After a presence of 23 years, the US military will leave Iraq by the end of September. US and Iraqi officials made the joint announcement on Tuesday, drawing a close to an involvement that began with the 2003 invasion against Saddam Hussein and later ran through the campaign against the Islamic State (IS).
The news was reported by the Associated Press (AP). Standing beside Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi at the White House, US President Donald Trump said he did not think a US military presence there was needed any more. Noting Iraq’s growing ties with US oil companies, he said the relationship had now become a vast partnership in which a military presence was no longer required.
Iraqi Prime Minister al-Zaidi said US forces would be out of Iraq by 30 September, though US companies would remain inside the country. The United States is now handing responsibility for the fight against IS to trained Iraqi troops. In March 2003, the United States launched its assault with a massive air campaign, after which US infantry entered Baghdad.
The invasion was based largely on a false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction — weapons that were never found. At the peak of the counter-insurgency in 2007, the number of US troops in Iraq rose to 1,70,000. After the Obama administration completed negotiations for a phased withdrawal, the last combat US troops left Iraq in December 2011.
After the rise of the Islamic State in 2014 and its seizure of vast areas of Iraq and Syria, US and allied forces returned at the invitation of the Iraqi government, their main aim being to rebuild and retrain the collapsed police and military units. The coalition’s military campaign ended in 2021 after IS lost the territory it controlled, but the United States had kept about 2,500 troops in Iraq for training and joint operations.
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