Tony Blair. Nicki Dugan Pogue/Flickr. Some rights reserved.A decade ago this week, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a targeted assassination by two United States airforce RF-16 strike-aircraft. Tracking him down had been a key part of Operation Arcadia, itself a core element in the Joint Special Operations Command’s operations to destroy the heart of the AQI insurgency, seen as the core of the war against the US-led coalition.
Al-Zarqawi’s death on 7 June 2006 was seen in some western circles as the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq, a war which was then killing thousands of civilians each year. Iraq Body Count estimated that 2006 was actually the worst year, with 29,000 civilians dying in the conflict (including 2,584 in June alone). Within four years the situation had improved, though 2010 still saw over 4,000 killed. In turn that proved to be only a brief pause, as the nearly 50,000 killed in the past three years indicates.
The terrible violence in Iraq confounded the expectation of a quick victory when the Saddam Hussein regime collapsed in 2003, and is one of the main reasons why there is still such interest in the war. Another is the striking contrast between the huge public opposition to the war and the UK's heavy involvement in it from the start. Without that opposition and the chaotic and violent aftermath in the Middle East, there would not have been calls for an inquiry and the Chilcot report would never have been written.
