Operation Banner
| Operation Banner | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Troubles | ||||||||
 Two British Army soldiers at a checkpoint near Newry, Northern Ireland, 1988 |
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| Belligerents | ||||||||
 Irish republican paramilitaries |
 Ulster loyalist paramilitaries |
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| Casualties and losses | ||||||||
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127 killed by British military | 14 killed by British military | ||||||
Operation Banner was the operational name for the British Armed Forces' operation in Northern Ireland from August 1969 to July 2007, as part of the Troubles. It was the longest continuous deployment in the British military's history. The British Army was initially deployed, at the request of the unionist government of Northern Ireland, in response to the August 1969 riots. Its role was to support the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and to assert the authority of the British government in Northern Ireland. At the peak of the operation in the 1970s, about 21,000 British troops were deployed, most of them from Britain. As part of the operation, a new locally-recruited regiment was also formed: the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR).
The main opposition to the British military's deployment came from the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). It waged a guerrilla campaign against the British military from 1970 to 1997. There was also much hostility to the British military's deployment from the Catholic community; particularly due to incidents such as the Falls Curfew (1970), Operation Demetrius (1971) and Bloody Sunday (1972). In their efforts to defeat the IRA, there were incidents of collusion between the British Army and Ulster loyalist paramilitaries. 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. After the 1998 Belfast Agreement, the operation was gradually scaled down and the vast majority of British troops were withdrawn.
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