It's the second time the U.S. has withdrawn all military forces from Iraq.
Page B1From§Eachthe midnight edition — 30 September 2026
TWELVE YEARS
America leaves Iraq for the second time in twelve years, having promised the first would be the last.
As it ran on the front
Born in 2014, when the black flags went up over Mosul and Washington sent soldiers back into a country it had left three years earlier. Preceded in death by the withdrawal of 2011, and by the promise that came stapled to it — that no American boots would touch Iraqi soil again. That promise lasted four years. On December 3, 2015, wire services confirmed the pledge of additional U.S. Special Operations troops to the fight, a pledge Iraq's own ruling alliance said only its Parliament could authorize, and one the country's militias were already calling unacceptable before a single soldier landed.
The occupation it restarted did the slow work occupations do. In October 2017, the Iraqi Army and allied fighters stormed Hawija, one of the last Islamic State strongholds still standing inside Iraq's own borders. The territory was gone. The soldiers were not.…
…(cont) They stayed through a decade in which the terms of the arrangement were rarely discussed out loud. In December of 2015, the same month Washington confirmed the new troops were coming, Iraq's foreign minister was separately demanding that Turkey pull its own tanks and artillery out of Iraqi Kurdish territory, where they had rolled the month before without so much as a phone call to Baghdad. Sovereignty, it turned out, was a word two governments used about a third country's soil, neither of them being it — plain hogwash dressed up as diplomacy.
This week the last Americans go, twelve years after they came back for a fight that had already been declared finished once. It is a second withdrawal for a war that got a first ending speech in 2011 and needed a second one anyway. What survives it: the successor deployments elsewhere in the region, the contractors whose employment was never pegged to a Wednesday deadline, and the question — raised once in a Baghdad parliament and never resolved in either capital — of who gets to authorize the next one.
In lieu of flowers, a floor vote, held before the troops leave next time, not twelve years and two withdrawals after they arrive.
“They pulled out in 2011, told us that was that, and then spent the next decade quietly walking it back one Special Operations pledge at a time. Nobody in Washington voted on the second war, the same way nobody voted on the first ending — the guys who actually write the authorization just watch it happen on the news like the rest of us.”
“Look, the mission changed — this was never a re-invasion, it was a counter-terrorism partnership, targeted, advise-and-assist, completely different legal posture than 2003. Did the Iraqi Parliament object? Sure, but that's a sovereignty question for their system, not — okay, that's actually the whole point of a sovereignty question. Forget I brought it up.”
The receipts
· Following the Obama Administration's pledge of additional Special Operations troops to Iraq, several members of Iraq’s ruling alliance state that only the Iraqi Parliament can authorize the action, an from the morgue, 3 Dec 2015
· Thousands of ISIL fighters and their families flee or surrender to the Syrian Democratic Forces, pushing back ISIL control to a square mile in the last ISIL stronghold of Baghuz. It is expected that I from the morgue, 14 Feb 2019
· The Iraqi Army and allied paramilitary fighters storm the ISIL-held city of Hawija in the Kirkuk Governorate. Hawija is one of the last remaining ISIL strongholds in Iraq. (BBC) from the morgue, 4 Oct 2017
· Iraq's Foreign Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, renewed demands that Turkey fully withdraw its troops from northern Iraq, asserting that Turkey must respect Iraq's sovereignty or face potential military from the morgue, 30 Dec 2015
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.