SAEDNEWS: The Iraqi government plans to end the presence of the US-led military forces in the capital Baghdad and at the Ain al-Asad airbase in the western al-Anbar province by the end of September.
An aide to Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, Hussein Allawi told the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) on Sunday that the US-led troops, purportedly formed to fight the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group, will withdraw by next month under an agreement between the Baghdad government and coalition members.
The move, Allawi said, comes in line with the Iraqi government’s plan to bolster the Arab nation’s armed forces and transition to bilateral defense partnerships.
“The Iraqi government is committed to its program of building the armed forces and ending the coalition’s mission, while transitioning relations with coalition countries into stable bilateral defense arrangements guided by political, economic, and cultural ties,” Allawi noted.
The prime minister’s advisor outlined a two-stage timeline agreed upon by Iraq and the Western military alliance, with the initial withdrawal phase scheduled for September 2025 and the full completion set for September next year.
He noted that Iraq plans to continue advisory and capacity-building partnerships with international allies beyond that period.
Allawi highlighted that this strategy illustrates the government’s dedication to forming enduring partnerships across various sectors, especially in security, while recognizing the continuous endeavors of the joint military committee responsible for facilitating discussions about the coalition’s mission.
‘The advisor highlighted that the gradual withdrawal signifies Iraq’s strategic transition towards establishing normalized relations with the United States and coalition countries, shifting from multilateral military frameworks to bilateral security pacts.
“It will return Iraqi-American and Iraq-coalition ties to the kind of strategic framework agreements that existed before the fall of Mosul to Daesh in 2014,” he stated.
Iraq adopted the law to expel foreign forces after Washington’s assassination of top Iraqi and Iranian anti-terror commanders four years ago.
Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), were martyred along with their comrades in a US drone strike that was authorized by then-president Donald Trump near Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020.
The two iconic anti-terror commanders are greatly admired for their instrumental role in fighting and decimating the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria.
