Baghdad and Washington agree that the US withdrawal from Iraq is a turning point. US President Donald Trump praised the US for leaving Iraq. Trump received applause for this announcement. He has called the withdrawal orderly, an apparent contrast to how the US left Afghanistan. Iraq is calling the US withdrawal a new milestone of “sovereignty.”
Trump has believed for many years that the US should not be in Iraq. “It’s been a long time with very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place. 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 died fighting Sunni insurgents and also Iranian-backed militias. The US left in 2011. The US returned to Iraq in 2014 to fight ISIS. Now the US is gone again. Many people see the long US role as essentially extending over the last 23 years.
Iraq appears to view it this way as well. It has hailed the US leaving. Iraqi security forces have been fighting ISIS themselves for years. In fact, the US largely stopped anti-ISIS operations in 2018 in Iraq. After that, the US continued to support the Iraqis in various ways. The US also backed the Kurdish Peshmerga.
Beginning in 2019, the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq began attacks on US forces. The US responded in 2020 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 the US drone strike. This led to the US removing forces from many bases and essentially concentrating most personnel in the Kurdistan Region.
Iran may see this as a victory
The US stayed on in the Kurdistan Region, but the militias kept targeting Americans. They increased this year, with some 600 attacks. Iran may see the US leaving as a victory. However, this has been planned for years. The last drawdown took about a year. Now 1,500 personnel have left Erbil and a few other locations.
As if to symbolize how Iran feels about the US 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 one of more than 1,000 Iranian drone and missile attacks in the KRG region since February 2026. Many of the attacks targeted Kurdish Iranian dissident groups. The question is whether Iran will increase its attacks, reduce them, or keep them at the same tempo. Iran wants to keep the Kurdish dissident groups on the defensive. It also wants Iraq to rein them in.
Meanwhile, the US wants Iraq to rein in the Iranian-backed militias. Iraq’s view is that it can’t do this by force. But it has been trying to disarm the Iranian-backed militias by having them place their arms under the control of the state. How this will work is unclear. The militias may pretend they are now under the control of the state but still keep their arms. Most militias have brigades within the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF.
As such, they are both an official force and militias. They may change uniforms and pretend to now be a regulated militia. Most of the militias are sanctioned by the US as terrorist groups.
While Iraq’s prime minister Ali Al-Zaidi has said that he expects the militias to disarm by June 30, several militias keep creating new conditions. They want the Turkish army to leave northern Iraq. Some want the Kurdish Peshmerga disbanded. They also claim they don’t want Iraq dependent on the US for financial support. There are now so many conditions that it is unclear how the holdout militias will comply.
Rudaw media in Erbil noted on October 1, “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.”