The US warplanes launched fresh air strikes on Fallujah lasting one and half hours at dawn on Tuesday, making this city a global focus once more.

Fallujah is located roughly 69 km (43 miles) west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River and is on the main road connecting Baghdad to Jordan. It is known as the "city of mosques" for the more than 200mosques found in the city and surrounding villages.

As a historical city, Fallujah was inhabited in Babylonian times. The origin of the town's name is in some doubt, but one theory is that its Syriac name, Pallugtha, is derived from the word "division" because evidence shows that millennia ago a branchof the Euphrates divided off at that point.

Fallujah was a small and rather unimportant town for most of its history under the Persians and Arab Caliphates, and in 1947 the town had only about 10,000 inhabitants. The city grew after Iraqi independence with the influx of oil wealth into the country.Under Saddam Hussein, Fallujah came to be an important area of support for the regime, along with the rest of the region that hascome to be known as the Sunni Triangle. Many senior Ba'ath Party officials were natives of the city.

Now Fallujah becomes the nightmare of the US army. Up to 60 US soldiers have been killed in that city since the United States invaded Iraq.

As the US army alleged that Fallujah is the hideout for Zarqawi,head of the anti-US forces, Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi demanded on Oct. 13 the people of Fallujah to turn over Zarqawi and his group. "If they don't do it, we are ready for major operations in Fallujah," he said.

Source: Xinhua