US military marks end of its war in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Dec 15 (Reuters): The US military officially ended its war in Iraq Thursday, packing up a military flag at a ceremony with US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta nearly nine years after the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. The last 4,000 American troops will withdraw by the end of the year, leaving Iraq still tackling a weakened but stubborn insurgency, sectarian tensions and political uncertainty. "After a lot of blood spilled by Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could govern and secure itself has become real," Panetta said at the ceremony. US soldiers rolled up the flag for American forces in Iraq and slipped it into a camouflage-coloured sleeve. Nearly 4,500 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives in a war that began with a "Shock and Awe" campaign of missiles pounding Baghdad, but later descended into a bloody sectarian struggle between long-oppressed majority Shia and their former Sunni masters. Saddam is dead, an uneasy politics is at work and the violence has ebbed. But Iraq still struggles with the insurgency, a fragile power-sharing government and an oil-reliant economy plagued by power shortages and corruption. In Falluja, the former heartland of an al Qaeda insurgency and scene of some of the worst fighting in the war, several thousand Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal Wednesday, some burning US flags and waving pictures of dead relatives. Iraq's neighbours will keep a close watch on how Baghdad will confront its problems without the buffer of a US military presence, while a crisis in neighbouring Syria threatens to upset the region's sectarian and ethnic balance. US President Barack Obama, who made an election promise to bring troops home, told Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that Washington will remain a loyal partner after the last troops roll across the Kuwaiti border. AFP from Fallujah adds: Battered, humiliated and temporarily cut off from the rest of Iraq, the people of Fallujah have paid a heavy price for two massive battles in 2004 between US forces and Sunni insurgents. Now they can't wait for the "occupiers" to leave. Despite parts of the city having been rebuilt, Fallujah remains deeply scarred by US military offensives in April and November 2004, two of the bloodiest campaigns of the war that turned it into a household name. "It is true that we suffered many losses, but we taught them a lesson they will never forget," said a man who said he took part in the fighting but declined to give his name. "They will tell their grandchildren of the great fighters of Fallujah." The city of about half a million people 60 kilometres (40 miles) west of Baghdad was home to some of the earliest anti-US protests in the aftermath of the March 2003 invasion. Back in May 2003, Fallujah residents were content to just throw their shoes at US soldiers. But in March 2004, four American employees of the US private security firm Blackwater, since renamed Xe and now called Academi, were brutally killed in the city. Images of their bodies, mutilated and set alight before being left hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates river, were seen the world over, and it would not be long before the US responded. The April offensive aimed to quell the burgeoning Sunni insurgency but was a failure-Fallujah became a fiefdom of Al-Qaeda and its allies, who essentially controlled the city. The second campaign was launched just two months before legislative elections, in January 2005. Some 2,000 civilians and 140 Americans died, in a battle considered one of the fiercest for the United States since the Vietnam war.