Britain's long-delayed mammoth inquiry into its part in the 2003 war in Iraq will be published on July 6, its chairman revealed Monday.

The Iraq Inquiry headed by former senior civil servant John Chilcot, which began in 2009, was originally due to report within a year.

In a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday, Chilcot said that routine checks to ensure that the report did not breach national security had been completed, without the need for redactions.

A July 6 publication date allows time for "final proof reading, formatting, printing and the steps required for electronic publication", he said, in the letter published Monday.

The report is expected to be 2.6 million words long.

The Chilcot inquiry was set up by prime minister Gordon Brown, the successor of Tony Blair, who led Britain into the conflict in 2003. Some 179 British soldiers died in the war.

The inquiry's vast remit was to consider Britain's involvement in Iraq from 2001 to 2009 to establish what happened, the way decisions were made and actions taken, and to identify lessons that can be learned.

It received evidence from over 150 witnesses, held more than 130 sessions of oral evidence, and analysed more than 150,000 government documents.

The report is expected to highlight how Britain's involvement in Iraq -- particularly questions over whether Blair's government "sexed up" a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to make the case for war -- remains the subject of heated debate.

The inquiry's costs to April 2015 were �10.375 million ($15 million, 13.1 million euros).

IS leader for Iraq's Anbar province killed in air strike: Pentagon
Washington (AFP) May 9, 2016 - A US-led coalition air strike has killed a senior Islamic State leader in Iraq's Anbar province, along with three other IS jihadists, the Pentagon said Monday.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the May 6 strike near the town of Rutba -- deep in the Anbar desert -- targeted Abu Wahib, IS's "military emir" for the vast western province.

Wahib was "a former member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq who has appeared in ISIL execution videos," Cook said, using an acronym for the IS group.

"We view him as a significant leader in ISIL leadership overall, not just in Anbar Province," he added. "Removing him from the battlefield will be a significant step forward."

The men were traveling in a vehicle when they were hit. Cook provided no additional details and did not specify if a warplane or a drone had carried out the strike.

The killing of Wahib is the latest in a series of attacks on senior IS leaders in Iraq and Syria, where the jihadists still control huge tracts of land despite an intense US-led air campaign dating back to August 2014.

Some other recent targets include Suleiman Abd Shabib al-Jabouri, an "ISIL war council member," Abd ar-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli -- the IS group's second-in-command also known as Haji Imam -- and Omar al-Shishani, the man known as "Omar the Chechen," who was effectively IS's defense minister.

In February, US special operations forces captured Sulayman Dawud al-Bakkar, also known as Abu Dawud, who was described as a chemical weapons expert.

"Since the start of 2015, we've targeted and killed more than 40 high-value ISIL and Al-Qaeda external attack plotters. We have removed cell leaders, facilitators, planners and recruiters," Baghdad-based military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren wrote online last week.

Despite many significant coalition gains against the IS group, the jihadists still control the key cities of Raqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, and assaults to recapture the towns are not expected for months.