In June 2006 I started working for Iraq Body Count as a news collector and writer. The year was remarkable in a number of ways. It was the year Nuri Al-Maliki was elected prime minister of Iraq. It was also the year Saddam Hussein was tried, convicted and executed. It was the worst year in terms of civilian deaths, with over 29,000 people losing their lives in violence. With over 55,000 civilian deaths, 2006 and 2007 marked what came to be known as Iraq's ‘sectarian violence’, or, more controversially, ‘civil war’.

The following two chapters focus on the period 2006– 2009, a time when over 71,000 civilians died in bombings and shootings, when Iraq was for the first time a ‘democratic’ state, when the civil war raged, when the US President George W. Bush announced ‘the surge’, employing more American troops in Iraq in order to crush the insurgency (2007), when British troops withdrew (2009), followed by American troops in 2011, and the rise of Sunni discontent in Shia-ruled Iraq.

By the end of this period, end of 2009, it seemed as though the violence had decreased, as Table 2.1 shows, enough for an external observer to be optimistic.

As a new researcher, I was given the task of recording the violence and monitoring the security and the political developments. What followed was a few years of keeping and publishing a weekly record of incidents, ‘The Week in Iraq’, as well as working with the rest of the team on annual reports. This chapter includes some of those editorials and reports, so as to shed light on developments and themes arising from the occupation of Iraq, terrorism and the effects of both on the lives of Iraqi civilians. It highlights the nature and frequency of the violence in Iraq, which was and still is daily.

My first publication on the IBC website that was read by thousands and filled my inbox with messages from all over the world was ‘The Price of Loss’, which was based on US army records involving Iraqi compensation claims for deaths caused by US troops.