On the ground floor of Falluja hospital, a symbol of the city’s rise from earlier wars, its most recent occupiers had set up a mosque. The jihadis of Islamic State (Isis) had rolled carpets across the reception room and erected a platform where religious figures gave sermons amid the mayhem of a trauma ward.
Outside stood a broken-down ambulance and a battered trolley. Around the corner, the hospital’s new guards had just buried an Isis fighter whose body had lain in the open since the militants fled six weeks ago.
Ever since, Iraq’s security forces have been slowly staking their claim inside Falluja, which had been branded over the past 13 years as either a “city of mosques” or a “city of resistance”. The newcomers have changed all that. It is now a city of ghosts and graffiti.
Across the city, on the walls of hundreds of homes and abandoned buildings, the conquerors have left their mark. Security forces and militias who helped win the six-week battle have spraypainted slogans denouncing Isis and proclaiming loyalty to Shia holy figures.
While victory has been credited to the Iraqi forces, those who fought acknowledge that Shia militias aligned to the Popular Mobilisation Front (PMF) played prominent roles in the battle and in the immediate aftermath.
“We were first in,” said Sayyed Ammar, spokesman for the emergency operations brigades of the interior ministry. “Then came the Badr Brigades [a Shia militia] and Asa’ib ahl al-Haq.”
Both militias are Iranian-backed and have played prominent roles in the war against Isis, often taking primacy over state security forces. The dynamic has been criticised by Iraqis, among them many Sunnis, who fear the sectarian overtones of some militia groups. Some western officials see them as subverting Iraqi sovereignty.
Asked about the role of the militias, one officer answered cautiously: “Whether you accept the PMF or not, they come here as Iraqis to free people who had accepted Isis into their lives.”
“This is a victory for the one who we worship, Ali,” read one of the spray-painted banners. “Falluja is now in the hands of the Badr Brigades,” said another. All around, Shia banners are juxtaposed against national flags, which are also now flying in large numbers across a city that knew nothing but the black standard of Isis for the past two-and-a-half years.
As the reign of the terror group withers, the claim on Falluja’s future seems very much in the balance. There are no local people left to influence things. Nothing moves here except the military units left behind to safeguard it. Every resident who remained under Isis rule has now fled.
Many are housed in a refugee camp in the desert near a nearby town, a harsh, unforgiving environment in midsummer, from which they are unlikely to return for at least six months.
“It needs at least that,” said Lt-Col Tassen, of the emergency response brigades. “This place cannot accept people any time sooner.”
The fierce fight for the city has laid waste many of its streets and laid bare the secrets of the terror group, which used fear and brutality to impose itself, just as it had done elsewhere in Iraq and Syria.
Amid a street scarred with rubble and pockmarked with bullet holes and craters, Isis had set up an Islamic court and a prison. Both had been ransacked and torched, but cages used to hold prisoners had endured the flames. Some were too narrow to sit down in. Others were too short to allow people to stand.
In a nearby school, the group had used a courtyard as a killing centre. The bodies of two young men, their eyes bound with red bandanas, lay decomposing. “Another nine of them have been buried below them,” said Captain Ali Kazwini. “They are all Isis. They had either wanted to run away or had been accused of betrayal.” Hidden against the school gates were three makeshift boats used to cross the Euphrates. “They are very good at improvising,” he said. “They needed these things for smuggling.”
Interior ministry forces estimate that up to 1,000 Isis members were in Falluja when the battle began. And only a small number are known to have escaped – most in a midnight convoy that was attacked by jet fighters as it crept through the desert into Anbar province a week ago.
“We tossed their bodies into the Euphrates,” said spokesman Sayyed Ammar. “We used them as fish feed.” There is scant regard here for an enemy that had no intention of surrendering and saw no limits in how it conducted itself. Among the victors, there is also a deep suspicion of the people of Falluja, especially those who fled since the most recent fighting started.
“The mindset of the people here is a bit different from the rest of the country, dogmatically, ideologically, religiously,” said Lt-Col Tassen. “This is the centre of terrorism in all of Iraq. We need to vet the communities again.”
For many years a city of merchants, industry and loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Falluja remains well-to-do, with stately homes set on wide streets. “Look at this house,” said a junior officer inside a home that his forces had moved into.
“In Hilla and Diwaniya [in central and southern Iraq], we can’t afford 150 square metres – rented. The people who allowed Isis to come here need to explain themselves. They need to answer why they should have a future here.”
Outside the hospital, which was built by the Iraqi government in 2009, Saad Mahmoud, a Falluja resident and private in the Iraqi army, stood guard on a machine gun. He had fled the city with his family when Isis seized it in January 2014. “I don’t want to go back and see my house,” he said. “I don’t know what has happened to it.”
Next to him was a soldier from nearby Ramadi. He opened his cellphone and showed a photo of his home, which Isis had destroyed before being ousted from Ramadi late last year. “It was because they knew I was in the military,” he said.
Bulldozers ground slowly through rubble near the hospital entrance, while in mid-town soldiers took troop carriers on haphazard rides along empty streets.
In a storage house on a side street, roadside bombs and pressure plates were stacked in a corner. “This was where they made all their bombs,” said Captain Ali Kazwini. “Even their suicide belts.”
Further up the road, machine guns, body armour and ammunition were strewn amid the rubble of a home that Isis was believed to have used as a base. A bouquet of purple plastic flowers sat incongruously on the road in front. “They would rather destroy everything than leave it to us,” he said.
Victory in Falluja has given Iraqi forces a sense of confidence ahead of a battle that will likely prove defining for both Isis and Iraq – the push to recapture the country’s second city, Mosul.
“We have learned the benefits of being a professional military,” said Lt-Col Tassen. “We know what we are fighting for and we have been supported by very good artillery and air cover. It has been excellent”.
The turning tide of battle is also forcing a reckoning of what sort of country will emerge after Isis is defeated militarily and whether officials can re-enfranchise Sunnis or de-fang the militias.
“Their ideology has not been broken,” he said. “Don’t think that. How we go about rebuilding Falluja is very important.
“It could be Iraq’s last chance. If the country squanders this, and gets carried away on corrupt reconstruction contracts, then that’s it. Finished. They have to think clearly. The first thing, though, is that families can only be brought back after they have been evaluated.”
Additional reporting: Saud al-Murrani