War on Terror

The War on Terror (2001 – 2021) was a 20-year long international military campaign conducted by the United States of America and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001.^[1] Initiated by the Templar puppet^[2] and President of the United States George W. Bush during his first term in office, its purported aim was to eradicate al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist organizations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the Philippines, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen,^[1] but it was driven at least in part by American ambitions for oil in Iraq.^[3]

It was largely unsuccessful in failing to defeat a concept rather than a specific enemy,^[4] costing the United States Treasury over $8 trillion, causing billions of dollars in infrastructure damage, and with 38 million people forcibly displaced and 4.5 million killed through military operations or innumerable war crimes. With major conflicts like the Iraq War over and excluding any remaining smaller operations, the campaign was deemed formally concluded following the United States Armed Forces' 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.^[1]

Sometime during the conflict, the Assassins' leader William Miles assigned his agent Emmanuel Barraza to discover the Templar role behind it. As Barraza later revealed in an interrogation on 9 May 2014 aboard the ship Altaïr II, during the mission, he was forced to eliminate a bus full of bomb-rigged children aimed at a diplomatic conference. His action violated the Creed's first tenet—to refrain from harming innocents—even though he managed to protect the peace talks. In consequence, he vowed to never again take another human life, adopting a life of absolute pacifism.^[5]