated, the militants set fires in some university buildings and blew up others, part of a scorched earth campaign that contributed to the massive destruction in the city. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
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