Earlier this month, Iraq’s prime minister said American troops were no longer needed in his country. That might sound surprising, but it’s nothing new: Iraqi leaders have been calling on the U.S. to withdraw its forces for years.
American troops in Iraq completed their mission fully more than five years ago, in March 2019, when ISIS lost all of its territory. Yet for inexplicable reasons, U.S. troops have remained, overstaying their welcome and becoming magnets for insurgent attacks, including from Iranian proxies.
The mandate to leave Iraq ought to be clear, but not everyone is eager to see U.S. troops depart. Detractors are throwing all shapes of proverbial pasta at the wall, searching for anti-withdrawal arguments that will stick. Perhaps inevitably, given the recent anniversary of 9/11, they have resorted to scare tactics, conjuring images of smoke plumes and burning towers while breathlessly warning of an ISIS resurgence that will terrorize the world.
Such fearmongering is disingenuous, and the American people must see through it. The truth is, the ISIS threat to the American homeland is remarkably small, and always has been. It certainly isn’t a reason to station U.S. soldiers in Iraq indefinitely.
The threat of ISIS terrorism to U.S. civilians was always hyped beyond reason. First and foremost, ISIS never was, at its core, a terrorist group intent on harming America. The hallmark of terrorism is attacking soft targets — civilians — to frighten powerful countries into meeting political demands. At its height, ISIS was an insurgency that sought to gain territory and establish a caliphate. That meant that even though ISIS perpetrated terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Europe, the group focused its greatest energy on local resistance in Iraq and Syria.
No doubt, ISIS treated its occupied populations brutally. But few, if any, real ISIS fighters targeted the U.S. homeland. Indeed, the vast majority of the so-called “ISIS terrorism” in the United States was committed by homegrown ISIS wannabes lacking any material ties to the group. According to the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, of the 455 terrorist incidents in the U.S. from 2014–2020, “jihadi-inspired extremists” carried out 31 attacks, killing 94; the Islamic State and its affiliates committed zero.
It isn’t even clear that ISIS has directly inspired violence by its admirers. Scholars have found no correlation between ISIS propaganda statements and ISIS-wannabe attacks.
Drawdown opponents, however, knavishly conflate ISIS assaults on Iraqi and Syrian military forces with the possibility of terrorist attacks on American civilians as if the two were the same. They aren’t. Just because the Islamic State can mount rudimentary ambushes on lightly defended targets in Syria doesn’t mean the group can meaningfully menace ordinary Americans on U.S. soil. So while it may be the case that ISIS activity in the Middle East increased this year, the suggestion that the United States is somehow more vulnerable as a result is pure alarmism.
Nor should the purported threat from ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) scuttle the rationale for an American departure from Iraq. ISIS-K has proved deadlier in recent years than the original ISIS, massacring more than 140 people at the Crocus City Music Hall in Moscow in March 2024 and killing 95 in Kerman, Iran, two months before that. But ISIS-K is also based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thousands of miles away from the Operation Inherent Resolve deployment in Iraq.
More to the point, even without a U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, American authorities detected both plots and alerted their Russian and Iranian counterparts in advance. Had the warnings been taken seriously — as they would have been by U.S. allies — those tragedies might have been prevented. It goes to show just how sophisticated American over-the-horizon intelligence capabilities are in neutralizing terrorist threats, without the need for boots on the ground.
Mongers of fear also exaggerate the danger of recent foiled plots that were only tenuously linked to ISIS. Last month, Austrian authorities arrested two teenagers “radicalized online” (read: never met an ISIS militant in their lives) who were suspected of planning to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. Their ties to ISIS? An “oath of allegiance” proclaimed on social media and later deleted and some ISIS paraphernalia found in their possession. Their weapons? Hobbyist stuff: “knives or homemade explosives.”
Yet newspaper headlines uncritically echoed U.S. officials’ insistence that ISIS-themed cosplay by a couple of Austrian teenagers posed a grave danger to Americans. “They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people,” crowed CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, praising his agency’s role in the arrests.
The Islamic State is a bunch of thugs who managed to turn an entire region against them. No one likes them, and no one should. Their rise a decade ago provoked an overwhelming counterbalancing response from Iran, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, the Kurds, the Taliban and even the Russians. But they are no real threat to the U.S. homeland, and no real reason to keep 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Rosemary Kelanic is director of Middle East Engagement at Defense Priorities.