America's last troops leave Iraq after 23 years

Twenty-three years, $1.7 trillion, and 4,500 American dead — and on Wednesday, the last major US base in Iraq locks its gates.

The exit was agreed in 2024, under President Joe Biden, and carried out by President Donald Trump, who put it plainly in July: “We don't think we need the military there anymore.” The arc of it is staggering — from more than 170,000 troops at the invasion's peak to zero. Troops and equipment have been moving out of Harir Air Base, near the Kurdish capital Erbil, since early September; other coalition partners, including Germany, already packed up. And Baghdad rejected a last-minute US request to keep part of the force behind, Iraqi officials say.

Here is the gamble inside the ceremony. Premier Ali al-Zaidi, a 41-year-old businessman who took office promising to end the foreign presence, attached a second deadline to the same day: Iran-backed militias must hand over their weapons by September 30. Billboards celebrating the end of the American presence went up across Baghdad on Monday. The militias, however, are not disarming — they are parading. Tehran's allies have celebrated the exit as a victory, and the commander of Iran's Quds Force reportedly made an unannounced visit to Baghdad this week for closed-door meetings on the government's disarmament plan.

“On September 30, we will celebrate the turning of a black page in Iraq's history and the failure of the occupation to impose its will on our country.” — Abu Mojtaba al-Yasiri, Islamic Resistance in Iraq commander

And so the question nobody in Baghdad can answer is what October 1 actually looks like. Washington's war with Iran has turned Iraq into a battlefield for seven months: militants and Iranian forces launched more than 600 attacks on US facilities in the first two months alone, and the US embassy in Baghdad now issues kidnapping warnings about twice a week — a Wall Street Journal team pulled out this month after one such threat. Iraqi security experts warn the departure removes the one counterweight to Tehran's influence; the Kurds fear a vacuum that Islamic State sleeper cells could exploit; Iraqi authorities say they just disrupted a suspected IS cell preparing attacks timed to the withdrawal.

Twenty-three years in five acts

The withdrawal closes a story that began with a lie the world has never stopped paying for. In March 2003, American and British forces invaded Iraq on the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat. The weapons did not exist. What existed was a swift military victory followed by a catastrophic occupation: the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the de-Baathification of the state, the power vacuum into which sectarian militias, al-Qaeda, and eventually the Islamic State all poured. The invasion's architects promised a short war and a grateful democracy. They got the longest war in American history's shadow and a region rearranged.

Act two was the surge and the drawdown. By 2007, Iraq was in open sectarian civil war, and the Bush administration's troop surge — more boots, Sunni tribal buyoffs, a grinding counterinsurgency — bought a fragile calm. In 2011, Barack Obama completed the withdrawal his predecessor had negotiated, declaring the war over. It was not over. The hollowed-out Iraqi army, the sectarian government in Baghdad, the Syrian civil war next door: the kindling was stacked, and in the summer of 2014 the Islamic State swept out of Syria, took Mosul, and declared a caliphate across a third of Iraq. Act three was the return — American airpower, advisers, and eventually thousands of troops again, fighting alongside Kurdish peshmerga and Shia militias alike to destroy the caliphate street by street. Mosul was liberated in 2017 at the cost of the city's west bank.

Act four was the shadow war. In January 2020, an American drone strike killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad's airport — an assassination on Iraqi soil that Iraq's parliament answered by voting to expel all foreign troops. The vote was never enforced, but the trajectory was set: every Iraqi government since has promised the Americans would leave, and every American administration has negotiated the timeline. The militias Washington calls Iranian proxies and Baghdad calls the Popular Mobilization Forces — the Hashd al-Shaabi, born in 2014 as volunteers against ISIS, now a permanent, armed, Iranian-aligned pillar of the Iraqi state — spent those years attacking American bases with rockets and drones, bleeding the presence they could not expel by vote.

Act five is the war that made the exit inevitable. Seven months ago, Washington's confrontation with Tehran turned hot, and Iraq became its battlefield: more than 600 attacks on American diplomatic and military facilities in the first two months alone. Bases built to fight ISIS became targets in a war with Iran. The logic of the presence inverted — the troops were no longer protecting Iraq from its enemies; they were drawing Iraq's enemies' fire onto Iraqi soil. When Trump said in July that America doesn't need the military there anymore, he was stating what the rocket fire had already established. The 2024 agreement, negotiated under Biden, gave the exit its paperwork. The war gave it its urgency.

Zaidi's double deadline

Ali al-Zaidi is the figure the whole gamble turns on, and he is worth understanding. Forty-one years old, a businessman rather than a militiaman or a cleric, he took office promising what every Iraqi premier since 2003 has promised: the end of the foreign presence. What distinguishes him is that he attached a second promise to the first — that the Iran-backed militias would disarm by the same September 30 deadline, because, in his words, there is "no justification for their existence after the 30th of September."

The logic is elegant and the enforcement is fantasy. The logic: the militias' founding charter was the fight against ISIS and the resistance to American occupation. With ISIS territorially defeated and the Americans leaving, the justification expires — and a sovereign state cannot tolerate armed factions that answer to a foreign capital. October 1, in Zaidi's telling, opens "an era free of foreign troops." It is the sovereignty speech every Iraqi leader has dreamed of giving.

The fantasy is in the arithmetic of power. The Hashd al-Shaabi is not a militia in the romantic sense; it is a parallel state. Its factions hold ministries, parliamentary seats, border crossings, and business empires. They command tens of thousands of armed men and an arsenal of rockets and drones. They are funded, trained, and in many cases directed by Tehran's Quds Force — whose commander's unannounced visit to Baghdad this week, for closed-door meetings on the disarmament plan, was the real negotiation happening behind the billboards. The billboards went up on Monday celebrating the American exit. The militias' parades are the counter-demonstration: we are not disarming, we are inheriting.

Zaidi's deadline will therefore be tested in the most literal way. If the militias ignore September 30 — and every signal says they will — the premier faces a choice between confrontation he cannot win and reinterpretation he cannot sell. The likely outcome, the one Iraqi politics has produced for twenty years, is a third path: the deadline slips, the disarmament becomes a "process," the process becomes permanent. Sovereignty day arrives on schedule. Sovereignty itself remains negotiable.

The vacuum and its candidates

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the Middle East abhors it with armed men. The American departure removes three things at once: the intelligence and surveillance architecture that watched the desert, the airpower that could strike anywhere in the country within the hour, and the political counterweight that kept Tehran's influence at least partially deniable. Each absence has a candidate waiting to fill it.

The first candidate is Iran, and it is not waiting. The Quds Force commander's quiet trip to Baghdad this week was the tell: with the counterweight gone, Tehran's question is not whether its influence grows but how openly it can be exercised. The militias' celebration — al-Yasiri's "historic victory," the "black page" turned, the warning that any American who stays "would go back in a coffin" — is the sound of a proxy network promoting itself to landlord. For twenty years, Iran bled the American presence with rockets it could deny. Now it inherits the estate.

The second candidate is the Islamic State, and it has been waiting longer. The caliphate is gone; the insurgency is not. IS sleeper cells have spent years in the deserts of Anbar and the mountains of the north, attacking checkpoints, assassinating officials, taxing villages — the low-level war that never quite ended. Iraqi authorities say they just disrupted a cell preparing attacks timed to the withdrawal, which is either reassuring or terrifying depending on how many cells they did not find. The Kurds' fear is specific and historical: every time the center's attention lapses, the disputed territories become the jihadists' corridor again.

The third candidate is the Iraqi state itself — the outcome Zaidi is betting on, and the one with the thinnest track record. The Iraqi security forces are larger and more experienced than at any point since 2003; they did the ground fighting against ISIS, and they held during the war's seven months. Iraqi officials insist they can hold security alone. The honest assessment, the one Iraqi security experts give off the record, is that they can hold most of it, most of the time — and that the gaps, the seams, the bad nights, are where the other candidates live.

Then there is the embassy. The American diplomatic compound in Baghdad — the largest American embassy in the world, a fortress on the Tigris — now issues kidnapping warnings about twice a week. A Wall Street Journal team pulled out this month after one such threat. The diplomats stay; the journalists leave; the warnings accumulate. It is the precise measure of what the withdrawal does not end: the war with Iran continues, the militias remain armed, and the Americans who remain in Iraq — diplomats, contractors, the quiet security details whose existence the consensus lists as unknown — are now the exposed remnant of a presence that once numbered 170,000.

Empires have left Mesopotamia before

There is a longer history here, and it counsels humility about exits. The British drew Iraq's borders, installed its king, and ran its oil — and left, in stages, across the middle of the last century: formal independence in 1932, the military finally out after the 1958 revolution that killed the king. Every foreign power that has held Mesopotamia has discovered the same thing: the country is easy to enter and impossible to administer, its sects and tribes and cities rearranging themselves around every occupier and outlasting every one.

The American era will be remembered, in that longer history, as the most expensive lesson of the pattern. $1.7 trillion. 4,500 American dead. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead — the number no American speech ever quite says aloud. A war launched on false premises, a surge that bought time, a withdrawal that invited ISIS, a return that defeated ISIS, a shadow war that bled into a real one, and now an exit negotiated by one president and executed by another. The bipartisanship of the departure is its own verdict: Biden agreed it, Trump carried it out, and no serious voice in Washington argued for staying. The debate ended before the last base closed.

What the twenty-three years purchased is the question historians will argue over for a century. The maximalist case: the caliphate destroyed, a generation of Iraqi officers trained, a flawed but functioning electoral politics, a Kurdistan that survived. The minimalist case: Iran empowered beyond its pre-2003 dreams, a militia state within the state, a region taught that American commitments expire. Both cases are true. That is the thing about Mesopotamia. Every ledger balances and no ledger closes.

What October 1 looks like

Begin with the certain: celebration. October 1 will bring rallies in Baghdad, flags, the billboards' promise fulfilled — the visible joy of a country marking the end of a foreign military presence that began when its teenagers were born. Zaidi will give the sovereignty speech. The militias will give the victory speech. Both will claim the day. Both will be, in their way, right.

Then the deadline. The disarmament demand will slip or be reinterpreted — watch for the vocabulary shift from "deadline" to "process," from "hand over weapons" to "integrate into the state." The Quds Force commander's meetings this week were the real negotiation; whatever was agreed in those closed rooms will surface as policy in the coming weeks. If a single prominent faction disarms publicly, Zaidi can claim momentum. If none does, the premier's authority — staked entirely on this promise — begins to erode on day one.

Then the test the consensus names honestly: the first post-withdrawal attack. It may come from an IS cell probing the seams, or from a militia faction reminding the premier who holds the rockets, or from the Iran war's spillover finding the embassy's exposed perimeter. Whenever it comes, it will set the tone for everything after — because the question it answers is the only one that matters: does the Iraqi state hold the line alone, or does the vacuum fill?

And finally, the Americans who remain. The consensus is careful — "whether any American personnel remain in Iraq after today in any form" is listed as unknown — and the carefulness is the story. Advisers, contractors, security details, intelligence liaisons: the visible base closes, the invisible presence negotiates its own terms. Twenty-three years ends on Wednesday. The relationship it leaves behind — the embassy warnings, the militia threats, the premier's gamble — is just beginning its next act.

Beyond Iraq's borders, the exit rearranges the region's furniture. In Tehran, the departure will be read — and sold — as the vindication of twenty years of proxy patience: the Americans came, the Americans bled, the Americans left on a timetable Baghdad set. In Riyadh and the Gulf capitals, the read is warier: a smaller American footprint means the Iranian shadow lengthens, and the kingdoms that spent the last decade hedging between Washington and Beijing will hedge harder. In Washington, the doctrine has a name — “over-the-horizon” — and a geography: the bases remain in Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, the carriers remain in the Gulf. The promise is that America can leave Iraq without leaving the region. The premise is that distance no longer degrades power. The militias' rockets spent seven months testing that premise.

And then there is the oil — the thing the war was never about and always about. Iraq is OPEC's second-largest producer, and its southern fields around Basra pump the crude that funds the entire state: salaries, subsidies, patronage networks, all of it downstream of the barrel. A stable withdrawal keeps the crude flowing; a chaotic one puts a risk premium on every tanker loading at the Gulf terminals. The market that repriced Brent on a social-media post will reprice it again on the first bad night in Baghdad. The barrels are the reason everyone — Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, Beijing — needs Iraq stable. They are also the reason none of them can guarantee it.

In Washington, the bet is that ending the mission ends the target on American backs — no troops, no hostages, no more 600-attack seasons. The Journal's own Baghdad bureau just left over a kidnapping threat, which says everything about the risk the policy is accepting. The arithmetic is clean; the security logic underneath it is not.

Tehran reads this as a victory bought with patience and proxies — twenty years of pressure, and the Americans are leaving on a timetable Baghdad set. The Quds Force commander's quiet trip to Baghdad this week was the other half of the story: with the counterweight gone, the question is not whether Iran's influence grows, but how openly.

For Baghdad, October 1 is sovereignty day — a premier delivering what every Iraqi government since 2003 promised. For the Kurds and the Sunnis, it is the day the intelligence, drones and air support leave with the Americans. For the region, it is the next live test of whether Iraqi forces, and not foreign bases, can hold the line.