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TACTICALLY ACQUIRED LLC

OPERATIONIRAQI FREEDOM

Who was there

Find your unit

Pick your branch and tap your unit. Every page is built for the people who were in the sand. Not listed? Type it. It probably exists.

Unit not here? It probably exists anyway. Type it above, or request it.

The timeline

Eight years, the short version

Fourteen moments that explain the war. Each unit page has the long version.

  1. 20 Mar 2003
    Shock and awe

    The invasion kicks off

    Kuwait border to Umm Qasr

    Air strikes open on the night of 19 March. The next day 3rd Infantry Division and I Marine Expeditionary Force cross the berm from Kuwait with British 1st Armoured on the right. Baghdad is 350 miles up the road.

    3rd ID gear
  2. 23 Mar 2003
    Task Force Tarawa

    Nasiriyah

    An Nasiriyah, Dhi Qar

    Task Force Tarawa fights through Ambush Alley to seize the bridges over the Euphrates and the Saddam Canal. The same morning the 507th Maintenance Company drives into the city by mistake and is shot to pieces. Eighteen Marines die on the worst day of the drive north.

  3. 5 and 7 Apr 2003
    Operation Iraqi Freedom

    The Thunder Runs

    Baghdad

    2nd Brigade, 3rd ID sends an armored column up Highway 8 into the capital on 5 April to prove it can be done, then drives back in on 7 April and stays. Task Force 1-64 Armor holds the overpasses nicknamed Moe, Larry and Curly against everything the regime has left.

    1-64 Armor gear
  4. 9 Apr 2003
    Baghdad falls

    Firdos Square

    Baghdad

    3rd Battalion, 4th Marines rolls into the city center and an M88 pulls Saddam's statue off its plinth with a crowd and the world's cameras watching. The regime is finished. The war is not.

    3/4 gear
  5. 13 Dec 2003
    Ace of spades

    Operation Red Dawn

    Ad Dawr, near Tikrit

    Soldiers of 4th Infantry Division's 1st Brigade and Task Force 121 pull Saddam Hussein out of a hole in the ground on a farm outside his hometown. Ace of spades, in custody.

    4th ID gear
  6. Apr 2004
    Operation Vigilant Resolve

    First Fallujah and the Sadr uprising

    Fallujah and Sadr City

    Four Blackwater contractors are murdered on 31 March. Marines go into Fallujah in Operation Vigilant Resolve and are pulled out a month later with the city still in enemy hands. At the same time Muqtada al-Sadr's militia rises across the south and in Sadr City.

  7. 7 Nov to 23 Dec 2004
    Second Battle of Fallujah

    Operation Phantom Fury

    Fallujah, Al Anbar

    Six battalions take the city block by block in the bloodiest urban fight since Hue City. Ninety-five Americans are killed and more than five hundred wounded clearing a city of mosques, tunnels and booby-trapped houses.

    3/1 gear
  8. Sep 2005
    Operation Restoring Rights

    Tal Afar

    Tal Afar, Nineveh

    3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment under Colonel H.R. McMaster clears a border city that had become an insurgent rail yard, then stays to hold it. Clear, hold, build gets its proof of concept here.

    3rd Cav gear
  9. 7 Jun 2006
    Air strike

    Zarqawi killed

    Hibhib, near Baqubah

    An F-16 drops two 500-pound bombs on a safe house and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is dead. The organization he built is not.

  10. 2006
    Ready First

    Ramadi and the Awakening

    Ramadi, Al Anbar

    1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, the Ready First, pushes combat outposts into the most dangerous city in Iraq while SEAL Team 3 fights beside them. In September Sheikh Sattar and the tribes turn on al-Qaeda. The Anbar Awakening starts in Ramadi.

    1st AD gear
  11. Jan to Jul 2007
    Five brigades

    The Surge

    Baghdad and the belts

    Five more brigades flow into Baghdad and the surrounding belts under General Petraeus. Soldiers move off the big bases into joint security stations in the neighborhoods. In June, Operation Arrowhead Ripper clears Baqubah.

  12. Mar to May 2008
    Charge of the Knights

    Basra and Sadr City

    Basra and Baghdad

    Iraqi forces lead the Charge of the Knights into Basra with American advisors and air. In Baghdad, 3rd Brigade, 4th ID and 1st Cav fight six weeks in Sadr City and wall off the Mahdi Army's rocket teams.

  13. 1 Sep 2010
    Advise and assist

    Operation New Dawn

    Iraq

    Combat operations formally end and the mission becomes advise and assist. Fewer than fifty thousand troops remain, and they are still getting shot at.

  14. 18 Dec 2011
    End of mission

    Last convoy out

    Khabari crossing, Kuwait border

    The last American convoy crosses into Kuwait before dawn. Eight years and nine months after the berm came down, Operation Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn are over.

The cost

Never forgotten

Every number on this page is a name on a wall somewhere. We print the units so the names keep getting said out loud.

  • 4,418U.S. deaths, OIFDoD, as of 16 Jul 2020
  • 31,994Wounded in action, OIFDoD, as of 16 Jul 2020
  • 95U.S. killed, Second FallujahOperation Phantom Fury, Nov to Dec 2004

Casualty figures: U.S. Department of Defense casualty status, as compiled by the Congressional Research Service (RL32492), as of 16 July 2020. Operation Iraqi Freedom, 19 March 2003 to 31 August 2010. Operation New Dawn added 74 more.