US troops leave Middle East as Iranian threat weakens

The US military has begun to draw small numbers of troops out of the Middle East as the threat of reprisal ­attacks from Iran subsides.

A billboard of late Iran's commander Qassem Soleimani overlooks Valiasr square in Tehran. Picture: AFP

The US military has begun to draw small numbers of troops out of the Middle East after concluding that the threat of reprisal ­attacks from Iran or its proxies has subsided, in no small part due to the coronavirus outbreak.

About 1000 combat troops who had deployed to Kuwait days after the January 3 strike that killed Iranian commander ­Qassem Soleimani have left the region over the past two weeks, military officials said. A further 2000 members of the same brigade are expected to leave the­ ­region in coming weeks.

They are the first departures of ground forces since the increase in hostilities in January, signalling a tenuous confidence by US officials that the immediate tension in the region has begun to decline.

Iran is battling one of the deadliest outbreaks of the new coronavirus outside China. As of Wednesday, at least 291 Iranians, including two members of parliament, had died and more than 8000 had been reported as contracting the virus.

The coronavirus has affected Iran’s ability to respond to the January strike, some Pentagon ­officials have concluded. “Their focus is internal,” one said.

With the withdrawals, the ­majority of American troops added to the region in the weeks after the Soleimani strike — which included combat troops, jet fighter squadrons, missile-­defence systems, an American aircraft carrier and other warships — will have left the region.

Extra combat troops were sent to Kuwait to provide additional security for US bases and embassies in case the death of Soleimani, considered by US officials to be the architect of deadly Iranian shadow wars throughout the Middle East, led to widespread retaliatory attacks by Iran and the proxy forces he supported.

The US holds Iran responsible for several attacks that began last year, including attacks on commercial vessels, the downing of an American drone, and a drone and missile attack against an oil facility in Saudi Arabia.

Iran has denied responsibility for the attacks. It acknowledged launching a series of ballistic missile strikes on two US-occupied bases in Iraq on January 8, resulting in brain injuries that affected more than 100 American service members.

In the two months since Soleimani’s death and the retaliatory Iranian strikes, the outbreak of ­violence many US officials feared hasn’t materialised. Officials said they were now more confident that the window for potential violence connected to his death had passed.

Critics warned that it might be too early to conclude that Iran and its proxies won’t respond further.

Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani, may have needed some time to fully assume command and develop his own plans. Militant forces allied with Iran, like Hezbollah, could conduct strikes, independent of Tehran’s plans.

“Everything we know about Iran and its past actions is that they tend to retaliate in a major way,” Andrew Miller, deputy ­director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “It takes time to reconstitute, and I think the Iranians are calculating and waiting for the Americans to let their guard down.”

There are about 90,000 American forces operating in the area overseen by US Central Command, which includes the Middle East and Afghanistan, defence ­officials said, up from the 80,000 that were in the region in the weeks before Soleimani’s death.

The Wall Street Journal reported in December, citing US officials, that the US military was considering deploying up to 14,000 additional troops to the ­region in response to rising threats from Iran.

The Pentagon denied at the time that such plans existed, ­although some of the eventual increase of roughly 10,000 personnel were drawn from those plans, Pentagon officials said.

Before the US airstrike in Baghdad in January, Soleimani was the revered commander of the Quds Force, the foreign wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In that role, he oversaw foreign activities of Iran and its proxy forces, including a campaign that US officials say killed hundreds of American and allied soldiers in Iraq in the years after the US-led invasion in 2003.

The Wall Street Journal