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 200 mosques 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 branch of 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 bean important area of support for the regime, along with the rest of the region that has come to be known as the Sunni Triangle. Many senior Ba'ath Party officials were natives of the city.