Iraq war in figures

BBC
1 September 2010

All US troops must be out of Iraq by the end of next year

The US has formally ended its combat operations in Iraq, marking a new phase in the seven-year conflict 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, even though they have yet to form a new government almost six months after an election.

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.

CASUALTIES

Over 4,000 US service personnel have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom since the invasion started on 19 March 2003.

At 26 August 2010 the latest figure from the US Department of Defense stood at 4,421 of which 3,492 were killed in action. Almost 32,000 have been wounded in action.

The UK has lost 179 servicemen and women, of which 136 were killed in action.

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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.

COST

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 on funding the war by the end of fiscal year 2011, with $747.6bn already appropriated.

However, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes put the true cost at $3 trillion 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 in aid.

A summary of how the war was funded was also presented to the UK's Iraq Inquiry in January 2010.

TROOP LEVELS

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 during 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.

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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

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, who are due to withdraw by the end of 2011.

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.

There are now around 150 British military personnel serving in the country with a further 1,500 assigned to the operation but not in Iraq itself (such as Royal Navy staff in the Gulf).

DISPLACED PEOPLE

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.