Mapped: The Countries the US Has Bombed Every Year Since 9/11 ‎

Every single year since the September 11, 2001, attacks, US forces have bombed a country somewhere in the world, according to an interactive investigation by Al Jazeera's data and visual journalism unit, AJ Labs. The findings, mapped out in a pair of Al Jazeera interactives, trace a quarter-century of continuous American military action often described as the "war on terror" and tally its staggering human and financial cost.

At Least 10 Countries Bombed
According to AJ Labs' analysis, the US has bombed at least 10 countries since 2001: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran. The strikes have taken a wide range of forms from full-scale invasions to targeted drone strikes and air campaigns carried out under four different US presidents, and the AJ Labs team notes its count may not even capture every operation, since covert and special-forces strikes are often excluded from public data.

Three Full-Scale Wars
The mapped campaign includes three declared, full-scale wars:

Afghanistan (2001–2021): Launched on October 7, 2001, as Operation Enduring Freedom to dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power, the war toppled the Taliban regime within weeks but triggered two decades of insurgency.

It became the longest war in US history, spanning four presidencies, before the Taliban retook control after the 2021 US withdrawal. An estimated 241,000 people died as a direct result of the conflict, according to Brown University's Costs of War project, with hundreds of thousands more deaths linked to war-driven hunger, disease, and injury. At least 3,586 US and NATO soldiers were killed.

Iraq (2003–2011): Launched in March 2003 on the false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the war saw the US declare "mission accomplished" within weeks, only for the country to descend into years of insurgent violence and a power vacuum that helped fuel the rise of ISIL (ISIS). US combat troops fully withdrew in 2011 under President Barack Obama.

The anti-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria (2014–): From 2014 onward, the US expanded its air campaign into Syria to fight ISIL while backing local partner forces on the ground, alongside continued operations advising Iraqi troops a campaign that included the 2020 US strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

The "Drone Wars" and Other Interventions

Beyond its declared wars, AJ Labs' mapping highlights a parallel track of undeclared drone and air campaigns:

In Pakistan, CIA drone strikes against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in the tribal border regions began in the mid-2000s and expanded sharply under the Obama administration. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded 423 US strikes in Pakistan since 2004, killing an estimated 2,499 to 4,001 people, including 424 to 966 civilians.

In Yemen, the US carried out missile and drone strikes against al-Qaeda leaders; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded at least 186 strikes and raids there, killing at least 853 people, including 158 civilians.

In Somalia, US air strikes targeted first al-Qaeda affiliates and later al-Shabab fighters, with 19 to 23 recorded strikes between 2001 and 2016 killing between 188 and 276 people.

In Libya, the US joined a NATO-led intervention in 2011 amid the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, launching air and missile strikes to enforce a UN-mandated no-fly zone. Nearly 9,700 strikes were launched over seven months before Gaddafi was captured and killed by rebel forces, according to Amnesty International.

More recently, the campaign has extended to Venezuela, Nigeria, and, in 2025 and 2026, Iran, where the US joined Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear and missile infrastructure and military leadership as part of a campaign that, by 2026, had escalated into a full-scale war aimed initially at regime change in Tehran.

The Staggering Cost
The financial and human toll compiled by AJ Labs, drawing on Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, is immense. US-led wars since 2001 have directly caused an estimated 940,000 deaths across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other conflict zones a figure that excludes indirect deaths from the loss of access to food, healthcare, and other war-related causes.

Financially, the US has spent an estimated $5.8 trillion funding more than two decades of conflict, broken down as roughly $2.1 trillion from the Department of Defense's war-specific budget, $1.1 trillion through the Department of Homeland Security, $884 billion in increases to the Pentagon's base budget, $465 billion on veterans' medical care, and a further $1 trillion in interest payments on the debt taken on to fund the wars. With veterans' care projected to cost at least another $2.2 trillion over the next 30 years, the total estimated bill for the war on terror climbs to roughly $8 trillion.

A Pattern That Outlasted Four Presidencies

What the AJ Labs mapping ultimately illustrates is continuity rather than any single administration's policy: despite campaign promises from multiple presidents including Donald Trump to wind down US involvement in foreign wars, every US president since George W. Bush has authorized military strikes abroad in the name of counterterrorism or national security, extending an unbroken 25-year pattern of American bombing somewhere in the world, year after year, since the morning of September 11, 2001.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/Science communicator, Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,United States Institute of Peace (USIP), [email protected] +233555275880

Sources
Al Jazeera / AJ Labs, "How many countries has the US bombed since 2001, and how much has it cost?" by Marium Ali, March 3, 2026

Al Jazeera, "'Everything changed': The human cost of 25 years of US wars," September 11, 2026

Brown University, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Costs of War Project

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone and covert-strike casualty data for Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia

Amnesty International, reporting on NATO/US strikes during the 2011 Libya intervention