Easily the most wretched thing Barack Obama has done during his presidency was to abandon Iraq to Iranian hegemony and the horrors of ISIS after the valiant sacrifices our soldiers made to save that land.

The biggest battles of the Iraq war were in the two cities where al-Qaeda had become most deeply entrenched, Fallujah and Ramadi, in the original heart of the insurgency. That’s where the Anbar Awakening began, when the Sunni tribes embraced an alliance with the U.S.-led coalition to expel al-Qaeda from their cities. Now there are reports that Ramadi has fallen to ISIS.

During the summer of 2007, I visited Ramadi and its environs multiple times, starting just a few weeks after the last pitched battles for the city.

Here is an old man in a small village outside Ramadi, who as I approached put his grandson on his knee and said, “Thank you, Coalition.”

These pictures are from a nearby medical clinic.

At a joint combat outpost outside Ramadi, an Iraqi Army soldier says goodbye to a U.S. soldier, before going on leave with his platoon.

Here Sunni tribal leaders break for lunch behind the provincial government center in Ramadi, on the day of the Anbar Forum, in early September 2007. The event was attended by Senator Joseph Biden, along with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials, as I chronicled at The Weekly Standard.

Those were hopeful days. Nobody could have imagined that the next American president would come along to throw all of it away and watch the war re-ignite, this time without U.S forces on the ground to protect those caught in the crossfire.