U.S. Troops Are Leaving Iraq. Iran-Backed Militias Aren’t Disarming.
BAGHDAD — Iraq is heading toward two deadlines at the end of the month, and they are pulling in opposite directions.
The U.S. military is set to end its decades-long presence in the country by Sept. 30, with the last several hundred troops in northern Iraq expected to leave by that date. At the same time, the Iraqi government has told non-state armed groups to lay down their weapons. Most of the powerful militias have made clear they have no intention of doing so.
The result is a moment of unusual uncertainty for Iraq: one deadline is being met with packing crates and redeployments, the other with defiance.
A U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said the withdrawal would be completed by Sept. 30. The hundreds of troops still in northern Iraq will mostly be redeployed to Jordan and other countries in the region. Military equipment, including air defense systems, will also be removed.
He said a “normal bilateral security cooperation” agreement could then be negotiated with the central government in Baghdad, though it remains unclear what form that would take. The counterterrorism base in Irbil, he added, has lost importance for U.S. troops as the Islamic State threat has receded.
The withdrawal closes a long and volatile chapter. U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein. They left in 2011, but three years later Iraqi authorities invited a smaller U.S.-led mission back to fight the Islamic State group, which had seized large swaths of territory. With the extremists now reduced to scattered sleeper cells — thanks in part to Iran-backed militias as well as the U.S.-led coalition — Washington and Baghdad agreed in 2024 to wind the mission down.
U.S. forces pulled out of bases in most of Iraq last year but kept a presence in the semiautonomous northern Kurdish region. Those bases have regularly come under attack since the U.S. and Israel launched their war against Iran on Feb. 28.
During that war, northern Iraq largely did not serve as an “offensive platform” for U.S. operations, the official said, but U.S. forces there were frequently targeted by Iran and Iran-backed Iraqi militias. Pulling them out, he said, “will reduce our risk.”
Still, the U.S. military remains worried about the ability of Iraqi militias to launch attacks elsewhere in the region, including in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, and about the presence of Yemen’s Houthi rebels in Iraq. Iranian-backed Iraqi militias have struck U.S.-linked targets both inside and outside Iraq since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, and they have coordinated with the Houthis on attacks against Saudi Arabia.
With the U.S.-Iran war raging, Tehran is unlikely to surrender the leverage it holds in neighboring Iraq. U.S. officials are concerned about the militias’ continued capacity for attack — but not enough to delay their departure. In the past, Washington has struck militia sites in Iraq in retaliation and imposed sanctions on some groups. More sanctions could follow.
The disarmament deadline is even less certain. Iraqi government officials have wavered over whether Sept. 30 is a hard date for militias to disarm or merely the starting point for negotiations.
“There will be no disarming of any groups by the 30th of September,” Iraqi analyst Sajad Jiyad said at a panel convened last week by the Atlantic Center think tank. “I think that’s probably clear to anybody who watches Iraqi politics.”
A handful of less-influential militias have agreed to hand over weapons. But the most powerful groups — and those closest to Iran — Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada — have rejected disarmament or set conditions they know the government is unlikely to meet soon. Those conditions include bringing the Kurdish peshmerga security forces in northern Iraq under the control of the central government’s military and expelling Iranian Kurdish dissident groups and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which have bases in the region.
“After establishing these parameters, discussions will focus on regulating weapons, not surrendering them,” an official with one of the Iran-backed Iraqi militias said. “There is absolutely no decision among the factions to surrender weapons, and we have not surrendered any weapons.”
A government official said Baghdad’s strategy currently centers on bringing armed factions under the control of the Iraqi military. Many of the militias are already part of the Popular Mobilization Forces, a coalition of armed groups that is officially part of the Iraqi armed forces, although individual militias often act on their own.
The government wants the factions to hand over “dynamic weapons,” including missiles and long-range aircraft, to the PMF’s central leadership, and for individual factions to be dissolved and placed under the command of the PMF and the Iraqi army, the official said.
Iraqi government spokesperson Sabah al-Numan said last week that “discussions and dialogues are ongoing, and the file will be resolved after the withdrawal of the international coalition forces.”
For the Kurdistan region, the U.S. withdrawal removes one target but may not stop the attacks.
Mohammed A. Salih, a non-resident senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on Kurdish and Iraqi affairs, noted that Iran and affiliated groups “have targeted other locations in the Kurdistan region that have not been related to the U.S. troops’ presence.” Those include bases of exiled Iranian Kurdish dissident groups, energy facilities and even the office of the Kurdish region’s prime minister, Masrour Barzani.
“The withdrawal will expose the Kurdistan region even further and make it an even easier target,” Salih said.
Regional government officials declined to comment. But Barzani has publicly expressed anxiety that removing U.S. air defenses would leave the area more vulnerable. Numan said last week that Baghdad was close to procuring new air defense systems from South Korea, Turkey and the U.S., and that they “will be deployed according to carefully devised military plans to ensure the complete protection of Iraqi airspace, including the Kurdistan region.”
The twin deadlines capture Iraq’s central dilemma: the state wants to assert sovereignty over armed groups, but it cannot easily compel the most powerful ones to give up their weapons. A U.S. exit lowers the risk to American forces, yet it also removes a counterweight and leaves a more crowded field for Iran-aligned factions, Iraqi security forces and Kurdish authorities.
For Washington, the immediate goal is a cleaner, lower-risk posture. For Baghdad, the harder question is what comes next — and whether the day after the withdrawal will bring calm, or simply a new phase of the same struggle.
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Sewell reported from Beirut. Associated Press journalist Stella Martany in Irbil, Iraq, contributed to this report.