guerrilla campaign against the British military from 1970 to 1997. Catholics welcomed the soldiers when they first arrived in August 1969, but Catholic hostility to the British military's deployment increased after incidents such as the Falls Curfew (1970), Operation Demetrius (1971), the Ballymurphy Massacre (1971) and Bloody Sunday (1972). An internal British Army document released in 2007 stated that, whilst it had failed to defeat the IRA, it had made it impossible for the IRA to win through violence, and reduced substantially the death toll in the last years of conflict. From 1998, after the Good Friday Agreement, Operation Banner was gradually scaled down: patrols were suspended and several military barracks closed or dismantled, even before the start of the decommissioning of IRA armaments. The process of demilitarisation started in 1994, after the first IRA ceasefire. From the second IRA ceasefire in 1997 until the first act of decommissioning of weapons in 2001, almost 50% of the army bases were vacated or demolished along with surveillance sites and holding centres, while more than 100 cross-border roads were reopened. Eventually in August 2005, it was announced that in response to the Provisional IRA declaration that its campaign was over, and in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement provisions, Operation Banner would end by 1 August 2007. From that date troops were to be based in Northern Ireland only for training purposes, and reduced in number to 5,000; responsibility for security was entirely transferred to the police. The Northern Ireland–resident battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment – which grew out of the Ulster Defence Regiment – were stood down on 1 September 2006. The operation officially ended at midnight on 31 July 2007, making it the longest continuous deployment in the British Army's history, lasting over 37 years. While the withdrawal of troops was welcomed by nationalist political parties the Social Democratic and Labour Party and Sinn Féin, the unionist Democratic Unionist Party and Ulster Unionist Party opposed the decision, which they regarded as 'premature'. The main reasons behind their resistance were the continuing activity of republican dissident groups, the loss of security-related jobs for the Protestant community, and the perception of the British Army presence as an affirmation of the political union with Great Britain. Adam Ingram, the Minister of State for the Armed Forces, has stated that assuming the maintenance of an enabling environment, British Army support to the PSNI