Iraqi Kurdistan’s Erbil Still A Vital Hub For U.S. Anti-ISIS Campaign

A vehicle belonging to a US military convoy drives in Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, on September 17, 2024. (Photo by SAFIN HAMID/AFP via Getty Images)

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As part of its pre-planned drawdown, U.S. troops in Iraq are leaving the federal provinces and consolidating in the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region’s capital, Erbil. The move is hardly surprising given that Erbil is home to America’s longstanding Kurdish allies and has already served as a hub for operations against the Islamic State, ISIS, group for over a decade.

The consolidation is part of a phased drawdown agreement between the U.S. and the Iraqi government reached in September 2024. American troops began leaving Iraq’s Ain al-Asad airbase in August ahead of the agreed-upon September 2025 deadline. Once the consolidation in Erbil is complete, less than 2,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, the vast majority of them in the Kurdistan Region.

From the airbase in Erbil, the U.S. will continue supporting counter-ISIS missions in nearby Syria until at least September 2026. Consequently, Erbil will serve as a critical hub for continued U.S. support of and participation in counter-ISIS operations. With plans to expand the number of helipads at the Erbil airbase, located on the grounds of the city’s international airport, U.S. forces may remain there beyond 2026, especially if the situation in Syria remains volatile.

In September alone, 25 ISIS attacks in northeast Syria killed 40 civilians and U.S.-allied fighters. In that corner of Syria, America’s Kurdish-led allies combat the group on a daily basis and still holds thousands of ISIS suspects in prisons and makeshift camps. A U.S. raid in northeast Syria killed a senior ISIS operative responsible for plotting external attacks on September 19.

Given its geographical proximity, reliable access, and relative security, Erbil serves as a vital launchpad for such counter-ISIS operations. It’s no surprise that some of the helicopters carrying the American commandos that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province in late October 2019 flew out of the Iraqi Kurdish capital.

ISIS was at the peak of its power in June 2014, when al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate spanning large swathes of Iraq and Syria that his group had conquered. Two months later, it made the fateful decision to attack Iraqi Kurdistan. It was only when ISIS militants approached Erbil that the Obama administration authorized U.S. strikes against the group. The first strikes against ISIS members as they approached Erbil marked the start of the U.S.-led war that eventually destroyed the group’s self-styled caliphate.

Iraqi Kurdistan’s Peshmerga forces held the line against ISIS for years, preventing it from expanding any further. Their efforts helped pave the way for the eventual Iraqi counteroffensive that eventually recaptured the country’s second city, Mosul, by July 2017. In neighboring Syria, the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured the group’s de facto capital, Raqqa, in October 2017 and removed it from its last territories near the Iraqi border by March 2019.

In both Iraq and Syria, ISIS still has remnants and sleeper cells, despite no longer controlling large swathes of territory from which to wage war. In Syria, the group still poses a significant threat, necessitating continued U.S. support of the SDF’s counter-ISIS efforts. The base in Erbil enables the U.S. to continue providing such essential support, especially as Washington reduces the number of American troops in Syria from 2,000 to less than 1,500 and the number of its bases there from eight to just one.

The U.S. military has long played a pivotal role in protecting Erbil and safeguarding Kurdish autonomy, going all the way back to the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. After that war, a U.S.-led no-fly zone over much of the region protected Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s ruthless forces. As Kurds held their first elections in 1992, many told Western journalists how reassuring the sound of coalition fighter jets flying high over their capital was, cognizant that they actively deterred Saddam’s army, which still had armor and artillery not far to their south.

Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani told the late journalist David Hirst in 1993 that he had received reassurances from his U.S.-led allies that they would intervene if Saddam’s forces attacked Kurdish population centers with their artillery or missiles.

Saddam’s army did briefly reenter Kurdistan in 1996 when it intervened in a highly counterproductive civil war between the two main Kurdish factions. However, it did not retain hold over those Kurdish territories it had briefly overrun.

The Kurdistan Region would go on to serve as a staging ground for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that deposed Hussein. Erbil’s Harir airfield was “captured” by U.S. paratroopers during that campaign. In reality, the Kurds welcomed and hosted American troops in a region that was already long outside of Saddam’s control. Throughout the ensuing Iraq War, not a single U.S. or coalition soldier lost their life in Iraqi Kurdistan.

While Saddam’s utterly defeated and decimated forces could no longer pose a threat after 2003—the Peshmerga even captured several abandoned Soviet-era T-55 and T-62 tanks as the demoralized Iraqi Army melted away—new threats would eventually emerge from post-Saddam Iraq. Of course, there was ISIS, which used captured American-made weaponry left behind by the Iraqi Army that fled Mosul in June 2014 against the Peshmerga.

After the ISIS war, Iraqi state-sanctioned Popular Mobilization Forces paramilitaries backed by Iran seized Kirkuk and other disputed territories from the Kurds after they held an independence referendum in September 2017. The documented use of some American-made M1A1 Abrams tanks by these forces against the Peshmerga in October 2017 led to General Dynamics suspending technical support to the Iraqi Army, which was supposed to have sole control over those tanks.

In more recent years, unclaimed rocket and drone attacks by Iran-backed PMF elements have targeted the U.S. base in Erbil at moments of heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran. In July 2025, a series of drone attacks systematically targeted Iraqi Kurdistan’s energy sector in the aftermath of the June 2025 Israel-Iran 12-day war.

Previously, Iran twice targeted Iraqi Kurdistan directly with ballistic missiles in March 2022 and January 2024. Both attacks targeted the private residences of wealthy regional businessmen. In April 2024, a U.S. MIM-104 Patriot air defense missile system deployed in Erbil intercepted at least one Iranian ballistic missile heading for Israel. It’s unclear if that same system was in place during the earlier attacks directly targeting the Kurdish capital, leading some to question whether that Patriot was for protecting Kurdistan or Israel.

Either way, the U.S. presence in Erbil is arguably a win-win for America and Iraqi Kurdistan. For America, it has reliable access to a strategically located base from which it can ensure the ISIS threat from the Middle East does not reemerge. For the Kurds, while the presence of U.S. troops may attract occasional militia attacks on their soil, the American presence provides broad reassurance that their landlocked region is unlikely to be overrun by the likes of ISIS or Iran-backed militias.

In a September interview on the region’s Rudaw Media Network, veteran Iraq analyst Michael Knights highlighted the numerous difficulties of adequately defending against modern-day attacks by small drones on vulnerable targets like oilfields. While undoubtedly a significant problem, these attacks are more of an irritant than an existential threat.

Alluding to 1996, “when the Saddam forces invaded Erbil, when they overran numerous places within the core Kurdistan Region,” Knights argued that Iraqi Kurdistan no longer faces any such existential threat.

“Well, that’s not going to happen now,” he said. “And that didn’t even happen after the terrible days in Kirkuk in October 2017. So the fundamental security of the Kurdistan Region is intact.”

“The Kurdistan Region will not be wiped out of existence.”