Timeline

In August 1990, Iraq suddenly attacked and occupied Kuwait.

In 1994, American troops clashed with local warlords in Somalia, resulting in heavy casualties. Somali people dragged the bodies of American troops in Mogadishu, and then Clinton ordered American troops to withdraw from Somalia. Encouraged, bin Laden set the goal of terrorist activities as killing as many American troops as possible.

On September 11th, 2001, a series of terrorist attacks in the United States killed nearly 3,000 people, among which two buildings of the World Trade Center in new york were crashed by hijacked passenger planes, causing heavy losses.

Bin Laden was hiding in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, so the United States asked the Taliban to hand him over, but the Taliban refused. One month after the September 11th incident, the United States began its air strikes against Afghanistan.

In 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the then President of the United States, George Bush, announced on October 7th that he began to crack down on Afghanistan.

On January 29th, 2002, US President George W. Bush declared war on "terrorism" considered by the US government, and listed Iraq and other countries in the Axis of Evil.

In March 2003, when American troops invaded Iraq, American attention shifted from Afghanistan to overthrowing Saddam Hussein, then president of Iraq.

In 2004, the US-supported Afghan government came to power, but the Taliban is still popular in the areas bordering Pakistan, and it has hundreds of millions of financial inputs from drugs, minerals and taxes.

On May 2nd, 2011, US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in an operation in Pakistan.

NATO ended its combat mission in Afghanistan in 2014, but about 12,500 foreign soldiers, 9,800 of whom were American troops, remained to train the Afghan army and carry out anti-terrorism operations.

In 2014, Afghanistan suffered the most deaths from suicide attacks since the beginning of the war on terror. At the end of that year, NATO international forces ended their combat operations in Afghanistan and handed over the task of fighting the Taliban to the Afghan government forces.

In 2018, representatives of Washington and the Taliban cautiously opened talks in Doha, with the focus on drastically reducing the US military presence in Afghanistan.

On February 29, 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed a historic agreement to withdraw all foreign troops from Afghanistan by May 2021.

On August 15th, the Taliban entered Kabul. Thousands of Afghans and foreign citizens flocked to the airport, desperately trying to board the departing plane.

Just before the deadline of August 31st, 2021, the last batch of thousands of American soldiers left Afghanistan.