Pentagon says the last coalition troops have left Erbil and Inherent Resolve in Iraq is over

The Pentagon said on 30 September 2026 that the last United States troops and other coalition forces assigned to the anti-Islamic State mission in Iraq had left Erbil Air Base, and that Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq was over. Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell called the move an orderly departure of forces and equipment. The statement put the end of the wartime coalition at the close of a 12-year campaign and the start of what Washington now calls a normal bilateral security relationship.

The date was not a surprise inside either capital. In 2024 Joe Biden and the then Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, agreed that the multi-country coalition would wind down through 2025 and that the Inherent Resolve mission itself would end by the close of 2026. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, later told Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi that the mission would close by 30 September. The Erbil departure is the step that made that promise a fact on the ground. Iraqi forces marked it with a parade in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Parnell's wording is careful about what ended and what did not. He said the coalition had defeated Islamic State as an organised military threat in Iraq and across the region. He also said Washington would keep providing training and intelligence support so that the group could not rebuild from Iraqi territory. The primary job of dealing with remaining Islamic State cells, and with Iran-aligned militias that Washington says undermine Iraqi sovereignty, now sits with Baghdad. That is a transfer of responsibility, not a claim that either problem has disappeared.

Donald Trump treated the announcement as a political close. At a White House event for Hispanic Heritage Month he called the Iraq war a quagmire born of bad decisions and said the day was a great one for America. On Truth Social he wrote that he had a choice to stay or leave and that it was time for America to go home. He called the day a victory for the United States, a victory for Iraq, and a decisive victory over Islamic State. In the same post he said Inherent Resolve had begun as part of the 2003 invasion. It did not. The mission started in 2014, after Islamic State seized Mosul and large parts of northern and western Iraq, eleven years after the invasion and three years after the previous US withdrawal.

Iran and groups aligned with it treated the exit as their own result. Kataib Hezbollah's secretary general, Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, said on Thursday that the group would stop military activity inside Iraq after the American withdrawal, with one stated exception: strikes on aircraft it judges to be violating Iraqi airspace. He also said no disarmament understanding had been reached with al-Zaidi. The prime minister has set 30 June 2027 as the deadline for weapons held outside state control, after earlier talk of the end of 2026. The troop exit and the militia question are now on different clocks.

Iraqi officials have described 1 October as the start of a new chapter and as the recovery of sovereignty after two decades of war and foreign forces. Al-Zaidi confirmed on Thursday that the coalition withdrawal was complete and final. Security analysts in Baghdad, quoted by Reuters and Al Jazeera in the days around the announcement, have warned that Islamic State remnants still have room to recruit if the Iraqi army and the counter-terror service lose the intelligence feed they have used since 2014. The Pentagon statement answers that worry by keeping a training and intelligence line open. It does not say how many US personnel, if any, will remain in Iraq under embassy or bilateral cover. That figure was not in Parnell's text.

The base that closed the mission matters. Erbil Air Base, in the Kurdistan region, had become the last major coalition hub after earlier drawdowns from federal Iraq. Leaving it, with the equipment, is harder to reverse than a press release. Any return would need a new agreement with Baghdad and, in practice, with Erbil. The 2024 text assumed a phased exit. Wednesday's statement says the phase is finished.

What remains is a narrower American role and a wider Iraqi one. Islamic State no longer holds cities. It still plants bombs and runs cells. Iran-backed groups still have rockets, drones and political blocs inside the Coordination Framework. Al-Zaidi's disarmament date is eight months after the original end-2026 marker and nine months after the last coalition boot left Erbil. The interval between those dates is the period in which the bilateral promise will be tested, by a militia attack, by an Islamic State raid, or by a demand from Washington that the training line be thickened again.