The US is taking steps to ramp up the pressure on Iraq to reduce its ties with Iran and rein in Iran-aligned militias in the country after the escalations in the country amid the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Iraqi officials told the paper that in its latest step, the US has suspended cooperation and funding for Iraq’s security service. Iraqi reports said that the US had also halted shipments of physical US dollars to Iraq, a move that would seriously hurt the Iraqi dinar, but the Central Bank of Iraq denied those reports.
The US control of Iraq’s foreign reserves and oil revenue, a result of the 2003 US invasion, gives the Trump administration the ability to inflict significant economic pain on the country, and the threat has been used to pressure Iraq regarding the formation of its next government.
Hussein Allawi, a security adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, said that the US security support will be halted until Iraq forms its next government, which could take days or weeks. Earlier this year, Trump threatened that there would be consequences for Iraq if former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki became the country’s next leader.
Iraq exploded during the US-Israeli war against Iran, as drone attacks targeted US assets across the country, and the US was bombing the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Shia militias that was formed in 2014 to fight ISIS and was absorbed by Iraq’s security forces.
Many of the drone attacks against the US were claimed by the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, another coalition of Shia militias that includes some of the factions in the PMF. US airstrikes killed dozens of PMF fighters, including senior commanders, and one US attack on a PMF base killed seven members of the Iraqi military.
The US has been drawing down its forces from Iraq and recently pulled the last of its troops from Syria, but the US still maintains a significant presence in Iraqi Kurdistan.
