Outbound force: On the U.S. leaving Iraq

The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 , saying that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and harboured terrorist groups. In 2011, then U.S. President Barack Obama announced America’s withdrawal , but its troops returned when the Islamic State captured huge swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria. On September 30, 2026, more than 23 years after the invasion, U.S. troops finally left Iraq, in the midst of another American war in the region . The war on Iraq has been one of the gravest strategic and humanitarian disasters of the 21st century. The WMD claim turned out to be false, if not an outright lie, while al-Qaeda built one of its most violent branches in post-war Iraq. The destruction of Saddam’s Ba’athist state and the abrupt rise of Shia parties widened social cleavages, triggering a deadly civil war, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.