Twenty years on, Iraqis remain aggrieved over the U.S. invasion of their home country, which has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and almost 10 million displaced.

They still remember the scene in which former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell held a test tube filled with white powder, claiming it to be the evidence of Iraq's possession of "weapons of mass destruction" at a UN Security Council meeting on February 5, 2003.

Instead of waiting for the results of the investigation by the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United States decided to act on its own, recalled Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, who served as Pakistani Foreign Minister from 2002 to 2007, in an interview with Sputnik news agency.

"The United States had already decided that whether it got the support of the United Nations Security Council or not, they were going to go in," said the diplomat who represented Islamabad at that UNSC meeting, "I remember Colin Powell telling me that the United States could not just go on waiting forever."

The U.S. launched a special military operation in Iraq on March 20, 2003, without authorization from the United Nations. The ensuing eight years of bloody war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions of Iraqis.

"I was almost 12 when the Americans came in, and we were terrified. You could get killed at any moment. Our families were frankly terrified. It was a powerful fear ... The situation is getting worse every day," said Razzaq Hameed, a 30-year-old shopkeeper in Iraq.

According to Statista, a global statistical database, from 2003 to 2021, about 209,000 Iraqi civilians died in wars and violent conflicts. About 9.2 million Iraqis became refugees or were forced to leave their homeland.

The war has increased rates of illness and disease in Iraq as approximately half of the registered doctors fled the country in the years immediately following the 2003 invasion, according to a report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

For the United States, the issue of weapons of mass destruction is secondary to a deeper drive to overthrow then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, said a BBC report on March 13.

"We would have invaded Iraq if Saddam Hussein had a rubber band and a paperclip ... We would have said, 'oh, he will take your eye out,'" Luis Rueda, head of the Iraq Operations Group at the Central Intelligence Agency, was quoted as saying in the report.

On the 20th anniversary of the invasion, people swarmed onto social media and spat out their anger against the United States.

"I am saddened by the death of Colin Powell without being tried for his crimes in Iraq ... But I am sure that the court of God will be waiting for him," Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who hurled one of his shoes at former U.S. President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad in 2008, wrote on his Twitter account.

"America's arguments and allegations about weapons of mass destruction were nothing but a cover for the occupation of Iraq, the destruction of its infrastructure and foreign infrastructure," tweeted Zaid Al-Tikriti, who describes himself as a lawyer.

Mortada Al-Misani published a series of photographs on his Twitter account showing American soldiers transporting and destroying Iraqi cultural relics, with the caption saying, "the 20th anniversary of the American occupation of Iraq under the pretext of the existence of weapons of mass destruction and their danger to mankind."

With several American and British officials admitting that Iraq had neither chemical weapons nor weapons of mass destruction, one netizen asked on Twitter, "The war was futile and has left hundreds of thousands dead for no reason ... What does regret do?"