Timeline of Key Events in the Iraq War

This archive is about forty minutes of one morning. Those forty minutes make very little sense without the eight years around them, so here is the war in outline, with an eye on the parts that bear on July 2007.

2003: invasion and the first mistakes

The invasion began in March 2003, led by the United States and the United Kingdom. Organised resistance collapsed quickly and major combat operations were declared over within weeks.

What followed did more to shape the next eight years than the fighting had. The Iraqi army was dissolved and members of the governing party were removed from public employment, putting large numbers of trained, armed and unemployed men on the street with a grievance. No weapons of the kind used to justify the invasion were found.

Two decisions that shaped the next eight years

1. The Iraqi army was dissolved, putting large numbers of trained, armed and unemployed men on the street with a grievance.
2. No weapons of the kind used to justify the invasion were found, which removed the stated reason for the war while the war continued.

2004 to 2005: insurgency takes shape

• 2004Major fighting in Fallujah and elsewhere. Roadside bombs become the defining weapon of the war.
• 2004The Abu Ghraib photographs are published, the first time images rather than reports drive the argument about conduct.
• 2005Elections are held. A constitution is approved. Violence continues to rise.

The Abu Ghraib episode is worth noting here for one reason: it was the first demonstration in this war that pictures do what written reports cannot. The same mechanism operated in 2010.

2006 to 2007: the worst of it

The bombing of a major Shia shrine in early 2006 pushed the country into open sectarian conflict. Militias and death squads operated in Baghdad, mixed neighbourhoods separated, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced inside the city.

These were the peak years for civilian deaths, and 2007 was the deadliest year of the war for US forces. It is the year everything in this archive happens in. The surge page covers what that meant on the ground.

July 2007

2008 to 2010: the tide goes out

2011 and after

US forces completed their withdrawal at the end of 2011. The state they left behind was unstable, and within three years much of northern and western Iraq had fallen to the group that became Islamic State, drawing American forces back in a different form.

That sequence matters for the argument about the war's legacy and is beyond the scope of this archive. What the war changed about warfare itself is closer to the point.

What a list of years cannot show

A timeline gives the impression of a sequence of decisions, each following from the last. For anyone living in Baghdad it was nothing of the sort.

What a resident experienced was not phases but conditions: whether the electricity was on, whether the road to work had a checkpoint on it today and who was manning it, whether the neighbourhood had started receiving threats. Those conditions changed street by street and month by month, and they rarely matched the labels historians later applied to the year.

It is worth keeping that in view when reading any timeline of this war, including this one. The dates are real. The tidiness is imposed afterwards, and the people the war happened to did not experience any of it as a chapter heading.

Reading one morning inside the whole Iraq war

Laid out like this, 12 July 2007 sits exactly where you would expect a day like that to sit: in the worst year, in the most contested city, during a strategy that deliberately put infantry into neighbourhoods and helicopters above them.

That placement explains a great deal and excuses nothing. Thousands of days in this war contained an event of that kind. What makes this one different is not what happened but that a camera recorded it and, three years later, a copy escaped. The rest of this archive is about what people did with that copy. The human scale of the eight years is the other half of the picture.