Before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gen. Najm al-Jabouri would stand at the border crossing with Turkey and look longingly across the gate.

"As an officer, I had a dream to travel outside of Iraq," he says, sitting in a garden in Saddam Hussein's former palace complex in Mosul. "Sometimes I would go to Ibrahim Khalil gate just to see outside Iraq — to see whether the ground outside Iraq was different from inside Iraq."

For almost every Iraqi, the past 15 years have been full of unimaginable twists and turns. Jabouri is still an Iraqi general, but now he oversees security in Mosul and controls Saddam's former compound. His first trip outside his country wasn't to neighboring Turkey but to the United States.
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In the Saddam era, Jabouri says, Iraq was like a big prison. You had to have permission to travel abroad. You could be jailed or even executed for contacting people outside Iraq.

Ruptly traveled to Fallujah, a city that has become synonymous with every upheaval that has struck Iraq since 2003, to find a populace psychologically and physically scarred by the fallout from the ill-judged Western intervention.

​Spared during the initial offensive that toppled Saddam Hussein, the city, 65 kilometers west of Baghdad, became the focal point of the subsequent anti-American insurgency, and was bombarded and captured in the bloodiest battles for US troops since Vietnam.

​It later became a hothouse of radical Islamism, and was one of the first major cities captured by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in January 2014. It was won back by the Iraqi Army two years later in yet another devastating assault on a city that was once home to 300,000 but now houses about half that number.