# US response to ISIS and anti-ISIS coalition

### Military victory, civilian harm and the continuing coalition mission

The United States-led campaign against Islamic State grew from the collapse of Iraqi security in 2014 into a multinational air, advisory and intelligence operation extending across Iraq and Syria. Its central achievement was the destruction of Islamic State's territorial rule. Its central accountability deficit was that people living under Islamic State also suffered severe civilian casualties and displacement during the battles to defeat it. Winning a territorial campaign did not extinguish the organisation's cells, and the coalition's continued presence became a politically contested question in Iraq.

In June 2014 Islamic State captured Mosul and announced a caliphate spanning territory in Iraq and Syria. In August 2014 the United States began military strikes in Iraq and expanded the bombing campaign to Syria in September. President [Barack Obama](/people/barack-obama)'s administration assembled a coalition whose members offered aircraft, intelligence, training or financial measures against recruitment and financing. Britain began Royal Air Force strikes in Iraq in October 2014; its published operational record documents specific missions that month. The involvement of multiple states made [military alliance cohesion](/drivers/military-alliance-cohesion) an operational issue, since air forces and ground partners needed shared intelligence and interoperable command arrangements.

During 2015–2016 coalition forces supported Iraqi and Kurdish troops while Syrian partners advanced against Islamic State. Iraqi forces began the [battle of Mosul](/facts/battle-of-mosul) in October 2016 and reclaimed the city in July 2017 after devastating urban warfare. Syrian Democratic Forces captured Raqqa in October 2017. In March 2019 the last substantial Islamic State enclave around Baghouz fell. These territorial changes sharply reduced the group's ability to collect taxes, command towns and move fighters openly, but they did not eliminate [terrorist activity](/drivers/terrorist-activity). Insurgents could disperse, reconstitute covert networks or exploit insecurity in detention facilities and border districts.

The human costs cannot be excluded from the account of military success. [Human Rights Watch](/organizations/human-rights-watch) investigated coalition strikes around Tabqa in Syria, reporting that the evidence indicated at least 84 civilians were killed in two attacks in March 2017. Its September 2017 report questioned whether all feasible precautions were taken to minimise civilian casualties. Civilian harm also affects trust in foreign military partners, particularly when survivors have difficulty obtaining transparent investigations or compensation. Neither a coalition's assertion that a target was legitimate nor an insurgent group's use of densely populated areas resolves the obligation to investigate individual attacks.

In September 2024 the United Kingdom reported an American–Iraqi agreement to wind down the coalition's military mission in Iraq over the following twelve months. London said the mission had operated since 2014 and counted 87 government and institutional partners. It reported that British forces helped train more than 111,000 Iraqi personnel and that RAF crews conducted more than 10,000 sorties. Such figures describe deployment and assistance, not an independently measured absence of armed threats. The planned transition toward bilateral security arrangements reflected the Iraqi government's interest in sovereign control and the sensitive [al-Sudani militia balance](/drivers/al-sudani-militia-balance) between state authorities and armed groups. Renewed attacks or retaliatory strikes can still raise armed-conflict intensity even after a formal counter-insurgency coalition mission changes its name or legal basis. The defensible conclusion is narrower than either total defeat or total failure: coalition-backed forces removed a territorial regime while protection of civilians and enduring political stability remained unsettled.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/drivers/us-response-to-isis-and-anti-isis-coalition