Joe Biden to declare end of combat operations in Iraq

The announcement will be part of a deal signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi.

Joe Biden returns to the White House after spending the weekend at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Picture: AFP

The US will on Monday night declare an end to combat operations in Iraq, asserting that the fight against Islamic State can be led by local forces.

The announcement will be part of a deal signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who is in Washington and will meet President Joe Biden.

It will state formally that US combat troops will be withdrawn from Iraq and the forces that remain will perform only training and advisory roles. Its aim is to help Mr Kadhimi to argue that he is no longer beholden to Western military interests, and that attacks by pro-Iran militias on US targets, often bases shared with Iraqi troops, are illegitimate.

The public rationale is the defeat of Islamic State, whose surge across half the country led president Barack Obama to send US troops back to Iraq after announcing their withdrawal in 2011.

“There is no need for any foreign combat forces on Iraqi soil,” Mr Kadhimi told Associated Press on the eve of his visit. However, he did not give a timetable for the withdrawal.

“The war against ISIS and the readiness of our forces requires a special timetable, and this depends on the negotiations that we will conduct in Washington.”

Previous claims of victory and US withdrawal from Iraq had to be swiftly reversed. This time there will be little change to the number of troops stationed in the country – about 2500 — with a few hundred more other allies preserving a longer-term presence in the face of Iranian influence.

Donald Trump, who declared in his election campaign that he would “end America’s forever wars in the Middle East”, failed to do so but in one of his last acts as president, in November, he reduced numbers in Iraq by 500, down from 3000.

Mr Biden’s symbolic announcement is expected to take the form of a written statement unveiled in a White House ceremony after the meeting with Mr Kadhimi on Monday night. The talks are being billed as part of a “US-Iraq strategic dialogue”, a format used to stress the notion that the relationship between the two is of two sovereign, equal states, with shared security interests.

That fits the formal US position that the reason for its troops’ presence in Iraq is solely to help it defeat, and prevent a return of, ISIS jihadists.

The long-feared “resurgence” of ISIS after the defeat of the group’s territorial “caliphate” two years ago has not materialised. The group manages sporadic attacks, including a bombing in Baghdad’s largely Shia suburb, Sadr City, which killed 35 people last week, but maintains a physical presence only in remote patches of the deserts of Anbar and in ungoverned territory between Kurdish and federal government zones of control. On Sunday the Iraqi authorities released photographs of five men, including three brothers, arrested on suspicion of carrying out the Sadr City attack.

Reports in Washington suggest that the end of the year will be set as the formal deadline for the removal of combat troops. In reality, some will leave over the next few weeks and months. Nearly all US military activity is already said to be devoted to training and advising Iraq’s army, particularly its counter-terrorism forces.

The US presence has the key longer-term strategic purpose of providing a bulwark against the domination of Iraq, which has been divided since the 2003 invasion, by neighbouring Iran.

Mr Kadhimi, who has close relations with the West but whose coalition government depends on support from pro-Iranian factions, is under pressure to implement a vote by parliament last year for the US presence to end. It took place in disputed circumstances after Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the most powerful Iraqi militia commander, were killed in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport in January last year. The vote has been used by the militias to justify repeated rocket and drone attacks on bases shared by US and Iraqi troops, 50 this year alone.

The militias have been close to Iran in the past but now claim to promote an Iraqi nationalism independent of both Washington and Tehran. In particular, veteran militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose political faction won more seats than any other in the last Iraqi elections, has fostered relations with US allies such as Saudi Arabia even while keeping up his anti-American rhetoric.

The militias originate in brigades of fighters recruited by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from Iraq’s Shia community that was exiled under Saddam Hussein. The brigades then fought for Iran in the 1980-88 war between the two countries. Brigade leaders and fighters returned to Iraq after the 2003 invasion to form the core of a pro-Iranian, anti-Western “resistance” movement.

The Times