It involved a combined total of 15,000 Afghan, American, British, Canadian, Danish, and Estonian troops, constituting the largest joint operation of the War in Afghanistan up to that point.

[11] ISAF chose to heavily publicize the operation before it was launched, comparing its scope and size to the 2004 Second Battle of Fallujah, in the hopes that Taliban fighters in the town would flee.

[18] Shortly after the withdrawal of NATO soldiers from Marja, it was reported the Taliban had regained control of the town and district with US army analysts describing the goals of the operation as a failure.

[23] The announcement of the operation was also a part of this strategy: "shaping the information battlefield strategic communications",[24] and to ensure it would not repeat the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004.

[citation needed] The Afghan public was warned of the upcoming operation, in line with new rules of engagement for British forces, called "courageous restraint."

Its main aim was to ensure that captured ground can be held by British and American troops, enabling the Afghan government and civilian aid agencies and military contractors to work more effectively in the province.

The Joint Task Force Afghanistan (JTF-Afg)[40] ferried about 1,100 coalition troops to Nad Ali District in the largest air assault ever conducted with Canadian helicopters.

[41][42][43] 33 other coalition helicopters, supported by fighter jets and uncrewed aerial vehicles, also participated in the operation with a total of 11 waves of troop drops.

[44] Ahead of the military operation, hundreds of civilian families fled Marja and its surroundings and were displaced from their homes due to the offensive by NATO and their Afghan partners.

[45][46] The town was suspected to be "one of the biggest, most dangerous minefields NATO forces have ever faced," and hundreds of the beleaguered insurgents could insist to fight until death.

At the same time 2 TP HCR (12 man team) would encounter a force of 35 Taliban moving South to Marjah, stopping them with help from Apache support.

Also Route Clearance Platoons clearing routes from their respective staging locations (In the Desert or Cop) into pre-specified locations and intersections from the East West North and South(a "Breach Point" at the Southern tip of the City in a specific instance(Breaching a canal with a bulldozer and a Fasseen type bridge gaining access to the much sought after city((RCP3 Attached/Embedded into ODA 3121))[50] While repelling Taliban assaults, the Marines built a combat outpost, completed on February 14, that they named COP Reilly.

[56][57][58][59][60][61][62] The first kills were reported to be made by uncrewed Predator aircraft and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, targeting insurgents seen laying roadside bombs and setting up anti-aircraft guns.

At about 4 am, RAF Chinooks full of soldiers from the 1st battalion the Royal Welsh left Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand, for the Pegasus landing zone in the Taliban stronghold of Showal in the Chah-e-Anjir area.

While the U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers stormed the town of Marja, British, American and Canadian forces struck in the Nad Ali district.

These 72-ton, 40-foot-long (12 m) vehicles, fitted with a 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) plow supported by metallic skis that glide on the dirt, and nearly 7,000 pounds (3,200 kg) of explosives, ploughed a path through fields and dug a safety lane through the numerous minefields laid by the Taliban.

To clear minefields and ignite roadside bombs, the Marines also launched rockets which deploy cables of plastic explosives, called M58 MICLIC.

[66][67] On the first day of the operation, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a spokesman of the Taliban, said that insurgents were still resisting in Marja in hit-and-run tactics against ISAF forces.

[67] British forces moving into the Nadi Ali and western Babaji regions encountered small 'stay-behind' pockets of resistance, although most Taliban fighters had already retreated to other areas in Helmand.

[70] However, Reuters reported that a small flag-raising ceremony at one of the Afghan and ISAF compounds on the morning of February 14 drew gunfire, suggesting that the insurgents remained defiant.

[71] After American, Afghan and British troops seized crucial positions, having first overwhelmed most immediate resistance, they encountered "intense but sporadic" fighting as they began house-to-house searches.

[72] On this second day of the operation British troops pushed through Showal, the town that for the last two years was under the control of insurgents who used it as a staging post to build bombs and to train their fighters to plant them.

While the British 50-square-mile (130 km2) sector of northern Nad-e-Ali had fallen easily, the American troops were still pushing through Marja a few miles away where the insurgents are putting up a "final stand".

When clearing the bazaar, opening a booby-trapped door triggered an explosion, killing Lance Corporal Larry Johnson and Sergeant Jeremy McQueary, both of 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, and wounded five other Marines.

The Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald reported that an AFP photographer mentioned the rising of the Afghan flag on a building at the Marja bazaar by Mohammad Gulab Mangal, governor of Helmand province, watched by Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, the commander of the US Marines in southern Afghanistan.

Nicholson and Mangal, accompanied by Major General Nick Carter, the British commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, arrived in Marja early that day by helicopter from Camp Bastion.

[92][93] Four months after the start of the operation, a lack of security for local population cooperating with ISAF troops and the eruption of gun battles "almost daily" have been reported.

[94] Four months after the offensive the former Taliban stronghold, that was intended to become a showpiece of what Western military might and ramped-up Afghan government services could accomplish, became something of a cautionary tale.

In the first five days of fighting an anonymous US intelligence source estimated at least 120 Taliban fighters were killed engaging Coalition and Afghan forces in Marja during the operation.

[98][99] Since opium is the main source of existence of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja, American Marines were ordered to preliminarily ignore the crops to avoid trampling their livelihood.