Brown announces Iraq pullout
Updated on 17 December 2008
On a day when blasts kill 18 people in Baghdad, the British prime minister announces that UK troops will leave Iraq in July.
Six years after the invasion, Gordon Brown and his Iraqi counterpart announced today that British troops will have "completed their tasks" by the end of May 2009 and will pull out of the country within the following two months.
The statement was made in Baghdad, where shortly after a meeting between Mr Brown and Nouri al-Maliki, two bomb blasts killed 18 people and wounded more than 50.
Since the 2003 invasion 178 British servicemen and nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.
