Both Iraq and the US agree that the US’s withdrawal from Iraq is a turning point. US President Donald Trump praised the US withdrawal from Iraq and received applause for it. He called the withdrawal orderly, an apparent contrast to how the US left Afghanistan. Iraq, however, is calling the US withdrawal a new milestone – “sovereignty.”
For many years, Trump believed that the US should not have been in Iraq. “It’s been a long time with very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place,” he said. “It was a quagmire. For many, many years, it lasted. But soon, that part of history will be over.”
The US invaded Iraq in 2003; thousands of Americans subsequently died fighting Sunni insurgents and Iran-backed militias. Although the US left Iraq in 2011, it returned to Iraq three years later to fight ISIS. Now, the US has withdrawn once again.
Many have deemed the US’s role in Iraq as an especially long one, spanning 23 years. Iraq seemingly agrees with this assessment. Thus, Iraq is pleased that the US is leaving.
Iraq’s security forces have been fighting ISIS on their own for years. Notably, the US largely stopped its anti-ISIS operations in 2018. After that, the US continued to support the Iraqis in other ways. For example, the US backed the Kurdish Peshmerga.
In 2019, the Iran-backed militias in Iraq began their attacks on US forces. The US responded a year later with an airstrike on IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, who was visiting Baghdad to meet militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Soleimani and Muhandis died in that US drone strike. This led to the US removing its forces from many Iraqi bases and, in essence, concentrating most of its personnel in the Kurdistan region.
Iran may see this as a victory
The US remained in the Kurdistan region, but the militias kept targeting its forces. This year, militia attacks on US forces increased to roughly 600. Although Iran sees the US’s departure as a victory, there were signs that this has been in the works for years. The US slowly dwindled its personnel in a drawdown that took about a year. By now, 1,500 personnel have left Erbil and several other locations.
As if to symbolize how Iran feels about the US’s withdrawal, Rudaw media said that a “suspected Iranian drone struck a residential camp belonging to the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) in Erbil province’s Koya district late Wednesday, marking the second wave of attacks in a week.”
This is but one of over 1,000 Iranian attacks on the KRG region since February 2026. Many of these attacks targeted Kurdish Iranian dissident groups. The question is: will Iran increase its attacks on the Kurds, or reduce them? Or will it keep the same tempo?
Iran wants to keep the Kurdish dissidents on the defensive. Iran also wants Iraq to rein them in. The US, on the other hand, wants Iraq to rein in the Iranian-backed militias.
Iraq believes it cannot do this by force. Instead, Iraq is trying to get the militias to disarm by having them place their weapons under the state’s control. How this will work is unclear, however. The militias can easily pretend they’re now under state control while quietly keeping their weapons.
Most of the Iranian-backed militias have brigades within the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). As such, they are both an official force and a militia. Because of this, if they so wished, they could change their uniforms and disguise themselves as a regulated militia.
Notably, most of these militias are sanctioned by the US as terrorist groups.
While Iraq’s Prime Minister, Ali al-Zaidi, once said that he expected the militias to disarm by June 30, several of them created new conditions for their disarmament. Some want the Turkish army to leave northern Iraq. Some want the Kurdish Peshmerga disbanded. The militias likewise claim that they don’t want Iraq to be dependent on the US for financial support. There are now so many conditions that it is unclear how the militias will comply with the state’s order to disarm.
Rudaw media noted on Wednesday: “The June deadline replaces an earlier September 30 target for bringing armed factions under state control and comes after weeks of negotiations with Iran-backed groups, several of which have resisted disarmament or attached conditions to any agreement. Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada have been among the main holdouts.”