The US military is set to complete its withdrawal from its remaining bases in Iraq on Wednesday under a deal signed between the US and the Iraqi government in 2024.
The US is officially ending the mission of the anti-ISIS coalition that began in 2014 after the US redeployed troops to Iraq following a 2011 withdrawal.
In the months leading up to the withdrawal, the US had only a few hundred troops in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, which has come under significant attacks launched by Iran and its allies since the US launched the war against Iran on February 28.
The US will likely keep Marines or other military personnel at its embassy in Baghdad, the largest US diplomatic facility in the world, but it’s unclear whether that presence will be beyond the typical security contingent for a US embassy in a foreign country.
When the Biden administration signed the withdrawal deal, it insisted that it wouldn’t pull all of its forces out of Iraq and was only changing the mission from the anti-ISIS coalition to a “bilateral security partnership.” But the Trump administration decided to go ahead with a full withdrawal from the US’s military bases in Iraq.
The Trump administration has also demanded that its withdrawal should come with the disarmament of Iraq’s Iran-aligned Shia militias, but Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said last week that the new deadline was June 30, 2027. The militias form what is known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, a coalition formed in 2014 to fight ISIS that is part of Iraq’s security forces.
Another coalition group of Iraqi Shia militias, known as the Islamic Resistance of Iraq (IRI), which includes some of the PMF groups but not all, and has launched many attacks on US bases in recent years, is celebrating the US withdrawal. Abu Mojtaba al-Yasiri, an IRI commander, told Reuters that it was “a historic victory for the Iraqi Islamic resistance groups and honorable Iraqis, and a crushing defeat for the American project.”
“On September 30, we will celebrate the turning of a black page in Iraq’s history and the failure of the occupation to impose its will on our country. Iraq has proven that its sovereignty cannot be secured by foreign forces, but by the resistance and the will of its people,” he added.
While the US is withdrawing its remaining troops from military bases in Iraq, Washington will continue to wield significant power over the country. Iraq’s oil revenues, which account for about 90% of the government’s budget, are deposited into an account belonging to Iraq’s central bank at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, giving the US significant leverage over Baghdad’s access to dollars.
