Iraq: 1,000 days of war

It has been the strangest war. A thousand days ago, on 20 March 2003, the US and British armies started a campaign which ended a few weeks later with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

It seemed so easy. President George Bush announced that the war was over. The American mission had been accomplished. Months passed before Washington and London realised that the war had not finished. In fact it was only just beginning. Of the 18,000 US servicemen killed or wounded in Iraq, 94 per cent have been killed or wounded since the fall of Baghdad.

There is no sign that the election for the 275-member Iraqi parliament this Thursday will end the fighting. The Sunni Arabs, the core of the insurrection, will vote for the first time, but there is no talk of a ceasefire. A leaflet issued by one resistance group in Baghdad yesterday encouraged its followers to vote but warned: "The fighting will continue with the infidels and their followers."

It was such a strange war because the US began a conflict in 2003 to change radically the Middle East, the most volatile and dangerous region in the world. This was in complete contrast to the first Gulf War in 1991, when the main war aim of President George Bush Snr was to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and restore the status quo.



http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article332812.ece