The US troop surge in Iraq in 2007 gradually decreased violence, as it is showed by the statistics of the war.
Year 2007 was the most violent of the entire occupation. The number of dead and injured shot to a maximum due to the insurgent offensive, both in civilian victims and Iraqi security forces and in casualties of foreign troops. In 2007 alone, approximately 904 US servicemen died in Iraq and more than 6,000 of the same nation were injured, which is the highest figure in the entire occupation. Iraqi casualties are harder to count, but it is estimated that 1800 members of the Iraqi security forces and more than 17,000 civilians were violently killed during that year.
This increase in violence was due to an offensive by the Shia insurgency in the main cities of the country as well as the attacks of jihadist cells that still operated in Iraq. Cities such as Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, Najaf, Tikrit or Baquba, among others, were the scene of constant attacks and clashes throughout the year in an attempt by the insurgents to thwart the normal development of the new Iraqi authority backed by the multinational force.
In his speech to the nation on Wednesday, January 10, 2007, George Bush declared that the most urgent priority for success in Iraq was security and announced as the cornerstone of his strategy the dispatch of 21,500 soldiers and 1.2 million dollars for this program.
The statistics show us that the violence in Iraq began to diminish as of March 2008, when the American supremacy in combat began to break the insurgent efforts.
The year 2009 began with a considerable reduction of violence throughout the country coinciding with the end of the Bush administration, which was the symbol of the American occupation. This fact and the advances already achieved in terms of security, as well as the very wear of the insurgency, reduced the casualties in foreign troops to minimum levels. However, constant attacks continued in a large number of cities, punishing both Iraqi forces and the civilian population.
The following graph shows how the number of civilian deaths in Iraq decreased after the surge of 2007.
