The blunt question prompted some low-level chuckles at Tuesday’s Pentagon briefing when it was posed to an Italian general in charge of training Iraqi security forces.
“General, now that Muqtada al-Sadr’s bloc has won the election, are you preparing to leave Iraq?”
The prospect that the U.S., NATO, and other partner nations would pack up and leave seemed remote before this month’s Iraqi elections, but the victory scored by a coalition backed by al-Sadr, a firebrand cleric who once led an insurgency against the U.S., has injected new uncertainty.
After all, the U.S. is intent on not repeating the mistake of 2011, when U.S. troops left a vacuum, which is widely seen as leading directly to the rise of the Islamic State.
Brig. Gen. Roberto Vannacci, the deputy commanding general for training in Iraq, who was briefing reporters over a video link from Baghdad, didn’t seem to think the query was frivolous in the least.
“This is a very good question,” he said. “But I don’t have the answer because, as you know, we are here by the request of the Iraqi government.”
Al-Sadr is probably best remembered as the anti-American cleric who led the Iraqi Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army, which fought against U.S. troops after the 2003 invasion and was accused of kidnapping torturing and killing Sunni Iraqis.
Because he didn’t run for a seat himself, al-Sadr is not in line to be prime minister, but his coalition will hold a significant number of seats in the Iraqi parliament and could control the government once it is formed.
Al-Sadr, who has run an “Iraqis first” campaign, may want to see all foreign troops, including some from neighboring Iran, leave his country.
“As you know, we are military, and we don’t make these kind of decisions. These are political decisions,” said Vannacci. “Whatever we will be told by Iraqi government, we will have to leave [to] the politicians of our nations [to] take the right decision.”
Last week, NATO’s military committee met in Brussels to discuss plans to upgrade its assistance to Iraq to a formal NATO military mission, in anticipation that Iraq security forces would require continued training to ensure they are capable of preventing any resurgence of ISIS.
“We view our relationship with Iraq as a partnership, and that partnership is going to be informed by the new government and the discussion that takes place between the United States and the new government,” Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs, told reporters traveling with him as he flew back to Washington Thursday.
Dunford expressed no worries about the possibility that U.S. troops might not be invited to stay, but he acknowledged that nothing was certain until Iraq forms a government and makes clear what level of military assistance it feels it requires.
“The political environment will change so I think at that point we’ll probably start having more long-term discussions than we probably would have right now,” Dunford said.
NATO military chiefs drew up options for troop and capability contributions that will be approved by defense ministers next month, and could be announced at the NATO summit in July.
“I think we have a pretty good feel with our Iraqi military counterparts of the specific areas where we might be able to make a contribution in the future to make sure the gains they have made — and they have made real gains — are sustainable,” Dunford said.
“What we’ve got to do now is see what is the political appetite within the coalition and the Iraqi government for a long-term presence of the coalition,” he added.
