US completes Iraq withdrawal while still at war with Iran - critical summary review

What the American presence in Iraq actually was

In March 2003, a US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. The official justification was that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. What followed were years of insurgency and sectarian violence: at the peak of the war in 2007, more than 170,000 American soldiers were deployed in the country. Around 4,500 US troops died in the war that began in 2003, and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the invasion.

The troops left at the end of 2011, under President Barack Obama. Less than three years later they were back, at Baghdad's request, after the Islamic State seized roughly a third of Iraqi territory, including Mosul, the country's second-largest city. That second deployment became Operation Inherent Resolve, a US-led coalition campaign against the group. Over the following years the role shifted from combat to training, advising and intelligence sharing, and the number shrank: about 2,400 troops by December 2023, according to US Central Command, down to the roughly 2,500 that DW reported remained at the end, concentrated in bases in the Kurdistan region in the north.

Why this reaches anyone outside the region: Iraq is an oil exporter sitting next to Iran, and it has become one of the main stages of the dispute between Washington and Tehran. This month, Iraqi groups loyal to Iran hit a vital pipeline in Saudi Arabia with drones, disrupting global crude supply and pushing oil prices up, CNN reported.

Why the exit happened now, with the caliphate defeated since 2017

Officially, the withdrawal follows a 2024 agreement between Washington and Baghdad to end the coalition mission. It was negotiated under Joe Biden and carried out by Donald Trump's administration. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that the milestone "reflects the success of a 12-year campaign that defeated ISIS as an organized military threat in Iraq and across the region". Trump wrote on his social network Truth Social: "We came to fight a caliphate. There is no caliphate anymore. We're coming home!"

Analysts quoted by the BBC read the timing differently. "This is about risk, not ISIS; that justification expired years ago," said H.A. Hellyer, of the British think tank RUSI, pointing to recent attacks on American facilities in northern Iraq. Safwan Al-Amin, of the Atlantic Council in Washington, put it this way: given the small number of troops and their limited ability to project power, "the war with Iran exposed their presence as more of a vulnerability than an advantage".

That war began in February, when the United States and Israel launched an offensive against Iran, and it killed Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Since then, attacks by Iran-backed Iraqi groups on US-linked targets in Erbil have increased. The Kurdistan Regional Government's Peshmerga Ministry said the region was the target of more than 1,000 drone and ballistic missile attacks during the conflict, and called the American departure without a replacement air defence system "a cause for concern".

Sovereignty declared, disarmament pushed back

Baghdad declared four days of national holiday, named the "Days of Sovereignty". Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi described the moment as the start of a "new phase, defined by Iraq's sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, unity in decision-making and balanced alliances with its friends".

There was a second deadline attached to the first. Baghdad had originally tied the end of the American mission to bringing the country's armed groups under state control, many of them operating under the Popular Mobilisation Forces, a network of mostly Shia militias. Al-Zaidi announced last week that the new deadline is 30 June 2027: a 90-day period in which the groups refrain from attacks in exchange for guarantees that US forces will not strike them, followed by a gradual handover of weapons.

Alina L. Romanowski, of the Atlantic Council, told DW that the most radical groups, Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, "have so far given no sign of being willing to hand their weapons to the state and integrate into Iraq's armed forces".

Those celebrating the exit are the ones keeping the weapons

As'hab Al-Kahf, an Iran-backed militia, congratulated Iraqis on "the humiliating withdrawal of the American occupier under the attacks of the Resistance's drones and missiles". Abu Mujahid al-Assaf, a senior security official of Kataib Hezbollah, called the departure "the beginning of full sovereignty" and warned the government that "any government that does not work for the benefit of the people will be overthrown by all available means".

A commander of Harakat al-Nujaba, designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the United States, told CNN on condition of anonymity that the disarmament demand "is backed by the United States, Zionism, the West and the Gulf countries, and aims to weaken Iraq".

Experts differ on what happens next. Lahib Higel, of the International Crisis Group, told CNN that "disarming these groups quickly is a practically impossible task" while the government in Tehran remains in power. Douglas Silliman, US ambassador to Iraq between 2016 and 2019, sees a possible upside: without American troops as a common target, the militias lose one of their main political banners, which could give Baghdad room to press them. He also told the BBC that several Iraqi prime ministers have told him over the years they fear the situation could lead to internal conflict or civil war.

The influence that does not leave with the troops

Al-Amin told the BBC that American leverage survives the withdrawal: Iraq depends on selling oil in dollars, still buys American weapons and relies on US diplomatic support in dealing with its neighbours. Yerevan Saeed, of the American University in Washington, notes that the largest US embassy in the world is in Baghdad, and the largest US consulate in Erbil, both of which will still need protection.

Military cooperation continues in training, planning, counterterrorism and intelligence, according to the Pentagon. CENTCOM said the coalition will keep running its anti-ISIS mission in Syria from its headquarters in Jordan, and that forces in the region "remain ready to respond to any ISIS threat that emerges".

The scenario nobody wants to repeat

The Islamic State lost its self-declared caliphate in 2017 and is now reduced to scattered sleeper cells, but Iraqi and Kurdish security officials fear that losing American intelligence, aerial surveillance and drone support could help it reorganise. The reference point is 2014, when Iraqi soldiers took off their uniforms and fled as the group took Mosul.

"The lesson of the last two decades is that security vacuums can be extremely dangerous," Iraqi analyst Jassim al-Bahadli, who advises the security forces, told Reuters. Retired general Mohammed al-Jabouri told the same agency that the key question is whether Iraq's security institutions have a viable plan B. Silliman is more optimistic, arguing that Iraqi forces are far stronger than a decade ago.

What to do with this information

The withdrawal is finished, so what is worth following are the two dates that will show whether the declared sovereignty holds. The first is 30 June 2027, the new deadline for the armed groups to hand over their weapons, with the 90-day no-attack window as the first checkpoint: if the three groups Romanowski named keep refusing, the deadline will have slipped twice in less than a year.

The second is the pattern of attacks on Erbil and on American interests while the war with Iran continues. Al-Amin's warning to the BBC is the frame to keep: "American troops already left Iraq once, in 2011, but came back a few years later. It's the end of a chapter in history, not the final chapter." Between 2011 and 2014, an exit announced as definitive was reversed in under three years.

The next time news from Iraq moves oil prices, which of these two clocks will you check first: the disarmament deadline, or the attacks on Erbil?