Iraq War

The Iraq War was fought in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. It began on 20 March 2003 with an invasion by a coalition led by the United States and the United Kingdom, which overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein within weeks. A long insurgency and a sectarian civil war followed, and American troops left only at the end of 2011. Estimates of the dead range from about 150,000 to over a million, most of them killed after the invasion itself.

After the Gulf War of 1991, the United Nations required Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction and sent inspectors to verify it. Iraq obstructed their work and in 1998 suspended cooperation. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush's administration made Iraq a target of its "war on terror". It argued that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The US Congress authorised force in October 2002. The war was opposed by many governments and by anti-war protests around the world, and the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, later called the invasion illegal under the UN Charter.

The attack opened on 20 March 2003 with a "shock and awe" bombing campaign, followed by a fast ground advance. American, British, Australian and Polish forces took part, while Kurdish Peshmerga fighters opened a northern front. American divisions drove north through the desert and the centre of the country, British forces advanced through the south-east, and on 9 April Baghdad fell. Saddam's home town of Tikrit was taken on 15 April. Saddam went into hiding; he was captured near Tikrit on 13 December 2003, tried by an Iraqi court and hanged on 30 December 2006.

The American-run Coalition Provisional Authority dismantled the ruling Ba'ath Party and disbanded the army, decisions later widely blamed for fuelling resistance. Looting and disorder spread. An insurgency grew among former regime loyalists, Sunni Islamists including al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Shia militias such as that of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. In 2004 photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison provoked international outrage, and American forces fought two battles for the city of Fallujah, the second, in November, the heaviest urban fighting of the war. No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were found, and the 9/11 Commission found no credible evidence of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Iraqis voted in multi-party elections in 2005, and Nouri al-Maliki became prime minister in 2006. In February 2006 the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, set off a wave of sectarian killing between Shia and Sunni Muslims. In January 2007 Bush announced a "surge" of more than 20,000 extra troops under General David Petraeus, which helped to reduce violence in parts of the country, although the scale of the improvement was debated.

In 2008 the American and Iraqi governments negotiated a status of forces agreement, and Bush agreed to withdraw US combat troops. Most coalition partners had already left, and the last American combat troops departed on 18 December 2011 under President Barack Obama. The coalition reported about 4,500 American and 179 British military deaths.

The war left Iraq deeply divided, and al-Maliki's government alienated much of the Sunni minority. The conflict is widely linked to the emergence of the extremist Islamic State, and in 2014 the United States returned to Iraq at the head of a new coalition against it. The failure to find the weapons that had justified the war damaged the standing of the American and British governments; a British inquiry, the Chilcot Report of 2016, concluded that peaceful options had not been exhausted.

Our 2000 map shows Iraq under Saddam Hussein before the invasion, and our 2010 map shows the country during the last full year of the American presence, with its borders unchanged.