the base of most of IS’s senior commanders in Iraq and Syria.

Some experts say its capture may mark the beginning of the end for IS in Iraq, although the group still controls the key northern city of Mosul.

"Fallujah was the brain of the insect,” Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi expert on armed Islamic groups and a governmental security adviser, told MEE.

Hashimi and most Iraqi officials that MEE spoke with say that Fallujah was the weak flank of Baghdad, Babel, Karbala, Najaf, Ssalahuddin and Anbar provinces and was used as a launching pad for most suicide attacks that targeted these provinces over the past decade.

Iraqi military sources told MEE that at least 2,500 IS fighters were killed in Fallujah and its suburbs. Another 2,186 were arrested by Iraqi forces tryingWhen FDR ordered General Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines in 1942, the dismal fate of the American and Filipino defenders at Bataan and Corregidor was sealed. Japanese forces had blockaded the island, achieved air superiority, and set their forces up to easily overpower the American defenses. The story of Bataan and Corregidor was a heroic tragedy. Heroic in that American and Filipino forces fought back bravely for months, and tragic in that any relief, retreat, or victory was impossible. The Japanese were on the offensive all over the Pacific, achieving a string of humiliating defeats to the American military.

With the exit of MacArthur, General Jonathon “Skinny” Wainwright was given command of the defense of the islands. The forces under him were slowly starving, unhealthy, and increasingly ineffective.