U.S. soldiers look on as they watch a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter on final approach for landing at Bagram Air Field on November 26, 2009. (Photo by BONNY SCHOONAKKER/AFP via Getty Images)
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Just over a month after the fourth anniversary of the calamitous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Donald Trump has demanded that the ruling Taliban return control of the strategic Bagram airbase to the United States. Among other things, Trump asserts that the U.S. built the sprawling Afghan airbase, something he has previously said about another large airbase used by the U.S. military in Iraq.
“If Afghanistan doesn’t give Bagram Airbase back to those that built it, the United States of America, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN,” Trump wrote in a post on his social network site Truth Social on Saturday. For its part, the Taliban responded on Sunday by rejecting any prospect of returning the base to U.S. military control or allowing it access.
Perhaps overlooked in all this was Trump’s assertion that the U.S. “built” Bagram, which is easily disprovable. After all, the original airfield was built by the Soviet Union all the way back in the 1950s. It’s not the first time Trump has made such a statement. Late in his first term, he suggested the U.S. would retain its troop presence in Iraq’s western al-Asad airbase to “watch Iran.”
“We spent a fortune on building this incredible base,” he said in reference to al-Asad in February 2019. “We might as well keep it.”
Trump’s statement, and his earlier surprise visit to al-Asad to meet U.S. service personnel stationed there in December 2018, infuriated the Iraqi government, which he did not coordinate his visit with, leading to charges that he violated Iraq’s sovereignty. That, combined with his subsequent comment about the same base, led to calls by powerful Iran-backed political factions in Baghdad to expel U.S. troops.
Iran directly targeted al-Asad with a ballistic missile barrage in retaliation for Trump’s assassination of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ extraterritorial Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. While the missiles did not kill any U.S. troops at the base, several suffered traumatic brain injuries.
As with Bagram, the U.S. did not build al-Asad. The base’s construction dates back to the 1980s, when Iraq built a network of enormous airbases with designs incorporating lessons derived from the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars. Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, it was known as Qadisiyah airbase, and Yugoslav contractors built it, not the United States. These bases featured long runways and reinforced aircraft shelters designed to prevent a repeat scenario of the destruction of much of the Egyptian Air Force sitting in the open in Sinai by a surprise Israeli air assault in 1967.
Military aviation historian Tom Cooper once recalled how meticulous Iraq was about reinforcing these bases. A HR-Manager of a contracted Yugoslav construction company told him how the Iraqis “insisted on top quality” construction. For example, while that company would typically harden the reinforced concrete construction of aircraft shelters and other fortifications by driving a roller up to 500 times over the same spots, the Iraqis demanded they do it 5,000 times!
“If the Yugoslavs failed to do so (and the Iraqi inspectors were all the time checking what they were doing), they would have to repeat the exercise,” he wrote. The result was that parts of the huge base were “rolled over and hardened not 5,000 times, but 6,000-7,000 times.”
Still, these hardened shelters proved vulnerable to bunker-buster bombs dropped by the U.S.-led coalition during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. After the U.S. outright invaded Iraq in 2003 and deposed Saddam Hussein’s regime, al-Asad became a valuable asset, strategically situated as it is in the restive Sunni-majority Anbar province, during the ensuing Iraq War.
Reporting from al-Asad in 2006, Oliver Poole described it as sitting amidst the “most rebellious region” of Iraq at that time.
“But get ‘inside the wire’ and this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a slice of U.S. suburbia rather than the front-line in a war zone,” he wrote. “Its restaurants include a Subway and a pizza shop. There is a coffee shop, football pitch and even a swimming pool.”
A picture taken on January 13, 2020, during a press tour organised by the US-led coalition fighting the remnants of the Islamic State group, shows members the US military walking through the cafeteria inside Ain al-Asad airbase housing US and other foreign troops in the western Iraqi province of Anbar. (Photo by AYMAN HENNA/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Consequently, al-Asad served in those years as a relatively secure hub for U.S. troops at the height of that conflict. Perhaps underscoring its security, President George W. Bush even made an unannounced visit there on September 3, 2007, his third visit to Iraq at that point.
The Iraqi airbase served as a key hub for U.S. troops withdrawing from the country, an unceremonious withdrawal completed by the end of 2011, concluding a highly controversial and unpopular war. However, the U.S. military would return to Iraq in 2014 following the bloody rise of the notorious Islamic State group, which conquered one-third of Iraq that summer. U.S. troops returned to al-Asad, where they found things like newspapers left behind from the previous withdrawal, along with extra dust.
The U.S. expanded its presence in 2016 ahead of Iraq’s counteroffensive to remove Islamic State from Mosul, Iraq’s second city and the largest urban center the group ever captured.
U.S. troops remained throughout the war against the Islamic State. They transitioned into an advisory role in December 2021 and withdrew from al-Asad a second time this August, ahead of a scheduled September 2025 withdrawal from the federal Iraq regions. Thus, it appears that in his second term, Trump has lost any interest in using al-Asad to “watch Iran.” U.S. troops will remain in Iraqi Kurdistan until at least September 2026. However, the planned construction of additional helipads at the U.S. troop base on the grounds of Erbil International Airport in Kurdistan may signal a more extended deployment there.
While the U.S. expanded and modified al-Asad over the years and trained several Iraqi security personnel there, it’s certainly a stretch to say that this amounted to “building” it.
Trump’s talk of America having “built” Bagram, while also untrue, makes some degree of sense considering the highly substantial modifications the U.S. made to that enormous base over the course of the 20 years it controlled it.
As an interesting aside, George W. Bush wasn’t the first U.S. president to visit Bagram. That first goes to Dwight Eisenhower, who visited in the late 1950s when a monarchy still ruled Afghanistan.
In the 1980s, the Soviets controlled Bagram and used it as a hub throughout their 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. Just as U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II attack planes based at Bagram provided troops with close air support against the Taliban, so too did Su-25 Frogfoots during the Soviet war against the Mujahideen.
When U.S. troops arrived in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, they came across rusted-out Soviet-built T-55 tanks hulks and gutted airplane frames abandoned in nearby fields, a reminder of the ultimate fate of the previous superpower’s occupation. Bagram was also in ruins when the Americans arrived. And while the U.S. didn’t build it, it undoubtedly rebuilt and expanded it significantly, by an estimated 30 square miles, during its time there.
“Originally envisioned as a temporary home for invading U.S. forces, the sprawling American base at Bagram, a former Soviet outpost in the shadow of the towering Hindu Kush mountains, is growing by nearly a third in size,” read an October 2007 Associated Press report.
By 2006, the U.S. had already spent $96 million on a second 3,660-meter runway at Bagram. Substantially thicker and lengthier than the previous one, this American-built runway could handle bigger aircraft, including strategic bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress and large military transports like the C-5 Galaxy. Therefore, access to Bagram could enable the U.S. or China to project significant power outside Afghanistan in Central Asia and surrounding regions.
A US Air Force C-17 heavy lifter takes off from Bagram airbase, in the Parwan province north of Kabul, on August 10, 2009. (Photo by MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP via Getty Images)
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As with al-Asad in the Iraq War years, Bagram featured several American fast food joints and cafes. By 2009, more permanent brick-and-mortar accommodations were being constructed to house the growing number of troops deployed in the country during Barack Obama’s earlier years as president. Bagram also hosted a detention center for suspected terrorists that became infamous among Afghans and was compared to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba since it held several suspects without charge, sometimes for years.
Ultimately, the U.S. evacuation of Bagram could hardly have been less ceremonious or even dignified. It literally took place under the cover of darkness, and the new Afghan commander wasn’t even notified. It also occurred before the primary evacuation in August 2021, which saw an infamous suicide bombing at Kabul’s main airport, and thousands of desperate Afghan civilians trying to escape on outgoing planes as the Taliban swiftly recaptured the entire country.
Last year, the Taliban triumphantly marked the third anniversary of its rise back to power by parading military equipment, much of it American-made, through Bagram, a reminder that the days of the U.S. military in Afghanistan are now relegated to history.
While Trump can indeed credit the U.S. with expanding, substantially improving, and upgrading the Central Asia country’s main airbase, the prospect of the U.S. military returning to it with the consent of Kabul’s incumbent rulers seems highly unlikely.
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