However, the Labour government had attracted controversy by sending British troops to fight in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, and even more so when it joined the American-led invasion of Iraq eighteen months later – particularly when it emerged that the ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction were never found, and serious questions were raised about the issue of going to war. Although the regimes in both of these countries were swiftly ended by British and American troops, the remaining British forces were not withdrawn from Iraq until 2009 and not from Afghanistan until 2014.