9/11's Consequences in the Middle East

February, this year. A recording goes out on an Islamic State channel. The spokesman, Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari, says Syria has, quote, moved from Iranian occupation to Turkish-American occupation... and declares a new phase of operations. The man he's threatening is Syria's president, Ahmad al-Sharaa.

And al-Sharaa is... who, exactly?

A former al-Qaeda leader. He broke with the group in twenty sixteen, then led the coalition that overthrew Bashar al-Assad at the end of twenty twenty-four. So in twenty twenty-six, a former jihadist runs Damascus... and the jihadists want him dead.

Okay. Draw me the line from four planes in two thousand one to THAT.

That's the whole episode. Not vibes — documents and dates. And the biggest single hinge is one page of paper, signed in Baghdad, May two thousand three.

One page. I'm holding you to that.

Scale first, because people forget it. Brown University's Costs of War project, their twenty twenty-one report: eight trillion dollars, and more than nine hundred thousand people killed in the post-nine-eleven wars.

Nine hundred thousand... directly killed?

Direct violence, yes. Between nine hundred and six and nine hundred thirty-seven thousand, across Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. Then in twenty twenty-three they added the indirect deaths — disease, displacement, collapsed hospitals, hunger. Up to three point six million more. Total: at least four and a half million.

And is all of that being laid at America's door?

No. They're explicit that they don't assign blame, because these wars involved many armed parties. It's a ledger, not a verdict. Afghanistan goes first. Invasion, October two thousand one. Twenty years later, August twenty twenty-one, the Taliban walk back into Kabul. Same movement. Same country.

Twenty years, to arrive back at the start.

Then Iraq, two thousand three. Sold on weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Saddam falls fast — and suddenly the Americans have to actually run a country. They do it through the Coalition Provisional Authority, under Ambassador Paul Bremer, from April twenty-first.

And here comes your page of paper.

Order Number Two. In force May twenty-third, two thousand three. Title: Dissolution of Entities. It dissolved Iraq's defence and intelligence institutions... which meant the army. Republican Guard, navy, air force. Gone, by signature.

So you fire hundreds of thousands of men who are trained, humiliated, off the payroll — and still armed.

And you erase the institutional memory of the state in one afternoon. Scholars reviewing it — including a study published through Cornell — argue it created the security vacuum that let an insurgency recruit from unemployed, disaffected young men. And that it paved the way for the beginnings of Islamic State.

Is that the consensus, or one camp's reading?

Heavily contested. Bremer has always defended it — his line is that the army had already melted away. What nobody contests is the sequence. The order comes in May. The insurgency hardens after it. And into that walks a Jordanian. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi founds al-Qaeda in Iraq in two thousand four, and builds a strategy out of mass-casualty attacks designed to set Sunni against Shia. He's killed by a US airstrike on June seventh, two thousand six, north of Baghdad.

And that's the end of it.

It doesn't even dent it. Because the next generation is already being assembled somewhere else — an American detention camp, out in the southern desert. Camp Bucca.

How big are we talking?

Around a hundred thousand detainees passed through it. The Soufan Group counted nine members of Islamic State's top command who did time there. Including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who arrived in two thousand five. Former inmates called it a university. One of them said: we spent the best days of our lives there.

Did the guards have any idea who they had?

Colonel Ken King oversaw Bucca in two thousand eight and nine. He later said of Baghdadi: he didn't rack up to be one of the worst of the worst.

Oof.

June tenth, twenty fourteen: Mosul falls. Nineteen days later, Baghdadi declares a caliphate stretching from Aleppo to Diyala. The territorial defeat takes until March twenty nineteen — and it takes a global coalition to do it.

People say Iran was the real winner of two thousand three. Fair?

Removing Saddam removed Tehran's main regional counterweight, and Iranian-backed Shia militias filled parts of that space. ISIS itself frames it exactly that way — go back to the spokesman in February, complaining about Iranian occupation being replaced. Which brings us to now. January twenty twenty-six: Islamic State prisoners escape from al-Aqtan prison at Al-Shaddadah, during fighting between the Syrian army and the Kurdish-led forces. Mass escapes from al-Hol. The US is scaling back its presence. Analysts writing in March called containment in Syria collapsing.

So the caliphate is coming back.

Most assessments say no — not as territory. The judgement is that it expands as something looser: mobile cells, assassinations, no governing, no map. That's reported analysis, not certainty.

Twenty-five years. Four and a half million dead. And the thing we invaded to destroy just... changed shape.

That's the lesson buried in Order Number Two. Destroying a regime is the easy part — that takes an afternoon. It's what you break alongside it. The police, the army, the payroll, the paperwork. That's the raw material of the next war.

Nobody signs a page expecting it to run for twenty-five years.

No. They never do. The page runs anyway.