Four soldiers died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on Sunday bringing the US death toll in the 5-year-old war to 4,000. Photo by CNN
Four US soldiers died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on Sunday bringing the American death toll in the 5-year-old war to 4,000.
The soldiers' vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device while patrolling a neighbourhood in southern Baghdad, CNN reported.
"No casualty is more or less significant than another; each soldier, Marine, airman and sailor is equally precious and their loss equally tragic," US military's chief spokesman in Iraq, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, commented on the tragic milestone reached.
Meanwhile, estimates of the Iraqi death toll range from about 80,000 to the hundreds of thousands, with another 2 million forced to leave the country and 2.5 million people displaced within Iraq.
President Bush ordered troops into Iraq on March 19, 2003, after months of warnings that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was concealing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
The CIA later concluded that Iraq had dismantled its weapons programs in the 1990s.
About 160,000 US troops remain in Iraq, and the war has cost US taxpayers about USD 600 billion.