When Melania Trump accompanied her husband President Trump to Iraq this week, it was the first time in more than a decade that a first lady of the United States had visited a war zone.

Trump also became the only first lady to have visited Iraq since the war began more than 15 years ago.

During the eight years of her husband's presidency, Michelle Obama never traveled to a war zone, according to Mark Knoller, a veteran CBS White House correspondent widely respected for his copious and accurate record-keeping of White House activities and events. "Checked my records," Knoller told the Washington Examiner. "Found no war zone trips by Mrs. Obama."

Obama launched an initiative designed to help military families and got to within 600 miles of a war zone when she met with troops at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in November 2015.

Before the Trump visit to Iraq, the most recent visit to a war zone by a first lady was that of Laura Bush to Afghanistan in June 2008. The same day she was there, 11 police officers were killed in an ambush south of Kabul and three British soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber in Helmand province. Bush also went to Afghanistan in March 2005.

Hillary Clinton stayed away from war zones when she was first lady during her husband Bill's eight-year stint at the White House. She did not visit troops during combat operations in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 but made a trip there in March 1996 after hostilities had ceased, along with her daughter Chelsea, then 16. Clinton faced ridicule in 2008 when she claimed she landed in Bosnia "under sniper fire," even though news footage from the time showed her strolling on the tarmac and being read a poem by a small girl.

She visited Northern Ireland in 1995, after the IRA had called a ceasefire the previous year, and returned in 1998 after the IRA had called a second ceasefire. Clinton claimed she had been "instrumental" in brokering peace in Northern Ireland but Nobel Peace Prize winner Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey described this as "a wee bit silly."

Clinton later visited Iraq on congressional delegations as a senator in 2003, 2005, and 2007. She visited Afghanistan as a senator in 2007 and several times during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Barbara Bush accompanied her husband, President George H.W. Bush, to visit American troops in Saudi Arabia during Thanksgiving in 1990, just before the start of the Gulf War, when coalition forces ejected Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt visited American troops in the Pacific theater for a month in 1943, even traveling to see wounded Marines on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Guadalcanal was bombed the night before she arrived and the night after she left, and she joined troops in a shelter when an air raid warning sounded.

This week, Trump said he had been worried that he was putting his wife in harm's way. “I had concerns about the institution of the presidency," he said. "Not for myself personally. I had concerns for the first lady, I will tell you.

"But if you would have [seen] what we had to go through in the darkened plane with all window[s] closed with no light anywhere — pitch black. I’ve been on many airplanes. All types and shapes and sizes. So did I have a concern? Yes, I had a concern."