‘Everything changed’: The human cost of 25 years of US wars

Twenty-five years have passed since 19 al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial aeroplanes and slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.

What followed was a series of US-led wars that reshaped Washington’s foreign policy for a generation, in which every year since 2001, US forces have bombed a country somewhere in the world, devastating the lives of millions.

“Everything changed,” Omar*, an Iraqi student at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, told Al Jazeera. The war was launched on the false pretence that Iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction.