The 2003 invasion’s legacy reverberates in the emboldenment of Iran, Islamic State’s violence and the disintegration of Syria
n Baghdad’s heart of power, Iraq’s prime minister arrives at work each day in a building once used by Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s close adviser and foreign minister. The ruins of a Saddam-era defence building still teeter next door, 20 years after an American bomb crashed through its roof at the start of the invasion.
Operation Steel Curtain nears its end with a sweep along the north Euphrates river at Ramana, near the border with Syria. Detainees with their hands in cuffs are taken by helicopter for questioning. marauders who shredded borders and killed and displaced millions, and the disintegration of Syria. “Later, when Iraqis attack you under the cover of darkness, you don’t think it might be the same people who were smiling and waving. These are bad actors, evil people. The ones you came to get rid of. The fact that they could be the same people who smiled and waved: that’s a cynical realisation you won’t be ready for until years later.”
“Maliki was like the sorcerer’s apprentice,” says Simon Collis, a former British ambassador to Iraq and Syria. “He had wanted to whip up a small storm that would drive Shia voters to support him as the strongman who alone could deal with a threat that he had created.
At the height of the IS rampage, several million Syrians left Turkey by boat for Greece, or overland to Bulgaria, with Ankara doing little to stop them, as migration became weaponised as a political tool.
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