The number of British and US forces who died in Iraq in 2008 looks likely to be the lowest annual toll since the invasion nearly six years ago, while bombs and gunfire killed far fewer Iraqi civilians than in 2007.

The casualty reductions are the result, in part, of a surge of US troops last year and the growing competence of the Iraqi Army and police. A report by Iraq Body Count, released at the weekend, said that the number of civilians, including policemen, to die in Iraq because of violence fell to between 8,315 and 9,028 over the past year compared with 25,774 to 27,599 in 2006. In 2007, the toll was 22,671 to 24,295. Despite the drop, an average of 25 Iraqi civilians were killed every day.

Since January, two British soldiers were killed in action and two shot themselves. In contrast, 47 died in 2007, a year when UK Forces were being pounded by Shia militia in and around Basra.

The fall in casualties mirrors a shift in Britain’s operational tempo, with Iraqi forces increasingly taking the lead. The Iraqis led an offensive last March to wrest Basra back from militiamen.

Britain’s previous lowest annual death toll was in 2004 when 22 personnel died. On the US side, 312 troops died over the past 12 months, down from 904 the previous year, according to data compiled by the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a nonofficial website that records the number of military deaths in Iraq. The drop follows a decision by President Bush to send an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq from February 2007. The move halted Iraq’s descent into sectarian civil war.

Increased combat pushed up the US casualty count a year ago but the past 12 months have been much less bloody. December could show the lowest monthly death toll for the US military since March 2003.

“Nationwide, attacks are at their lowest levels since 2003,” said a spokesman for the coalition. “This improved security environment indicates a return to the rule of law and allows the Iraqi Government and its citizens to go about the business of planning for their future rather than surviving day to day.”

One Iraqi, Mohammed Ibrahim, knows all about survival. In September 2006 gunmen raided his house in south Baghdad while the 38-year-old was out working the night shift at a nearby power station. Kidnapping his father and teenage brother, the militants told the rest of his family to flee. “We had no choice but to move. Five days later the bodies of my father and brother, 16, were found at the local market. They had been shot,” Mr Ibrahim, a Shia Muslim, said of the attack by Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda supporters.

Two years later the terror that gripped Baghdad has eased. Civilian deaths fell two thirds in 2008 from their peak 24 months earlier. An average of 25 civilians died violently every day in 2008 compared with 76 in 2006 and 67 last year, said Iraq Body Count, an oft-cited website founded, after the invasion, by British and US volunteers.

Baghdad in particular has benefited, experiencing fewer deaths over the past 12 months than in the rest of the country for the first time since the 2003 invasion.

The relative lull in violence enabled Mr Ibrahim, who now lives with his mother, sister, wife and daughter in a rented house in the centre of the capital, to visit his former neighbourhood in Doura.

He told The Times: “I was shocked when I saw the neighbourhood. It is 100 per cent transformed. All the shops are open again.” The memories of that terrible night, however, keep Mr Ibrahim from returning to his roots. Instead he plans to sell his house in Doura and buy a property in Baghdad.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president