FALLUJA, Iraq — They came on Wednesday to bury the war: clerics and sheiks, children and widows from across this scarred city. In the shadow of an overpass, they waved banners, burned an American flag, displayed photos of their dead and shouted well-worn denunciations of departing American forces.

“It’s a festival,” said Sheik Hamid Ahmed Hasham, the head of the local council, whose four predecessors were assassinated.

Once an inner ring of Iraq’s wartime inferno, Falluja is only too eager to say goodbye to nearly nine shattering years of raids, bombings and house-to-house urban combat. At least 200 American troops were killed in this city. Untold thousands of Iraqis died, civilians and insurgents who are mourned equally as martyrs.

Today, Falluja is a city desperately seeking normal.

Calls to prayer ring out from minarets where insurgent snipers once perched. In restaurants once obliterated by mortars and airstrikes, waiters skate from table to table with trays of lamb kebabs and fire-roasted tomatoes. Opulent houses rise from fields of rubble, built by sheiks, contractors and anyone else who benefited, illicitly or not, from the vast sums of American money that poured into Iraq during the war.