THE NEW YORK TIMES: After two decades, US Forces leave Iraq to an uncertain future

US forces formally withdrew from Iraq on Wednesday, ending a two-decade military presence that stoked years of devastating bloodshed and leaves behind a battered nation struggling to unshackle itself from its two most powerful, and now warring, allies.

After toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly 24 years, US forces are making their second withdrawal from the country.

The US invasion and subsequent occupation, which ended in 2011, left a country reeling from sectarian bloodletting and militant insurgencies that cost nearly 4,500 US lives and killed more than 115,000 Iraqis, according to the most modest counts.

US forces ultimately returned three years later — this time to lead the international coalition fighting the Islamic State group, the jihadi force that once seized swaths of Iraq and Syria and became notorious for its slaughter of Shiite Muslim Iraqis, public killings of hostages, and torture and enslavement of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority.

With the end of Operation Inherent Resolve — the US military’s official name for the multinational campaign against the Islamic State — the last of the 2,500 US forces stationed in Iraq this year are now gone.

“The coalition successfully completed its organized withdrawal operation from Irbil,” Rear Admiral Liam M. Hulin, head of the joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve, announced during a ceremony held by US and Iraqi officials in Baghdad. Irbil, capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region, hosted the last coalition base in Iraq.

“I stand before you at this historic moment, when a nation reclaims its destiny,” Hulin said, in a speech given in Arabic.

Promising that US and Iraqi forces would forge new security partnerships, Hulin urged Iraq to remain vigilant, citing an Arabic proverb, “Gird yourself for the jackal with the belt of a lion.”

Physical reminders of decades of war are being erased every day. The blast walls that once snaked through Baghdad have come down. Malls, restaurants and construction sites are buzzing in a country determined to reclaim the rhythms of normal life stolen by years of car bombs.

Iraqis’ hard-won gains look more precarious in a region convulsing from the turmoil of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Iraq is struggling to navigate its critical relationships with Iran, its powerful neighbour, and with its most important ally, Washington, wary of letting the exit of US troops in the country embolden Iran.

The US withdrawal agreement was struck between the Iraqi government and the Biden administration in 2024. That President Donald Trump’s administration followed through with the September 30 deadline — despite the war with Iran — reflects broader US determination to step back from the region.

For years, there has been widespread American fatigue with so-called forever wars, as the conflicts in Iraq and in Afghanistan came to be known.

Even as Iraq commemorates the US withdrawal this week with a three-day “celebration of sovereignty,” the country is under huge pressure from the Trump administration to disarm Iran-backed Shiite Muslim militias, many of which are defying state efforts to bring them under control.

The last US forces leave a troubled American legacy. Iraq suffered huge numbers of civilian casualties and a cycle of sectarian violence between Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, empowered after years of repression by the Hussein government, and the Sunni minority, stripped of privileges it once held under his rule.

US forces also committed many abuses themselves — including the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and the use of private defence contractors such as Blackwater, whose extrajudicial killings of civilians fuelled deep resentments over American impunity.

Despite these grievances, Iraqis have been watching the US departure with a sense of trepidation.

“My wife lost her eyesight from the shrapnel of an American bullet,” said Omar al-Husseini, a photographer from Mosul, the city at the heart of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. “My uncle was killed by ISIS, after being paralyzed by an American bullet,” he said, using an alternative name for the Islamic State. “But today, when we speak about the Americans’ departure, our happiness is mixed with fear.”

Under the leadership of the novice prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, Iraq faces the daunting task of reining in the vast array of militias.

First established with Iranian support to fight the US occupation, the militias killed hundreds of US soldiers, and the sectarian bloodshed they helped foment killed tens of thousands of Iraqis. In 2014, when Iraqi Shiites mobilized to fight the Islamic State, the militias multiplied. In the years since, the thousands-strong militias have grown in power — not only through military might but also by forming political parties that deeply embed them in the state.

Al-Zaidi has pledged to bring the militias under state control by mid-2027. But it is far from clear that he can deliver. The stakes are high: Through Iraq’s US-based bank account for oil payments, Washington controls the physical shipment of dollars Iraq earns and has shown itself willing to use that power after temporarily halting the flow this year.

Iran is determined to preserve the militias, which have proved to be valuable partners in launching strikes during the war, in sowing regional chaos and in inflicting drastic costs on the global economy.

In a recent New York Times interview, al-Zaidi said, “Every Iraqi today wants his country to have complete sovereignty; they want power to be exclusively in the hands of the state,” and he pledged to end “the law of the jungle.”

The Unforeseen Consequences of Withdrawal

Many Iraqis worry how their country will fare in this struggle.

“We fear Iraq could be swallowed up,” said Ahmad al-Shammari, an employee at the Education Ministry in Fallujah, a city that came to symbolize the fragile victories of the first US military presence in Iraq.

Fallujah suffered the deadliest and most destructive battles to crush insurgents during the US occupation, only to become the first city to be seized as Islamic State militants swept the country in 2014.

When the US forces returned to spearhead a multinational coalition to defeat the jihadi force, the struggle to rout the Islamic State reduced huge parts of Iraqi cities to rubble.

It left an untold number of dead, displaced millions from Iraq’s Sunni minority and brought many more years of sectarian strife.

The question for many ordinary Iraqis today is what unforeseen consequences this latest US departure may have on their lives, whether that is a jihadi resurgence or the state’s imminent confrontation with Iran-backed militias.

“I remember what happened after the withdrawal in 2011,” said Sarkawt Ahmad, 26, a shopkeeper in northwestern Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. “Imagine what these pro-Iranian groups will do to us in the absence of the international coalition.”

Some regional security experts argue that it was the continued US presence in Iraq that allowed Iran-backed militias to try to justify their existence and their arms.

“We can’t just shape-shift these missions from one raison d’etre to another, which is what we’ve done for 25 years,” said Adam Weinstein, a longtime proponent of US forces’ ending their mission in Iraq who is the deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute, a research group.

At the ceremony marking the U.S withdrawal Wednesday, al-Zaidi expressed Iraq’s thanks to the United States and to all other countries who supported the fight against the Islamic State for more than a decade.

“The conclusion of the international coalition’s mission does not mean the end of our battle against terrorism,” he said. “It marks Iraq’s transition to a phase in which it assumes full responsibility for its security and stability.”

Kurds Are Vulnerable Under a New Security Order

Though both countries have pledged to maintain robust collaboration, the United States and Iraq have still not finalized plans for their security relationship moving forward. In a statement, the Defence Department said it would continue to provide “targeted training and intelligence support” to Iraq.

The last time US forces left Iraq, the United States maintained one of its largest embassies in the world there. Today, the US diplomatic presence is a small fraction of that, said Renad Mansour, an Iraq analyst at Chatham House, a research institute based in London.

He said the shift reflected Washington’s desire to extricate itself from the Middle East: “In the bigger picture, this shows the US is no longer what it used to be — but, also, its priorities are no longer what they used to be.”

This situation has particularly unnerved Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region in the north, which saw how the Trump administration’s withdrawal of US forces from Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast forced the region to come under central government control.

Iraqi Kurds, who began establishing sovereignty in their region through US air support in the 1990s, feel the most vulnerable under Iraq’s new security order. As one of the closest US security partners in the region, Iraqi Kurdistan has come under repeated attacks by Iran and its allied Iraqi militias this year.

Kurdish officials argue this reflects a serious problem for Iraqi security more broadly. “There is no air defence system neither in the Kurdistan region nor in Iraq as a whole,” said Kifah Mahmoud, an adviser to Masoud Barzani, the first president of Iraqi Kurdistan. “This creates a sense of anxiety and uncertainty.”

Baghdad’s efforts to assert its sovereignty have been repeatedly undermined in recent months by multiple incidents showing its lack of control over its sky and borders.

Most recently, Saudi Arabia accused Iraq of being the origin site of the strike that temporarily shut down its east-west pipeline, which provides 4 per cent of global oil supplies. Iraqi officials suspect Iraqi militias facilitated an attack by Iranian operatives.

At the same time, Iraqi militias point to the fact that Israel set up covert bases in the Iraqi desert during the war with Iran. And for years, Turkish forces have controlled territory in northern Iraq, though Iraqi and Turkish officials recently announced plans for a phased withdrawal.

Such gaps in Iraqi sovereignty may become the biggest vulnerability in the government’s campaign to control the militias.

Days before the formal end of the US military presence, Abu Mujahid al-Assaf, a leader from Kataib Hezbollah, one of Iraq’s most powerful Iran-backed militias, issued an ominous warning to the government if it kept complying with new US sanctions against Iran.

“Let Mr. al-Zaidi and those standing behind him know: A government that does not work for the benefit of the people will be brought down through various means,” he wrote in a statement.

The militias are trumpeting the official US withdrawal day not as a success of the anti-Islamic State campaign, but of their own. They announced an afternoon celebration on the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday under the slogan: “We won’t keep you.” They called the withdrawal an “occasion made possible by the blessed blood of the martyrs and the patience of the fighters in the Iraqi Islamic Resistance.”

Many Iraqis who reject the militias have painful memories of the US presence in Iraq. Among them is Awatif al-Azawi, 57, who blames the United States for the death of her son, who she says was killed in the crossfire between militants and US forces in their hometown, Fallujah.

“I used to love the Americans because they delivered us from the oppression of Saddam Hussein,” she said. “We unfortunately later discovered that the US military’s oppression and cruelty were worse than Saddam.”

On the first night that US forces no longer maintain a presence in Iraq, she said, “I will bake a cake at home, light candles and blow them out to celebrate.”