At the peak of the war, over 170,000 U.S. troops were on the ground in 500 bases in Iraq. Nearly nine years, $1 trillion, and thousands of Iraqi and American lives later, the final convoy of 500 U.S. soldiers quietly slipped out of the country into Kuwait. It was an unremarkable end to a war that started with a blitz called “Shock and Awe.” BBC correspondent Hugh Sykes, who has reported from Iraq for over a decade, filed this report on the end of the Iraq war.
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