Ramadi (Arabic: ٱلرَّمَادِي Ar-Ramādī; also formerly rendered as Rumadiyah or Rumadiya) is a city in central Iraq, about 110 kilometers (68 mi) west of Baghdad and 50 kilometers (31 mi) west of Fallujah. It is the capital and largest city of Al Anbar Governorate which shares borders with Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. The city extends along the Euphrates which bisects Al Anbar. Founded by the Ottoman Empire in 1879, by 2018 it had about 223,500 residents, near all of whom Sunni Arabs from the Dulaim tribal confederation. It lies in the Sunni Triangle of western Iraq.

Ramadi occupies a highly strategic site on the Euphrates and the road west into Syria and Jordan. This has made it a hub for trade and traffic, from which the city gained significant prosperity. Its position has meant that it has been fought over several times, during the two World Wars and again during the Iraq War and Iraqi insurgency. It was heavily damaged during the Iraq War, when it was a major focus for the insurgency against occupying United States forces. Following the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in 2011, the city was contested by the Iraqi government and the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and fell to ISIL in May 2015. On 28 December 2015, the Iraqi government declared, confirming media testimonies, that it had re-taken Ramadi, that government's first major military victory since its loss.

Ramadi's population was reported by the World Food Programme to number 375,000 people in 2011, though the number is likely to have decreased since then given the impact of the Iraq war and insurgency. Its population grew rapidly during the last half of the 20th century, from 12,020 people in 1956 to 192,556 in 1987. The population is very homogeneous, over 90 per cent Sunni Arab. The vast majority of its population come from the Dulaim tribal confederation, which inhabits Syria and Jordan as well as Iraq and has over a thousand individual clans, each headed by a sheik selected by tribal elders.

Ramadi is located in a fertile, irrigated, alluvial plain, within Iraq's Sunni Triangle. A settlement already existed in the area when the British explorer Francis Rawdon Chesney passed through in 1836 on a steam-powered boat during an expedition to test the navigability of the Euphrates. He described it as a "pretty little town" and noted that the black tents of the Bedouin could be seen along both banks of the river all the way from Ramadi to Fallujah. The modern city was founded in 1869 by Midhat Pasha, the Ottoman Wali (Governor) of Baghdad. The Ottomans sought to control the previously nomadic Dulaim tribe in the region as part of a programme of settling the Bedouin tribes of Iraq through the use of land grants, in the belief that this would bind them more closely to the state and make them easier to control.

Ramadi was described in 1892 as "the most wide awake town in the whole Euphrates valley. It has a telegraph office and large government barracks. The bazaars are very large and well filled." Sir John Bagot Glubb ("Glubb Pasha") was posted there in 1922 "to maintain a rickety floating bridge over the river [Euphrates], carried on boats made of reeds daubed with bitumen", as he put it. By this time the Dulaim were mostly settled, though they had not yet fully adopted an urbanised lifestyle. Glubb described them as "cultivators along the banks of the Euphrates, watering their wheat, barley and date palms by kerids, or water lifts worked by horses. Yet they had but recently settled, and still lived in black goat-hair tents." A British military handbook published during World War I noted that "some European travellers have found the inhabitants of Rumadiyah [Ramadi] inclined to religious fanaticism".

Ramadi was twice fought over during the Mesopotamian Campaign of World War I. It was held initially by the forces of the Ottoman Empire, which garrisoned it in March 1917 after losing control of Fallujah to the east. The British Army's Lieutenant General Frederick Stanley Maude sought to drive out the garrison in July 1917 but faced severe difficulties due to exceptional heat during both day and night. A force of around 600 British soldiers plus cavalry units faced 1,000 Turks with six artillery pieces. The attack was a costly failure and a combination of exhaustion, disorganisation, Turkish artillery fire and an unexpected sandstorm forced Maude to call off the attack with heavy losses. More than half of the 566 British casualties were caused by the heat.

Maude tried again during a cooler period in September 1917. This time the attacking force, led by Major General H.T. Brookings, was better organised and the British force was able to cope with the temperatures. The British mounted their attack from a direction that the Turks had not expected and managed to cut off their enemy's line of retreat. Many members of the Turkish garrison were killed or forced to surrender and the British were able to take control of Ramadi.

Ramadi was contested again during World War II following the 1941 Iraqi coup d'état. The coup leader, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, initiated a siege of the British base at RAF Habbaniya near Ramadi. This prompted a British counter-attack to break the siege, sparking the brief Anglo-Iraqi War. An Iraqi brigade occupied Ramadi under the auspices of a training exercise. The British assembled an ad hoc relief force dubbed Habforce which advanced from the British Mandate of Palestine into Iraq. The force succeeded in relieving RAF Habbaniya and Iraqi resistance rapidly crumbled as their counter-attacks were defeated, allowing a British column to seize control of Ramadi.