The Iraq War documents leak is the unsanctioned disclosure of a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 to several international media organizations and published on the Internet by WikiLeaks on 22 October 2010. The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths. The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians. It is the biggest leak in the military history of the United States, surpassing the Afghan War documents leak of 25 July 2010.

The logs contain numerous reports of previously unknown or unconfirmed events that took place during the war.

Following Operation Cast Lead last year, Israel come under such harsh international criticism culminating in the Goldstone Report, while the war in Iraq, which has claimed the lives of over 150,000 people, has yet to lead to the establishment of a similar UN-sanctioned probe

Iraq (/ɪˈræk/ or ⁱ/ɪˈrɑːk/; Arabic: العراق‎ al-‘Irāq); officially the Republic of Iraq (Arabic:  جمهورية العراق (help·info) Jumhūriyyat al-‘Irāq), is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.

Iraq borders Syria to the northwest, Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Jordan to the southwest and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the south. Iraq has a narrow section of coastline measuring 58 km (36 mi) on the northern Persian Gulf. The capital city, Baghdad is in the center-east of the country.

Two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, run through the center of Iraq, flowing from northwest to southeast. These provide Iraq with agriculturally capable land and contrast with the steppe and desert landscape that covers most of Western Asia.

Historically, Iraq was the center of the Abbasid Arabic Islamic Empire. Iraq has been known to the west by the Greek toponym 'Mesopotamia' (Land between the rivers) and has been home to continuous successive civilizations since the 6th millennium BC. The region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is often referred to as the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of writing, law and the wheel. At different periods in its history, Iraq was the center of the indigenous Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Abbasid empires. It was also part of the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Mongol, Safavid, Afsharid, and Ottoman empires, and under British control as a League of Nations mandate.

The Afghan War documents leak is the disclosure of a collection of internal U.S. military logs of the War in Afghanistan, also called the Afghan War Diary, which were published by WikiLeaks on 25 July 2010. The logs consist of 91,731 documents, covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. Most of the documents are classified Secret. As of 28 July 2010, only 75,000 of the documents have been released to the public, a move which Wikileaks says is "part of a harm minimization process demanded by [the] source". Prior to releasing the initial 75,000 documents, Wikileaks made the logs available to The Guardian,The New York Times and Der Spiegel in its German and English on-line edition which published reports per previous agreement on that same day, 25 July 2010.

The leak, which is considered to be one of the largest in U.S. military history, revealed information on the deaths of civilians, increased Taliban attacks, and involvement by Pakistan and Iran in the insurgency.Wikileaks says it does not know the source of the leaked data. The three outlets which had received the documents in advance, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, have all concluded that they are genuine when compared to independent reports.

Julian Paul Assange ( /əˈsɒnʒ/ ə-SONZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer, political/internet activist, publisher, and journalist. He is best known as the editor in chief and founder of WikiLeaks, a media website which publishes information from whistleblowers. The site acts as a conduit for worldwide news leaks, with a stated purpose of creating open governance.

WikiLeaks has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, WikiLeaks published Iraq War documents and Afghan War documents about American involvement in the wars, some of which was classified material. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and El País) began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables.

Assange was a hacker-activist in his youth, before becoming a computer programmer and then becoming internationally renowned for his work with WikiLeaks. He has lived in several countries and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism. He has received numerous awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award, Readers' Choice for TIME magazine's 2010 Person of the Year, the 2011 Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal and the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.Snorre Valen, a Norwegian parliamentarian, nominated him for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Kristinn Hrafnsson (born 25 June 1962) is an Icelandic investigative journalist and spokesperson for the WikiLeaks organisation.

He has worked at various newspapers in Iceland and hosted the television programme Kompás on the Icelandic channel Stöð 2, where he and his team often exposed criminal activity and corruption in high places. In February 2009, while investigating the connection between Iceland's Kaupthing Bank and Robert Tchenguiz, the programme was taken off air and Kristinn and his crew were sacked.

Shortly thereafter, Kristinn was hired by RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. In August 2009, he was working on a story about Kaupthing's loan book which had just been published on the WikiLeaks webpage, when the bank got a gag order issued by the Reykjavik sheriff's office, banning RÚV from reporting on the loan book, which could be publicly accessed online via WikiLeaks. The prohibition order was withdrawn later.

Kristinn was fired from RÚV in July 2010 and has since worked as an independent journalist, collaborating with WikiLeaks and stepping up as the organisation's spokesman as its founder, Julian Assange, was forced to retreat from the limelight due to persistent legal litigations. He called the December 2010 attacks upon Wikileaks a "privatisation of censorship". In 2012, in his quality of Wikileaks spokesman he defended the organization on the website of the Swedish Television against what he defined as a smear campaign by the Swedish tabloid Expressen.