When Did Iraq's Civil War Began?

"Last summer in Baghdad I had conversations eerily similar to the ones I’d had in Algiers a decade earlier. As time passes I’m more and more convinced that the first half of April 2004 may, eventually, come to be seen as the date when Iraq’s civil war began. It’s difficult today to remember just how quickly things deteriorated that spring. As late as mid-February, when I was still working at Al-Iraqiyah television, my friends and I would think nothing about walking out through one of the Green Zone’s checkpoints and catching a taxi to the Kurdish-run liquor store a half-mile away where we bought beer and scotch. Seven weeks later such a trip was unthinkable for a westerner, and it has remained so ever since. The killing of four American security contractors as they passed through Fallujah at the beginning of April touched off a spiral of violence that has rarely slackened in the months since. Those four deaths did not start the conflict, but they increasingly appear to have been a tipping point of sorts. It is a measure of just how bad things have become that in media circles the summer and fall of 2003 are now seen as a golden moment when Iraq was, relatively speaking, safe."

USC Center on Public Diplomacy | Middle East Media Project