Baghdad: Five years after US-led invasion troops swept through Iraq, feared dictator Saddam Hussein is dead and an elected government sits in Baghdad - but Iraqis remain beset by rampant violence, political stalemate, economic woes and the humiliation of a foreign occupation.

Saddam's regime was toppled in just three weeks in what US President George W Bush declared as the first bombs dropped on Baghdad in March 2003 was a campaign to disarm Iraq and "free its people."

But fear of Saddam's hated secret police has been replaced by a new terror, with Iraq still being hit on a daily basis by insurgent attacks and Sunni-Shiite violence where victims are counted in scores. Although the level of violence has dropped over the past few months, the top US commander in Iraq says the nation s leaders have failed to make enough progress in settling their political differences.

"Scoring a military victory is easy, but a political victory is more difficult to achieve," said Mustapha Alani, director of security studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre. He said Washington, having dismantled Saddam s regime, was now "unable to put it back together."

In the five years since the United States unleashed its "Shock and Awe" operation, violence has killed tens and probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and well over 4,000 members of the US-led foreign forces.

Independent website Iraqbodycount.org estimates the number of civilian deaths at up to 90,000 although other figures, including Iraqi government and UN statistics, are much higher.

Source : PTI