A new report indicates that divorce rate among the US armed forces has continued its upward trend in recent years as the service members fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The rate is a full percentage point higher than around the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Pentagon said on Friday.

There were an estimated 27,312 divorces among roughly 765,000 married members of the active-duty Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps in the budget year that ended September 30.

The figure equates to a divorce rate of about 3.6 percent for fiscal year 2009, compared with 3.4 percent a year earlier, the Defense Manpower Data Center said.

Marriages among reservists failed at a rate of 2.8 percent compared to 2.7 the previous year, the Associated Press reported.

Like previous years, women in uniform suffered much higher divorce rates than their male counterparts — 7.7 percent in 2009, compared to 3 percent for men.

The report also said that 3.6 percent rate is a full percentage point above the 2.6 percent reported in late 2001, when the US began sending troops to Afghanistan in response to the September terrorist attacks.

During long years of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many US soldiers have been killed and many others have been injured. Aside from that, countless number of Iraqi and Afghan civilians and security forces lost their lives.

US public support for the eight-year war in Afghanistan has dropped since President Barack Obama took office, with a majority now saying that they oppose the war and that it was not worth fighting to begin with, according to opinion polls.

Last spring, Obama who was against US wars during his presidential campaign, approved 21,000 extra troops for Afghanistan, bringing the number of US soldiers to an expected 68,000.

This is while the US president is expected to announce his decision for sending more troops to Afghanistan in a national address on Tuesday.

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