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.

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.