Troops leave 'with great pride'
 

The speeches touched on the success of the mission as well as its losses: Nearly 4,500 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis were killed. An additional 32,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis were wounded. And $800 billion was spent from the U.S. Treasury.


"To be sure, the cost was high — in blood and treasure of the United States and also the Iraqi people," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the roughly 200 troops and others in attendance. "Those lives have not been lost in vain — they gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq."


Many Iraqis are uncertain of how that chapter will unfold. Their relief at the end of the reign of Saddam, who was hanged in December 2006, was tempered by a long war that was launched to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nearly plunged the nation into full-scale sectarian civil war.

"With this withdrawal, the Americans are leaving behind a destroyed country," said Mariam Khazim, a Shiite whose father was killed when a mortar shell struck his home in Sadr City.


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