In keeping with Barack Obama's presidential campaign promise, the US has
withdrawn its troops from Iraq and by the end of 2012 US spending in
Iraq will be just five per cent of what it was at its peak in 2008.

In
a special two-part series, Fault Lines travels across Iraq to take the
pulse of a country and its people after nine years of foreign occupation
and nation-building.

Now that US troops have left, how are
Iraqis overcoming the legacy of violence and toxic remains of the US-led
occupation, and the sectarian war it ignited? Is the country on the
brink of irreparable fragmentation?

Correspondent Sebastian
Walker first went to Baghdad in June 2003 and spent the next several
years reporting un-embedded from Iraq. In the first part of this Fault
Lines series, he returns and travels from Basra to Baghdad to find out
what kind of future Iraqis are forging for themselves.