US withdraws remaining troops from Iraq

The US withdrew its remaining troops from Iraq on Wednesday, marking an end to its military presence in a fractured state that is still battling to overcome the bloody legacy of the invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein more than two decades ago.

The pullback comes at a pivotal moment for Iraq, which has been dragged into the US-Israeli war against Iran, with Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia militia drone and missile attacks on Gulf states underlining the Islamic republic's deep influence.

Those assaults have drawn air strikes from the US and Saudi Arabia, threatening more conflict and instability for a country that has spent the past two decades struggling to recover from the chaos and conflict triggered by the 2003 US-led invasion.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the departure of the remaining US forces from Erbil, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, marked "the successful conclusion of the military mission that defeated Isis in Iraq".

"It also marks a transition from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort supported by a more normal bilateral security relationship," he said.

The US pullout was agreed with the Iraqi government in 2024 as a coalition to fight Isis, which had drawn American forces back into combat in the Arab state, began to wind down.

Renad Mansour, an Iraq expert at Chatham House, said that the Iraqis had made that agreement ''in a very different regional context''.

"There wasn't a regional war on the scale we are seeing today, and Iraq itself wasn't a battleground in that conflict," he said.

In recent years, there were about 2,500 US troops in Iraq, but most were withdrawn from Iraq long before Wednesday's deadline, with those remaining deployed in Erbil.

Iraqi governments, under pressure from powerful Iran-aligned factions, had sought the withdrawal of US troops, particularly after the 2020 US assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the powerful commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Baghdad.

Yet the perennial challenge for Iraq's leaders has been managing the competing interests of Washington and Tehran, a legacy of the US-led 2003 invasion.

Iran and Iraq have long had strong cultural, religious and trading ties. But Iran's influence -- and that of its aligned Iraqi militias -- grew after the US occupation of Iraq plunged the country into conflict, igniting an insurgency against American forces and bitter sectarian violence among rival Iraqi factions.

The ousting of Saddam, a Sunni, also restored Iraq's Shia majority to power, with many of the new generation of leaders having long ties to Iran's Shia theocracy. A US army review of the Iraq war concluded in 2019 that an "emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor" of the invasion.

The Obama administration first pulled American combat troops out of the country in 2011 -- two years after the US opened the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad.

But the US was reluctantly dragged back after Isis exploited the weakness of the state to launch a blitz across Iraq and Syria in 2014. The Iraqi army that the US had spent tens of billions of dollars arming and training melted away in the face of the jihadis' advance.

The country stabilised after Isis militants were largely defeated and driven from the territory they controlled, but Iranian-backed factions capitalised on their role in fighting the Sunni extremists to deepen their influence in the state and politics.

Speaking at a ceremony in Baghdad on Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said a "new phase has begun whose headline is Iraq's sovereignty, the power of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision and its balanced partnership with its friends".

After holding talks with US President Donald Trump at the White House in July, Zaidi, a political neophyte who took office in May as a compromise candidate in Iraq's fractious political system, promised to disarm the Iran-backed militias.

But many of the militias have resisted such moves, and analysts say he faces a massive challenge to fulfil his pledge.

Mansour said there was anxiety within Zaidi's government over how to maintain a healthy relationship with Washington and not become "a pariah state like Iran, or a country considered too close to Tehran and therefore vulnerable to military attacks and sanctions".

"They're trying to push the message that just because this operation is coming to an end, it doesn't mean the US-Iraq security relationship is ending with it," he added.

Victoria Taylor, former US deputy assistant secretary for Iraq and Iran, said the withdrawal of US troops was "a major turning point" in the US-Iraq relationship that could allow the relationship to be less dominated by security issues.

"The Iraq war really embodies many of the failures of the interventionist era of US foreign policy and for that reason, many Americans are eager to turn the page," said Taylor. "Iran and the Iran-backed militias will view the US departure as a victory."

Mansour said that after promising democracy, state building and the end of dictatorship 23 years ago, the US legacy would be leaving behind a "fragmented Frankenstein state".

"But where for many Iraqis life is very difficult and where the government isn't able to control its territory," he said.