Iraq’s government soon will “start working on” requiring the withdrawal of a United States-led military coalition tasked with defeating the Islamic State, the prime minister said, assuring an audience of pro-Iran militias.
“The government is in the process of setting the date to start working on the bilateral committee to make arrangements to permanently end the presence of the international coalition forces in Iraq,” Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani said Friday. “We will not neglect anything that will give Iraq complete national sovereignty over its land and skies.”
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Al-Sudani’s comments come amid a series of militia attacks on U.S. forces, which culminated this week in a retaliatory strike in Baghdad that killed a militia leader and one of his associates. That strike renewed the internal political pressure to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces, even though President Joe Biden’s administration emphasized that the slain militia leader “was actively involved in planning and carrying out attacks against American personnel” in Iraq.
“When we’ve conducted strikes in Iraq and Syria, they have been against groups that are sponsored, Iranian proxies, to include HAN and Kataib Hezbollah,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Thursday. “And so, those forces have represented a threat to our forces. And again, we maintain the inherent right of self-defense, and we’ll take necessary actions to protect our forces.”
The airstrike in Baghdad came almost exactly four years after Donald Trump’s administration conducted an attack that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the notorious leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The extent of Soleimani’s influence in the Iraqi security system was demonstrated, that day, by the death alongside him of Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis — the former leader of the fighters whom al-Sudani addressed on Friday.
“So the audience was a particular one that had a wound, it was an anniversary of a wound for them, and so the prime minister had to speak to the issue in light of that history,” an analyst who requested anonymity to discuss Baghdad’s political dynamics told the Washington Examiner. The analyst added that to their knowledge, the Iraqi prime minister still believes the U.S. and the coalition “offer a value to Iraq and its fight against ISIS and preventing a resurgence.”
About 2,500 U.S. military personnel are believed to be based in Iraq, as part of a coalition to defeat the Islamic State. Those American forces conducted “24 partnered operations [that] resulted in 3 ISIS operatives killed and 14 ISIS operatives detained” in November 2023, even as Iran’s proxies inside the Iraqi security system increased the pace and intensity of their attacks on American forces against the backdrop of Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that ignited the war in Gaza.
“We affirm our firm and principled position in ending the presence of the international coalition after the justifications of its existence have ended,” al-Sudani said.
The prime minister’s hedging tone reflects a series of political cross-pressures that make Iraqi and even Iranian leaders hesitant to undertake a full ouster of the U.S. forces, analysts say.
“I don’t think Iran wants to go all the way in this fight against the U.S., and the reason why they don’t want to do that is because Iraq is the goose that lays golden eggs for the Iranians,” said Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The Iranians get a big cut out of this through corruption and many schemes … And they understand that if the Iraqi government goes all the way against the U.S, and then there are sanctions or any kind of American economic pressure on Iraq, then that’s a source of money that Iranians can’t afford to lose.”
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The other analyst agreed.
“If tensions between Iraq and the United States rise to a certain level … Iraq and Iran will be hurt, so that’s why Iran is not going to an outright major escalation,” the analyst said.
