The 26-year-old teacher is on the run and longs to leave Iraq. Credit:Kate Geraghty They want to put Iraq behind them and so have applied for visas to resettle in Turkey. But she has family and relatives still in towns across Anbar – Falluja, Ramadi and Amiriyat Falluja , all on the green-fringed banks of the Euphrates River as it snakes over the desert flats, desultorily finding its way to the Persian Gulf. In January, while her family tended to funeral rituals for her late grandmother, life in Falluja, about 50 kilometres west of the capital, was upended, the teacher says, "when we woke up one morning and people said IS is here – we had never heard of them, but they took over in a night." Where Iraqi Army checkpoints had been, townspeople found charred military vehicles and the black-clad fighters of IS planting their black and white banner – all Iraqi Army troops had disappeared. "Their dress, their hygiene and the look in their eyes made me think of the Stone Age and many of them were foreigners – I heard Arabic in Saudi accents and foreign languages too," she said of the new force in town. Her family fled, but only to Amiriyat Falluja, a small farming town 45 kilometres to the south-east, and soon the fighting followed them and the town came under IS siege. As IDPs - internally displaced people - they lived 30 and 40 to an apartment and rationed food as spirits rose and fell with the intensity of a tug-of-war fight for the town.

When a missile landed 20 metres in front of her in April, the teacher decided she had to get out – "it cut one man in half; it took the head off another and it killed a third". She fled again – this time alone. Her fiance was in Baghdad and the only access to the capital was over a bridge on a small tributary to the Euphrates – as she crossed, Iraqi Army troops were attempting to retrieve the bodies of their dead comrades floating downstream. Still determined to have the wedding of her dreams, she found herself checkmated by the contradictory urgencies of her life – if she was to be with her fiance they needed to marry fast, but how was a girl to marry without her parents, siblings and their whole extended family gathering for a great noisy celebration? Living with her sister in Baghdad, she set about salvaging what she could of the dream.

Even as word came that her brothers were on the frontline, fighting against IS at Amiriyat Falluja, and her father was pinned down at Ramadi, the teacher sent instructions to her mother. She was to get herself to Baghdad and there were two items she must bring with her – the white teddy bear that had been a first gift from the IT specialist; and the fishtail design wedding dress that she could not find in Anbar and which had taken two months to be delivered from Europe, after she had ordered it on amazon.com. Falluja today: A strange kind of normal Today Falluja is listed as an IS stronghold – its proximity to Baghdad sends shivers down the spine of Iraqi national security chiefs, especially as a series of battles are waged for control of nearby centres – like Amiriyat Falluja which, this week, has been the focus of unrelenting IS efforts to dislodge the Iraqi Army and tribal fighters who still occupy the town, backed by airstrikes from the US-led coalition and the Iraqi Air Force; and Hit, further up the Euphrates and about 185 kilometres west of Baghdad, which reportedly fell to IS forces on Wednesday. But Falluja has a special history in Iraq's recent wars and IS seems to fully appreciate this – for which reason the city is not being subjected to the horrendous treatment meted out by IS fighters to communities it controls in the north of Iraq and the east of Syria. Instead of human heads on stakes and baying for infidel blood, the Islamist hardliners in Falluja had work crews in the streets this week, painting the edges of median strips and footpaths in alternating black and white. Instead of complaints of shortages, I was told that the markets are better stocked than before the arrival of IS.

And instead of the Islamic State's horrendous treatment of women in the north of the country and across the border in Syria, including forced marriages to IS fighters and them being sold as sex slaves at public auctions, a professional man in Falluja told me by phone that after early mutterings about needing to do something about women, the Islamist hardliners did nothing to enforce their decree on women covering their faces, not going out without a male escort and not attending school and college unchaperoned. Similarly for men, talk about closing their barbershops and making them all grow jihadist-style beards has remained just that – no enforcement, it seemed. None of this is to suggest that IS is making nice in Falluja. A hospital administrator who recently fled Falluja, explained to a reporter why he could no longer remain in the city: "Every day, I saw children watching parents die and parents watching children die - I couldn't raise my children there any longer ... we all have targets on our head." The man I spoke to in the city, who cannot be identified for security reasons, said that 10 days ago there had been a public hanging – the victim was a Baghdad government policeman who had remained in Fallujah but who was accused of spying for the Baghdad authorities.

Because of its recent and volatile history of protest and war, and of fragile fundamentalist and tribal alliances, the word "normal" doesn't often appear in the same sentence as "Falluja". But when I asked the professional what life was like in the city, he responded: "Falluja is pretty normal." He was a member of a Sunni family, some of the males in which were fighting pitched battles against IS forces. But he insisted that water and power supplies were just like when Baghdad had control over the city – "and even the garbage is being collected". As he understood it, IS was able to organise trucked deliveries of propane, diesel and petrol from Mosul and Samarra, cities it controlled, which were selling in Falluja at "only" two or three times the prices available on the Baghdad black market. The IS social crackdown which upset the professional was a ban on smoking tobacco and smoking shisha pipe – "so I can never support them," he said, as though the hanging of the policeman was of no moment. IS made regular collections of "illicit" tobacco in the town, then making a spectacle of torching it in a public place. Leaflets are handed out, telling the people they should conduct themselves in line with IS' tortured view of social and gender behaviour, but the man observed of his fellow townspeople: "People here understand that our lifestyle is different to what IS wants it to be."

On first taking military control of Fallujah, and agreeing to share power with the tribes on a local council, IS demanded public repentance from the remaining members of the Baghdad security apparatus – "most of the police came and repented and handed in their weapons," I was told. However, the Falluja teacher recounted how her policeman cousin was detained and beaten up until he had "repented" - the young man cracked in two days. "Those who didn't repent left and their homes and personal possessions were sold at a big public auction. Some of their homes were demolished, but most are used by the IS fighters who have come to town. But have we had beheading – no. Rounding up women to marry or sell them off – no." Neither were locals rounded up to fight. But IS conducted regular rallies at which it invited townspeople to pledge allegiance – but the only response tended to come from prisoners who had been released from prison by IS. "IS knows what the locals are capable of," the man said, touching on the key question about IS' conduct in Falluja - why does IS treat this city so differently to Mosul in the north, which it overran in June, and Raqqa, its seat of caliphate power across the border in Syria? And what might that reveal about what IS actually believes – does all of Iraq and Syria really have to be bludgeoned back to a 7th century existence or does it cynically execute its agenda in select areas, as a different kind of "shock and awe" to that last visited on the region.

In a previous incarnation, IS was al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and Anbar province was its main base of operations. But it could survive only in alliances with local Sunni tribes who were disenchanted with the US-led coalition forces in Iraq as much as with the new Shiite-dominated Baghdad governments. But when the US peeled the tribes away from AQI, paying and arming them to fight as "the Sons of Iraq", al-Qaeda faded from view until it regrouped among the various rebel groups that took up the fight against the dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria. So IS is acutely aware of the consequences of offending the Anbar tribes. Additionally, as the Falluja professional pointed out to me, IS is also aware of the fight that Falluja put up in the face of costly bids by US forces to pacify the city in the years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "The people are anti-IS – they don't like them. Half of the population [of about 325,000] had fled, and even though they are returning by the thousands now, we still go our way and IS goes its own, and that way there's no confrontation."

It has yet to manifest itself in the ebb and flow of the conflict, but this man who has access to all parts of the town, argued that some of the tribes soon might start stepping back from their support for IS. That likely will depend on local reaction to coalition airstrikes in and around Fallujah, which will be overlaid on deep resentment in the city at the efforts of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to dislodge IS militarily. They included Maliki's resort to copying the crude barrel bombs devised by Assad in Syria – photographic evidence of which was provided to Fairfax Media. "The Iraqi government may be fighting a vicious insurgency, but that's no licence to kill civilians anywhere they think [IS] might be lurking," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said in a statement in July. "The government's airstrikes are wreaking an awful toll on ordinary residents." With Maliki gone, new prime minister Haider al-Abadi has ordered a halt to attacking civilian areas, but his government still has a great hill to climb and little time to do so, in winning the confidence and support of the Anbar tribes now aligned with IS. "For now we're just suspending action," the man from Falluja told me. "We're just watching."

Looking for their future The teacher and the IT specialist did get married – in Baghdad minimalist fashion. The bridge on the road to Baghdad had been blown up by the time the mother could make the crossing – in a small home-made canoe. She could squeeze the teddy on board, but not the wedding dress from amazon.com. Instead of dozens of girl friends at her henna night, the Arabic equivalent of the Australian hen's night, there was just the teacher and her sister – and they couldn't bring themselves to do the ritual tattooing of the bride's hands and feet that that precedes an Islamic wedding. The next day, the only male available to collect the bride from the hairdressers was the groom. The bride had to wear a hired gown and because of a security spasm in Baghdad, they had just a handful of guests at the ceremony – no photographer, no DJ. And instead of the traditional horn-honking, and blaring-brass-band procession of dozens of family and friends' cars to escort them to a city hotel, just four cars quietly escorted them to their new home here on the western flank of the city.

Their honeymoon was to be in Malaysia, but their flight was cancelled. This was getting maudlin – it was time to change the subject. Stuck indoors, how did the women of Falluja and Amiriyat Falluja kill time? "They keep reading the coffee grounds – maybe 30 times a day," said the teacher, who is now '2½ months pregnant;' and yes, the women discerned the usual litany of destinies that could be read as good or bad news for the subject. Loading

Like a good woman of Falluja she then reached for the coffee cup before another woman in our small party. "Ah yes," she said after upending it on a saucer. There was a woman kissing a baby, meaning motherhood. However, she also discerned a "dark" period as she peered into the thimble-sized cup. Then she became cheerful: "But the sun will rise."