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TONY Blair faces damning criticism over his failure to plan for life after Saddam Hussein when the official verdict on the Iraq war is finally delivered.

Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry team will also slam the former prime minister over claims that the dictator had weapons of mass destruction and for the way he took the UK to war when they announce their findings.

But a Whitehall source said yesterday: “They see the failure to plan for the aftermath as the biggest failing.

“The question of what Blair told US president George Bush is a bit of a diversion and the intelligence failings have already been exposed.

“But having decided to go in they should have planned properly for what came next.

“The inquiry think that thousands of lives were needlessly lost because that did not happen.”

A swift military victory for US-led coalition forces in 2003 quickly turned into a bloody insurgency – which is now being repeated as Islamist terrorist group ISIS advance on Baghdad.

The UK lost 179 troops in the six years after the invasion while estimates of Iraqi casualties have been put at up to 650,000.

Blair denied over the weekend that the 2003 invasion was to blame for the latest insurgency.

But experts say the decision to remove Hussein’s henchmen from power marginalised the Sunni minority and allowed groups such as ISIS to thrive.

Sir John is set to write to Blair and others facing criticism in his report to give them the right to reply.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said he expects it to be published before the end of the year.

The inquiry started in 2009 and was supposed to report by the end of 2011.

Meanwhile, shocking images emerged yesterday of gun-toting boys as young as eight watching an ISIS fighter executing a man by shooting him in the head.

It came as the militants stormed Baquba, their last big obstacle before Baghdad – and amid evidence that both Sunni rebels backing ISIS and Shia preparing to defend the capital are using boy warriors.

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