An agreement has been reached by US and Iraqi diplomats about the withdrawal of US soldiers from Iraq. A US official declared that “it’s now just a question of when to announce it,” despite the fact that the agreement still requires “a final go-ahead” from Washington and Baghdad officials.
According to the agreement, several hundred US soldiers would leave Iraq in September 2025, and the last US personnel would leave by the end of 2026. An agreement may be welcomed by opponents of the US’s “forever wars.”
The approximately 2,500 American troops in Iraq were the subject of the negotiations in January, but they were postponed due to tensions sparked by Israel’s war on Gaza.
Since October 7, at least 70 assaults on US forces in Iraq have been carried out by militias. Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi was the top leader of the Popular Mobilization Units, the umbrella group of Shia militias in Iraq that get funding from the Iraqi government. He was killed by a drone hit that the US conducted in early January in Baghdad.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who has increased his support for the removal of US troops in recent months, has denounced US strikes in his country.
Iraq and Its Neighbors
If US forces leave Iraq, it will be during a period when other regional countries have used force to oust the country’s fragile central government.
Turkey began attacking armed Kurdish forces in northern Iraq with warplanes on Monday. Ankara and Baghdad decided in August to run a joint instruction and collaboration center between Turkey and Iraq at a Turkish site in northern Iraq that would be turned over to the Iraqi Armed Forces.
The three-year budget for Iraq, which was unveiled in 2023, included an additional $700 million for the approximately 150,000 members of the Popular Mobilization Units.
US troops entered Iraq with the 2003 invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein. Troops peaked at 168,000 during the so-called surge, but by 2011, President Barack Obama had fully withdrawn US forces. Three years later, the ISIS emerged in Syria and Iraq, and in 2014, Obama redeployed troops. The deadline for US troop withdrawals falls after the US 2024 presidential elections. Biden administration carried out former President Donald Trump’s deal to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
According to the agreement reached by the US and Iraq, by September 2025, all US-led coalition forces will withdraw from the Ain al-Asad airbase in the western province of Anbar and drastically cut back on their presence in Baghdad. US and coalition soldiers will stay in Erbil, for just one more year. The US military presence in northeastern Syria may not be able to continue after these troops leave the area.
