Baghdad: The United States military officially declared an end to its mission in Iraq on Thursday even as violence continues to plague the country and the Muslim world remains distrustful of American power.
Troops lowered the flag and wrapped it in camouflage, formally ‘casing’ it, according to Army tradition.
The ceremony was attended by US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, who told troops they leave Iraq with ‘lasting pride’.
Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Lloyd Austin, the top US commander in Iraq, also spoke at the ceremony at Baghdad International Airport.
There are a little more than 4,000 US soldiers in Iraq, but they will depart in the coming days, at which point almost no more American troops will remain in a country where there were once nearly 170,000 personnel on more than 500 bases.
The withdrawal will end a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead, many more wounded, and 1.75 million Iraqis displaced, after the 2003 US-led invasion unleashed brutal sectarian fighting.
The ceremony comes after US President Barack Obama hailed the ‘extraordinary achievement’ of the war in a speech to welcome home some of the troops.
In an aircraft hangar at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Obama was cheered by soldiers as he honoured nearly nine years of ‘bleeding and building’.
The military ceremony comes a day after hundreds of people in Fallujah marked the impending departure of American forces by burning US flags and shouting slogans in support of the ‘resistance.’
Obama’s predecessor George W Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, arguing its then leader Saddam Hussein was endangering the world with weapons of mass destruction programs.
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