The US is withdrawing the last of its troops
from Iraq, the final phase in the eight-year operation which has cost
billions of dollars and many thousands of lives.
The onus of ensuring Iraq's security and rebuilding the devastated country now rests with Iraqi leaders.
Almost every figure related to the war is disputed, with none
more keenly debated than the total number of Iraqi deaths. This is a
summary of some of the key numbers and the arguments surrounding them.
US troops led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, in coalition with the UK and other nations.
The numbers of US "boots on the ground" have mostly
fluctuated between 100-150,000 apart from the period of the "surge" in
2007.
This was President George W Bush's drive to improve security
in the country, especially in the capital Baghdad, by sending in 30,000
extra troops.
UK troop levels in Iraq
- End of May 2003: 18,000
- End of May 2004: 8,600
- End of May 2005: 8,500
- End of May 2006: 7,200
- End of May 2007: 5,500
- End of May 2008: 4,100 (in southern Iraq)
- End of May 2009: 4,100 (in southern Iraq)
- End of Jan 2010: 150
- End of Nov 2011: 44
Source: MoD
Barack Obama made withdrawal from
Iraq a key pledge in his presidential election campaign of 2008 and
troop numbers have steadily fallen since he took office in January 2009.
On 19 August 2010, the last US combat brigade left the
country, leaving behind 50,000 military personnel involved in the
transition process.
British forces peaked at 46,000 during the invasion phase and
then fell away year on year to 4,100 in May 2009 when the UK formally
withdrew from Iraq.
The Royal Navy continued to train the Iraqi Navy until May
2011. The UK's presence in Iraq is now only as part of the Nato Training
Mission - Iraq. That includes 44 military personnel, including a
contingent at the Iraqi Military Academy.
The US has lost 4,487 service personnel in Iraq since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on 19 March 2003, according to the latest figures from the US Department of Defense.
By 31 August 2010, when the last US combat troops left, 4,421
had been killed, of which 3,492 were killed in action. Almost 32,000 had
been wounded in action.
Since then, in what was called Operation New Dawn, 66 have
died, of which 38 were killed in action. Three hundred and five have
been wounded in action since 1 September 2010.
The UK lost 179 servicemen and women, of which 136 were killed in action.
Other coalition countries account for 139 deaths
according to the icasualties website.
While coalition troop fatalities are reasonably well
documented, deaths of Iraqi civilians and combatants are more difficult
to track because of a lack of reliable official figures. All counts and
estimates of Iraqi deaths are highly disputed.
The organisation
Iraq Body Count has been collating civilian deaths using cross-checked media reports and other figures such as morgue records.
According to IBC there have been between 97,461 and 106,348 civilian deaths up to July 2010.
The most bloody period for civilian deaths was the month of
invasion, March 2003, in which IBC says 3,977 ordinary Iraqis lost their
lives. A further 3,437 were killed in April of that year.
The group says the difference between its higher and lower total figures
is caused by discrepancies in reports about how many deaths resulted
from an incident and whether they were civilians or combatants.
Other reports and surveys have resulted in a wide range of estimates of Iraqi deaths. The UN-backed
Iraqi Family Health Survey estimated 151,000 violent deaths in the period March 2003 - June 2006.
Meanwhile, The Lancet journal in 2006
published an estimate of 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths related to the war of which 601,027 were caused by violence.
Both this and the Family Health Survey include deaths of Iraqi combatants as well as civilians.
An unknown number of civilian contractors have also been
killed in Iraq. Icasualties publishes what it describes as a partial
list with the figure of 467.
The financial scale of the war is another area in which figures vary widely.
The respected and non-partisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the US will have spent almost $802bn (£512.8bn) on funding the war by the end of fiscal year 2011, with $747.6bn (£478bn) already appropriated.
However, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes put the true cost at $3 trillion (£1.2tn) once additional impacts on the US budget and economy are taken into account.
The UK has funded its part in the conflict from the Treasury
Reserve Fund which is extra money on top of the normal Ministry of
Defence budget.
Whitehall figures released in June 2010 put the cost of
British funding of the Iraq conflict at £9.24bn ($14.32bn), the vast
majority of which was for the military but which also included £557m
($861m) in aid.
A summary of how the war was funded was also presented to the UK's Iraq Inquiry in January 2010.
Sectarian violence in the conflict began to grow from early
2005. But the destruction of an important Shia shrine in February 2006
saw attacks between Sunni and Shia militias increase dramatically. This
caused many Iraqi families to abandon their homes and move to other
areas within the country or to flee abroad.
The International Organization for Migration, IOM, which
monitors numbers of displaced families, estimates that in the four years
2006-2010, as many as
1.6 million Iraqis [pdf] were internally displaced, representing 5.5% of the population.
Of that total, nearly 400,000 people had returned by mid
2010, primarily to Baghdad, Diyala, Ninewa, and Anbar provinces,
according to the IOM.
