In early 2014, Fallujah made it back to the world headlines for having allegedly fallen to al-Qaeda. Commentators in the United States were quick to make this story theirs, lamenting the idea that the city that had been liberated by its brave marines in 2004 was captured once again by terrorists (Sly 2014). The media frame according to which Fallujah had been taken was nurtured by the Iraqi government, which had adopted its own war on terror narrative in an attempt to root out anti-government protests that had been initiated in December 2012