At a ceremony held in Baghdad on December 15, 2011, the war that began in 2003 with the US invasion of Iraq officially ended. Although today was the official date for the end of the Iraq war, the violence continued and in fact worsened over the following years. The withdrawal of American troops was a priority for President Barack Obama, but when he leaves office, the United States will once again conduct military operations in Iraq.
Five days after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush announced the “War on Terror,” an umbrella term for a series of preemptive military strikes designed to reduce the threat terrorism poses to the American homeland. The first such strike was the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, which sparked a war that continues today.
Throughout 2002, the Bush administration argued that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was allied with terrorists and was developing “weapons of mass destruction”. Obviously, Hussein was responsible for many atrocities, but there was little evidence that he was developing nuclear or chemical weapons. Behind closed doors, intelligence officials warned the war case was based on guesswork – a British investigation later revealed that the description of an Iraqi chemical weapons report actually came from the action film made by Michael Bay. The rock. The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, however, were resolute in their public claims that Hussein posed a threat to their homeland and continued the invasion.
The invasion was an immediate success as the coalition overthrew Hussein’s government and occupied most of Iraq by mid-April. What followed, however, were eight years of insurgency and sectarian violence. Americans’ expectations that the Iraqis “would greet them as liberators” and quickly form a pluralist and stable democracy have proven to be wholly unrealistic. Although the coalition installed a new government, which took office in 2006, it has never come close to pacifying the country. Guerrilla attacks, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices continued to claim lives among soldiers and civilians, and militias on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide carried out ethnic cleanses.
The American public remained skeptical of the war, and many were horrified by reports of atrocities committed by the military and the CIA. Leaked photos proved Americans committed human rights violations at Abu Ghraib prison, and in 2007, US military contractors killed 17 civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad. Opposition to the war has become a major topic of discussion in Obama’s presidential bid.
On New Years Day 2009, shortly before Obama came to power, the United States handed control of the Green Zone – the Baghdad district that served as the coalition’s headquarters – to the Iraqi government. Congress officially ended its war authorization in November, and the last combat troops left the following month. Even by the lowest estimates, the war in Iraq claimed more than 100,000 lives; other estimates suggest the number is several times higher, with more than 205,000 civilian deaths.
Over the next three years, the ongoing sectarian violence turned into an all-out civil war. Many militias formed during the Iraq war have merged or associated with extremist groups in neighboring Syria, itself in the throes of a bloody civil war. In 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which absorbed many of these groups, controlled much of Syria and Iraq. The shocking rise of ISIS led Obama to launch new military actions in the region from June 2014. Although ISIS has now been driven out of Iraq and appears to be greatly diminished, US troops are still on duty. active in Iraq, 17 years old. after the initial invasion and nine years after the official end of the Iraq war.
READ MORE: The War on Terror: A Timeline
