FIRST they made me change out of my western clothes into a flowing black burqa and slippers. Then I squeezed on to the back seat of a car packed with other women and children for the nerve-jangling journey ahead. A toddler was told to sit on my lap so I was almost hidden from view.

The driver warned me not to speak if we were stopped, in case Iraqi National Guards noticed my foreign accent. All the precautions were in place for a perilous drive past roadblocks into Falluja, the shattered Iraqi city that no western newspaper reporter has entered for more than a year without the supervision of coalition forces.

The car bumped along a dusty track across farmland and through small villages on a roundabout route to the city in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Eventually we were stopped at one of the checkpoints where access is restricted to residents carrying biometric identity cards. I held my breath as a guard glanced inside our car. The women beside me chatted, trying to appear unconcerned.

Moments later we were waved forward and my visit to Iraq’s most defiant insurgent stronghold had begun. For the next five days residents and insurgents alike smuggled me around the ruined city, showing me the searing reality of life under American siege.

In November 2004 I was the last western reporter to leave Falluja before the US Army launched Operation Phantom Fury, an air and land assault aimed at eliminating insurgents from a city that had become a bastion of resistance to coalition rule.

Last weekend I was the first to return independently and it was impossible not to be shocked by the devastation. Huge areas of what were once homes have been flattened. On countless street corners, mountains of rubbish spew plumes of black smoke into the air.

Fields of rubble stretch as far as the eye can see. Here and there children scamper across the ravaged landscape, seeking out larger bricks and rocks for use in laborious rebuilding.

Of the swift reconstruction promised by Baghdad in the wake of the US-led assault, there are only sporadic signs in wealthier areas. Mostly there are women like Rasmiya Mohammed Ali, crouching in the ruins of her home, chipping away with a small hammer at broken breeze blocks salvaged by her sons, aged seven and eight.

“They did not even give us a tent. What can I do but clean and clear these stones so that we can rebuild our home?” said Ali, a mother of five who received only $700 compensation after her home was destroyed during the American onslaught.

I had been trying for months to re-enter Falluja to report on its progress since US-led forces in effect cut it off from the rest of Iraq. I almost succeeded once, but the Iraqi contacts arranging my journey were told that I might be kidnapped by a local insurgent faction and sold to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. We even heard that a price had been agreed for my head: $50,000.

When I finally reached the city, I was reminded of a remark by a US officer in Vietnam who claimed he had to destroy a village to save it. Falluja has indeed been destroyed. But I found nobody there who thinks it has been saved.

It was on April 28, 2003, six weeks after the invasion of Iraq, that Falluja emerged as a focus of rebellion against the Americans. When a crowd gathered outside a school occupied by US forces, soldiers opened fire, killing 15 Iraqi civilians.

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