Because every house had been turned into a bunker and every second was rigged to explode?

>>18371193
Urban warfare is always a bloody affair that favors the defenders unless you get really good at it. U.S/Coalition ground forces were also poorly equipped for this kind of fighting and had trouble adapting their doctrine.

>>18371887
The only way you can defeat the US army is to get in close, so they cant drop a 50 lb bomb on you.

>>18371193
>Those are shockingly high numbers for the side that lost like 2 people during the invasion of the country.
What are you talking about? Both are excruciating low. The latter reads more like a fluke or propaganda than a realistic low casualty count for invading a fucking country.

>>18371894
Hugging the enemy has been a tactic in asymmetrical warfare for a while, the U.S didn't have any unique capabilities that necessitated it really. I haven't been to officer school or done real military history work as anything other than enthusiast, but if the poor performance at Fallujah could be pinned to an institutional failure you would want to look at some of the organizational changes made during or after enduring freedom.

>>18371193
>A surrounded city defended by poorly trained and equipped insurgents being attacked by the most well equiped and advanced professional army in the world
The vast majority of the insurgents that fought in Fallujah were either former Iraqi army members that got demobilized and turned to the Jihadists to fight the Americans or Jihadists who had experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya. Combine that with a dense urban area filled with giant, walled concrete housing blocks and a massive number of mosques that are a war crime to target and you get a recipe for a drawn-out battle that's no fun for the attackers even if they're as powerful as the Americans were at their arugable imperial peak.
Marawi and Mosul were similar uniquely gruelling battles for these same reasons, and I expect Iran (if we go in) will be worse given you have all these elements x3 along with harsher geography and an insurgency led by experienced soldiers who are armed with better weapons and kit given they're a standing army.

>>18371193
Now compare that to the 1500 killed and 10,000 injured in the Iraqi Army during the battle to retake Mosul from Isis in November 2016 through July 2017.