On March 16, 2003, three days before the first coalition boots set foot on Iraqi soil, US vice president Dick Cheney stated his belief that the forthcoming war would be over in "weeks, rather than months".

Thirteen years later, there is seemingly no end in sight to hostilities in the beleaguered nation. From the coalition's initial invasion and the subsequent incursion to ongoing Sunni and Shia militantism and the rise of Isis in 2014, the people of Iraq are well into their second decade of living under the shadow of violence and bloodshed.

In the week that Sir John Chilcot published his long-delayed report into the UK's involvement in the Iraq war, more than 200 people were killed in an Isis suicide bomb attack in a busy Baghdad shopping district. They join an ever-growing list of those who have died from violence - a grim tally of lives ended by bullets and bombs, rocks and swords.

Collating casualty figures from warzones is a problematic and inexact science. Figures can be manipulated or misinterpreted; data does not always come from reliable sources; in some cases recorded evidence must give way to estimates and guesswork.

Amid this fog, the work of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project stands as the most widely-accepted record of civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003.

The volunteer-led IBC describes itself as "the world's only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies".

Since the war began, its researchers have collated and tallied documented deaths in Iraq as reported by local mortuaries, medics, police and relatives. This method has its own problems, and the IBC is by no means free of criticism, but its figures can at least be used as a baseline for mortality in the region.

According to the organisation, between 160,307 and 179,195 civilians have died from violence in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2016. Nearly 16,000 were killed in the 12 months prior to March 2016, the body count rising with the surge of Isis and other militant groups.

Around half of those slain last year were victims of Isis executions, others died in car bombings, air- and artillery strikes, or through the misfortune of being caught in the crossfire of territorial or ideological warfare.

They join the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have perished in acts of violence since 2003.

Among the worst incidents are a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad in 2005 that led to 950 deaths; the killing of 500 civilians near the Syrian border by truck bombs in 2007 and the massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children by US Marines in Haditha, also in 2005.

Events such as these are the headline grabbers, yet they fail to portray the true tragedy of Iraq - the unceasing, ever-present threat of violent death in the fractured state.

Senior IBC researcher Lily Hamourtziadou noted earlier this year that there are "at least a dozen incidents a day where civilians lose their lives".

She says the effect on children is particularly tragic, with a generation growing up for whom violent death is "part of normal life".

"What adults are those children growing up to be?" she asks.

"How will the trauma of war affect their lives?"

The conflict has also taken a heavy toll on the soldiery of both sides. From 2003 to 2011, when the last US servicemen and women withdrew from Iraq, 4815 coalition troops, including 179 Britons, lost their lives.

Pro-coalition Iraqi Security forces suffered almost 60,000 casualties, of whom 17,690 were killed, and more than 1000 members of the US-sponsored Sons of Iraq militias died in the conflict. 1554 private contractors were also slain during the eight year period.

Iraqi combatant dead, meanwhile, numbered around 10,800 during the invasion and an estimated 26,544 in the following insurgency.

The chaos of the war and the conflicts that followed in its aftermath also created millions of refugees and an ongoing human rights crisis.

In its annual report on Iraq for 2015/16, Amnesty International drew attention to "indiscriminate attacks and extrajudicial executions" by government forces and a climate in which arbitrary arrests, torture and unfair trials are "common and widespread".

Coalition governments have also faced criticism for human rights abuses during the occupation. These came to a head between 2004 and 2006, when eleven US soldiers were found guilty of torturing and raping detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad province.

Since the rise of Isis, an estimated 3.2 million Iraqi people have become refugees or been forced out of their homes. Executions are common in Isis-controlled areas while women and girls face discrimination, sexual violence and the threat of slavery.

In 2014, a new coalition task force deployed to Iraq with a mission to "degrade, and ultimately destroy, the threat posed by Isil". The objective is clear, if its chances of success remain shrouded in uncertainty. In a country torn apart by war, the prospect of yet more conflict is depressingly familiar, its effect on the Iraqi people unimaginable.

The IDC's Ms Hamourtziadou is pessimistic. In her 2016 report she writes: "The most frequently asked question on Iraq, for years, has been 'How can the war end?'

"So many are looking for the answer, the solution, the path to peace. Yet now, more than ever, no answer can be given. The continuing struggle for hegemony, the battle of interests and the battle of rival identities are once again raging, as hope is slowly dying, along with thousands of innocents."