US withdrawal from Iraq: Will it finally happen?

By Rabia Ali

ISTANBUL (AA) – A long-anticipated agreement between the US and Iraqi governments to conclude American-led military missions in the country has sparked debated about its feasibility at a time of soaring regional tensions.

With Israel’s war on Gaza in its second year, and Tel Aviv now attacking Lebanon and potentially other neighboring countries, experts say the US withdrawal plan is “arbitrary” and “foggy,” with no precise or clear details.

Washington officially announced in late September that the mission of the US-led coalition against the Daesh/ISIS terror group in Iraq will be wrapping up “over the next twelve months, and no later than the end of September 2025, and transitioning to bilateral security partnerships in a manner that supports Iraqi forces and maintains pressure on ISIS.”

The second phase of the plan involves an “understanding to allow the coalition to continue to support counter-ISIS operations in Syria from Iraq ... until at least September 2026.”

There are currently about 2,500 US troops still in Iraq as part of the global coalition set up in 2014 against Daesh/ISIS.

Given the spiraling security situation in the region, International Crisis Group’s Iraq analyst Lahib Higel raised doubts over whether the plan would go through.

“It is hard to speculate whether this agreement can actually be implemented in the current regional environment. If there is a significant escalation between Iran and Israel, it is very possible that the Iraqi resistance groups will again start attacking the US bases, and under those conditions, implementing this transition will be difficult," she told Anadolu.

Even if the plan is implemented, she added, it does not necessarily mean there will not be any US troops in Iraq.

“It's foggy picture in terms of what's going to happen. But the government is committed to the agreement because they see it as a possibility to stabilize the country because the tensions between the Iran-backed groups and the US have been recurring for many years now. And so they would like to see an end to that and they see this as a way out,” she said.

- Long in the making

Higel said the plan had been long in the making, with multiple voices in Iraq calling for the coalition’s withdrawal for several years.

“With the government of Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani, it was a specific demand on part of his coalition partners to make this happen,” she said.

While talks between Iraq and the US had started before last October, the Israeli war on Gaza “made it more urgent to come to some sort of conclusion … and put more pressure on the government.”

“The groups that are backed by Iran or the resistance groups resumed attacks on US bases in Iraq because of the US support to Israel,” she explained.

After major escalations in January and February this year, the attacks stopped, “giving the space for the government and the US to negotiate the terms of this agreement,” said Higel.

Regarding details of the plan, she said all it has is a “rough timeline.”

“It does not outline the intermediate steps. The part of the global mission against ISIS in Iraq is going to be concluded by September 2025,” she said.

The mission is also said to be winding up shortly before the Iraqi elections scheduled for next year, which Higel believes the current prime minister would want to sell as something that he has delivered.

Analyst Ryan Bohl believes that the American troops stationed in Iraq have become “a political problem for Baghdad and they are a security threat to the United States that drags them into conflicts that they don’t necessarily like.”

The current Iran-Israel conflict has spillover effects as Iranian militias and Iranian-backed militias attack US forces in Iraq, said Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at risk intelligence firm RANE.

“So Washington has long wanted to draw down and exit Iraq, and maintain essentially just an embassy protection force like it would in many other countries. A permanent base in Iraq is more of a liability than it is an asset for the United States,” he told Anadolu.

“What this means is that the US is considering its major mission in Iraq more or less accomplished, which is the suppression of (Daesh/ISIS).”

- Re-emergence of Daesh/ISIS

In early October, days after the US announcement, four Iraqi soldiers were killed and three others injured in an attack by Daesh/ISIS terrorists in the northern Kirkuk province.

While that has raised concerns over a possible resurgence of such attacks, Hamzeh Hadad, a visiting fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, believes there is no possibility of the terror group regaining control of any Iraqi territory.

“There’s no chance of (Daesh/) ISIS resurgence, of them taking and holding territory like we saw in 2014. That’s completely out of the question. That’s because this wasn’t just a military defeat ... there’s just no willingness from the population there to ever go through that again,” he told Anadolu.

Despite prevalent fear of pockets of Daesh/ISIS sleeper cells, Hadad emphasized that the threat is not at a point where there is a need for US military advisors to remain in Iraq.

“I think Iraqi security forces are more than capable of doing that themselves,” he said.

Bohl agreed with the assessment, saying that Washington also “believes that the Iraqis have enough abilities and enough counterterrorism forces to continue the campaign on their own.”

If Daesh/ISIS begins to resurge and Iraqi forces seem unable to handle it, the US could return forces to Iraq in the future, he added.

He said the result of the upcoming US election could also impact the agreement.

Vice President Kamala Harris would stick to the agreement, he said, but the timeframe could accelerate under a Trump administration.

“Trump has an isolationist, kind of erratic foreign policy and we saw this with Syria in 2019, where he tried to pull forces out,” he said.