Pentagon closes the Iraq mission as the last troops leave Erbil

The last American troops left Erbil air base on 30 September, and the Pentagon said the same day that the United States and its coalition partners had formally ended Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq. The departure closes a 12-year mission against the Islamic State and a presence that began with the 2003 invasion. Baghdad marked the date as Sovereignty Day.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said troops and equipment had completed an orderly departure from the air base in the Kurdistan Region. He called the move the end of a campaign that had defeated the Islamic State as an organised military threat in Iraq, and a shift from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort with a more ordinary bilateral relationship.

The Pentagon statement said the primary responsibility for what remains, including Islamic State remnants and Iran-aligned militias, now sits with the government of Iraq. Washington said it would keep providing training and intelligence support so that the group cannot rebuild from Iraqi territory. The combat mission itself is over.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi held a ceremony and named the day Sovereignty Day. Sabah al-Numan, spokesman for the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, said that after 30 September not a single foreign soldier would remain anywhere in Iraq, including the Kurdistan Region. CENTCOM said the departure had begun last October and that most of the remaining force had been based in Erbil over the past year, after Iranian-backed attacks pushed the mission north from bases closer to Baghdad.

The Diplomatic Support Center at Baghdad International Airport was handed to Iraqi officials after a deal signed on 25 September. Iranian-backed militias had fired on that compound repeatedly in 2026 and in earlier years. Its transfer was one of the last physical markers of the coalition footprint in the capital.

President Donald Trump, speaking at a White House event for Hispanic Heritage Month, called the withdrawal a great day for America. He described the Iraq war as a quagmire that grew out of very bad decision-making. Iranian officials and aligned factions treated the exit as a victory. Iraqi officers who spent the past decade fighting alongside American advisers were more divided. Some welcomed the end of a foreign garrison. Others asked who fills the gap if cells reappear in the Hamrin hills or the Syrian border desert.

The September deadline was written into an agreement reached two years ago. Baghdad had also linked that date to the disarmament of non-state armed groups. A few smaller factions have handed over weapons. The larger Iran-aligned groups rejected the demand or set conditions the government is unlikely to meet. The dollar-access pressure Washington had tied to the same date, reported earlier this month by Iraqi officials, is a separate lever. The troops are gone either way.

The 12-year clock starts in 2014, when the Islamic State took Mosul and the Obama administration sent forces back after the 2011 withdrawal. At the peak of the anti-Islamic State war, coalition troops numbered in the thousands and Iraqi forces retook the city in 2017. The mission then shrank, moved, and came under rocket and drone fire whenever Washington and Tehran were in open conflict. The war that began in February 2026 spilled into Iraq more than once. Militias fired on American positions. American aircraft struck militia sites. The formal end of Inherent Resolve does not erase that pattern.

What changes on the ground is narrower than the speeches. No American combat unit remains at Erbil or at the airport compound. Iraqi commanders now own the day-to-day hunt for Islamic State cells. The bilateral channel for training and intelligence is still open, which means advisers can return in small numbers without reconstituting the coalition mission. The militias that Baghdad promised to fold into the state are still armed. Iran's allies in the Popular Mobilisation structure have a clearer field, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has lost the nearby American base that had served as both a shield and a political fact.

The open question is whether the Islamic State, reduced but not gone, tests the new arrangement before winter. Iraqi forces have the lead. They also have neighbours who have spent the past year treating Iraqi soil as a launch pad and a target.