The Iraqi civil war was a civil war fought mainly between the Iraqi government along with American-led coalition forces and various sectarian armed groups, mainly Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Mahdi Army, from 2006 to 2008. In February 2006, sectarian tensions in Iraq escalated into a full-scale civil war after the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine (which is considered one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam) by the Sunni organization Al-Qaeda in Iraq. This set off a wave of reprisals by Shia militants on Sunni civilians, followed by Sunni counterattacks on Shia civilians. In 2006, the Secretary General of the United Nations declared that if patterns of discord and violence continued to prevail, the Iraqi state was in danger of breaking up. In a 10 January 2007 address to the American people, President George W. Bush stated that "80% of Iraq's sectarian violence occurs within of the capital. This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves, and shakes the confidence of all Iraqis.". The conflict escalated over the next several months until by late 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate described the conflict as having elements of a civil war. In 2008, during the Sunni Awakening and the U.S. troop surge, violence declined dramatically. However, an insurgency by Al-Qaeda in Iraq continued to plague Iraq following the U.S. withdrawal from the country in late 2011. In June 2014 the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the successor of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, launched a major military offensive in Iraq and declared a self-proclaimed worldwide Islamic caliphate, leading to a full-scale war mainly between Iraq and ISIL from 2013 to 2017 in which Iraq declared full victory against the terrorist group. In October 2006, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Iraqi government estimated that more than 370,000 Iraqis had been displaced since the 2006 bombing of the al-Askari Mosque, bringing the total number of Iraqi refugees to more than 1.6 million. By 2008, the UNHCR raised the estimate of refugees to a total of about 4.7 million (~16% of the population). The number of refugees estimated abroad was 2 million (a number close to CIA projections) and the number of internally displaced people was 2.7 million. The Red Cross stated in 2008 that Iraq's humanitarian situation was among the most critical in the world, with millions of Iraqis forced to rely on insufficient