KEY POINTS:
The British Army will formally end Operation Banner, the longest continuous deployment in its military history, and will bring almost all the troops back home after nearly four decades.
The move is a milestone for the Army and for Northern Ireland, which is looking forward to a more peaceful era. The hope is that no more generations will grow up with heavily armed troops as a familiar sight on the streets.
The ending of the IRA campaign and the widespread sense that the Troubles are over mean the Army will no longer be on active security duty, after 38 years which have seen more than 300,000 military personnel serve in Northern Ireland.
For decades the phrases "British Army" and "streets of Belfast" have been almost synonymous, with newspapers and television carrying images of wary infantry trudging through dangerous urban and rural areas.
The troops were first called in 1969 after a period of street marches degenerated into disorder. In Belfast extreme Protestant mobs set fire to Catholic homes in the Falls Road while in Londonderry's Bogside police were exhausted by days of nationalist rioting. The then Stormont Government did not want to call them in and Westminster desperately resisted the move but Prime Minister Harold Wilson approved their despatch as an absolute last resort.
Nationalists initially hailed the troops as saviours, handing out trays of tea and sandwiches to the first bemused squaddies.
But the military is a blunt instrument to come into contact with any civilian population, and the early welcome dissipated as brushes on the streets produced friction and eventually led to sustained rioting.
In the nationalist ghettos resentment grew with incidents such as a large-scale curfew in which a large part of the Falls Road was sealed off for several days.
Nationalist alienation from the military was heightened when troops were used in the disastrous introduction of internment without trial and, most of all, with Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972.
The deaths of 14 civilians who were taking part in a protest march put a final end to any military efforts to win nationalist hearts and minds.
The event led to a swelling of the ranks of the IRA and helped spark off a major wave of violence, with almost 500 people killed in that year.
This phase of the troubles saw sustained gun battles which sometimes lasted for hours in the Belfast republican heartlands of the Falls and Ballymurphy.
By that stage it was apparent that the military presence, which had originally been viewed as an emergency short-term measure, would have to continue indefinitely.
By the late 1970s the violence had reduced somewhat, yet by that stage the IRA had transformed itself into a smaller yet still deadly organisation with the ability to launch high-profile attacks and sustain a continuing campaign.
Most of the Army's fatalities were suffered at the hands of the IRA. In one 1979 incident 18 soldiers, 16 of them members of the Parachute Regiment, were killed in a two-stage IRA bombing attack at Warrenpoint, County Down.
Soldiers were also vulnerable to snipers, and in some cases were killed while off duty. Over the years the IRA used an array of tactics and weapons, including booby-trap bombs, mortars and heavy machineguns against troops.
In the border region of South Armagh - known as "bandit country" - the IRA threat was so high that almost all troop movements had to take place by helicopter since local roads were too dangerous.
The Army and IRA remained locked in battle into the 1990s. The IRA lost important figures but remained a potent menace.
The last soldier to be killed by the IRA, Lance-Bombardier Stephen Restorick, died in 1997, the victim of a sniper using a high-powered rifle.
The question of who really prevailed, the Army or the IRA, remains unanswered and will be the subject of controversy for years.
The IRA has gone as an active force, having abandoned the idea of victory and instead pursuing its aims through politics.
The Army would not claim to have beaten the IRA in the sense of bringing about its surrender, but it can argue that violence did not prevail and that the conflict ended with a political settlement.
- INDEPENDENT
