Opinion: Washington declared victory in Iraq. Its own watchdog says the ledger isn't closed.

On September 30, the last American service members and equipment left Erbil Air Base, closing out a 23-year on-and-off military presence in Iraq that began with the 2003 invasion. President Trump announced it in a single triumphant line: "Today, I am pleased to announce, that the last American Forces are leaving Iraq!" Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called it the culmination of "a 12-year campaign that defeated ISIS as an organized military threat in Iraq and across the region." Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, in office only since mid-May, said his security forces had achieved "full control over the security and operational landscape throughout the country."

It is the second time the United States has declared this particular mission over. The first full withdrawal, in 2011, preceded the Islamic State's seizure of a third of Iraq within three years. Washington has every incentive this time to insist the comparison does not hold. The trouble is that the most detailed, least political account of conditions on the ground — the Lead Inspector General's quarterly report to Congress on Operation Inherent Resolve, covering April through June — describes a security picture considerably messier than the valedictory statements suggest.

The numbers that support the victory lap

To be fair to the administration, the degraded-ISIS case is not hollow. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, Admiral Brad Cooper, the U.S. Central Command chief, said ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria were at their lowest levels since 2013 and down 70 percent since 2023. The Defense Intelligence Agency's own assessment, cited in the inspector general's report, concludes ISIS in Iraq "almost certainly remains severely degraded, focused on its own survival, and unable to exploit instability" from this year's war with Iran. When the final troops left Erbil, Cooper told the departing units that "ISIS no longer poses a systemic threat to Iraq's national security" and that Iraqi forces now "possess the capacity, leadership, and operational independence to unilaterally manage threats." Those are specific, falsifiable claims from the officer responsible for the theater, not spin from a podium.

The caliphate-era threat that drew 2,500 American troops back into Iraq in 2014 genuinely has receded. That is real progress, and an honest accounting of the withdrawal has to start there.

The threat the withdrawal date didn't wait for

What the inspector general's report also documents, in the same pages, is a second and unresolved security problem that has nothing to do with ISIS: Iran-aligned Iraqi militias who have spent the months since the February-to-April war between the United States, Israel and Iran attacking American interests directly. The Defense Intelligence Agency told the inspector general that since the fighting began on February 28, those militias "have launched hundreds of attacks against U.S. forces and U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq." In April, Washington sanctioned seven senior commanders from groups including Kata'ib Hezbollah, Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat al-Nujaba and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declaring, "We will not allow Iraq's terrorist militias, backed by Iran, to threaten American lives or interests." The following month, Treasury went further, designating Iraq's own deputy oil minister for allegedly diverting state oil revenue to the same networks.

The same report notes Washington simultaneously suspended training for Iraq's security forces and froze dollar shipments to the Iraqi government that April, explicitly to pressure Baghdad into curbing the militias. The dollar shipments resumed in late June. The training pause, as of the report's close-out date of June 30, had not.

Prime Minister al-Zaidi, for his part, did try to force the issue, setting September 30 — the same day U.S. troops finished leaving — as the deadline for armed factions to surrender their weapons. Two prominent groups agreed. Others refused. According to the coalition task force's own account in the inspector general's report, the holdouts "retain inventories of rockets, missiles, UAS, and in some cases, air defense systems that are capable of threatening U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq and the region."

"[Militia groups] retain inventories of rockets, missiles, UAS, and in some cases, air defense systems that are capable of threatening U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq and the region."

A gap between the ceremony and the inventory

None of this is hidden or classified. It is laid out, in plain language, in the same quarterly document that also contains the attack-rate statistics the administration is citing as vindication. Yet the public framing of September 30 has been almost entirely about ISIS — an adversary the government's own intelligence agencies say is genuinely diminished — and almost silent on the Iran-aligned militias, an adversary the same reporting period shows is still armed, still attacking American facilities as of the report's cutoff, and still defying a disarmament ultimatum that expired on withdrawal day itself. Reporting from the departure ceremony noted that Kurdish officials voiced concern about losing American air-defense coverage just as Iran-aligned factions publicly welcomed the American exit — an odd split reaction for a theater where the threat is supposedly resolved.

There is also a structural reason to want more candor about this gap. The force that is leaving Iraq is not simply relocating to Jordan in some symbolic sense; it is removing the direct deterrent and air-defense presence that, by Washington's own admission in April, was deemed necessary enough to justify suspending military aid and freezing currency shipments to an allied government. Fewer than five months later, the same militias that prompted those emergency measures remain armed, and the American response is to complete the pullout on schedule rather than explain what changes once the leverage of a troop presence is gone. The Lead Inspector General's report — produced under a dual mandate from the Inspector General Act of 1978 that exists precisely to keep Congress informed independent of the executive branch's talking points — is doing the job it was designed to do. Congress has not yet done its part in return.

What accountability would actually look like

A serious oversight response would not relitigate the withdrawal itself, which both the Biden administration that negotiated it in 2024 and the Trump administration that executed it agree was the right call once ISIS's territorial threat collapsed. It would instead demand answers the inspector general's report does not and cannot provide on its own: what contingency exists if the holdout militias use the weapons the task force says they still possess; why the training pause for Iraqi forces remained in effect through the withdrawal's final weeks even as the dollar-shipment pressure was lifted; and whether the embassy and diplomatic-support presence that remains in Baghdad and Erbil has the protection it needs now that the broader troop presence is gone. Those are not rhetorical objections to leaving Iraq. They are the specific, documented loose ends that the government's own watchdog flagged weeks before the flag came down — and that a ceremony built around a 70-percent statistic was not designed to answer.