American troops are preparing to pull out of Iraq completely by the end of December, more than eight years after the invasion that ousted Saddam and promised a better life for Iraqis. As the country enters a post-US era, many Iraqis who had welcomed the 2003 invasion feel they remain in even more danger than before Saddam’s fall.

Security is a key indicator of Iraq’s future – it drives business investment, government policy decisions and the psyche of the war-torn nation.

In interviews across Baghdad, Iraqis cited the random daily bombings and shootings that continue to kill people here. At least under Saddam, they say, they knew they could avoid being targeted by violence by simply staying quiet.

Sectarian violence, which drove Iraq to the brink of civil war just a few years ago, was almost non-existent under Saddam.

In May 2003, two months after the invasion, there were fewer than a handful of daily attacks on Iraqis, national security forces and foreign troops. That number spiked in May 2007, with an average of 180 attacks a day, according to the US military data released by congressional investigators at the General Accounting Office. Between 2005 and 2008, an average of 60 Iraqis were killed daily.

Since then, violence has dropped dramatically, but attacks continue.

Several people a day die, and a bombing in a residential area or on a street of shops that causes no casualties still spreads fear among everyone who hears about it. This past July, US forces in Iraq reported an average of 20 daily bombings, rocket attacks and shootings – including some that were thwarted before they were carried out.

Sunni insurgent groups, which sprung up when Saddam was ousted and Iraq’s majority Shiites took power, continue to strike at anyone who tries to restore normalcy to Iraq – security forces, the government, Americans or even fellow Sunnis, like the 29 who were killed in a Baghdad mosque by a suicide bomber during Ramadan prayers this past month.

Certainly no one has forgotten the horrors under Saddam.

Estimates of how many Iraqis were executed or otherwise “disappeared” during Saddam’s 24-year regime range from 300,000 to 800,000. Reviews of bodies found in mass graves from that era point to what Gerard Alexander, an expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, has called a “conservative estimate” that an average 16,000 Iraqis a year were killed.

Saddam persecuted prominent Shiite clerics and their followers and launched what Human Rights Watch calls a campaign of genocide against Kurds. People from all backgrounds rarely, if ever, dared to criticize the government, even to relatives or neighbours, for fear they’d be taken away by Saddam’s secret police and beaten, imprisoned, killed, or simply disappear.

The US military surge that poured more than 160,000 troops into Iraq in 2007 quelled much of the sectarian violence.

But a July report by the US watchdog that oversees construction in Iraq concluded that the nation is more dangerous now than it was last year due to bombings, assassinations and a resurgence in violence by Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Iraq Body Count, an independent British monitoring group, estimates at least 102,043 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the war began.

The violence looms over the American military’s planned exit, fuelling fears about instability and burgeoning influence from neighbouring Iran. As a result, Baghdad and Washington are reconsidering whether the US troops should leave by 31 December, as required under a 2008 security agreement.