US to pull back troops from Iraq

Donald Trump to tout troop cut as progress toward winding down what he has described as endless wars.

US President Donald Trump joins National Guard troops in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on August 29, 2020.

The Pentagon will cut the US force in Iraq to about 3500 troops, about a one-third reduction ­Donald Trump is expected to tout as progress toward winding down what he has described as endless wars.

The US and Iraq refrained from publicly setting a schedule for reducing the 5200 American troops in the country when Iraq’s Prime Minister visited Washington earlier this month.

But several American officials said the Pentagon would cut troop levels by about one-third over the next two to three months. That would bring American force levels roughly back to where they were in 2015 when the US was in the early phase of its campaign against Islamic State.

“We are reducing troop levels as the Iraqi capability to defeat ISIS remnants and prevent its resurgence improves, said Pentagon spokeswoman navy commander Jessica McNulty at the weekend.

“Any reduction of US. forces in Iraq will be determined through careful co-ordination with the government of Iraq, as well as with our coalition and NATO partners, and calibrated to our shared ­security interests and progress in the campaign against ISIS.”

The Iraqi embassy didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Pentagon has long-sought to shrink the US footprint in the Middle East as it focuses its efforts on China, even as some military commanders worry about thinning out a force in the region while at the same time maintaining the administration’s so-called maximum pressure campaign against Iran. The troop reduction also comes as clusters of Islamic State fighters remain active in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

“ISIS sleeper cells are still operating in Iraq,” Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi said on August 20. “The threat is still there.”

Neither the Iraqi government nor the Pentagon wants to repeat the experience of 2011, when the withdrawal of the entire US force in Iraq led to a security vacuum that Islamic State was able to exploit, officials on both sides said. But both governments have faced political pressures at home from critics who have complained that the US may be engaged in an open-ended mission.

Iraqi counter-terrorism forces stand guard in front of the US embassy in the capital Baghdad.

Mr Trump is anxious to show by November 3 election day that he has made progress toward pulling more troops out of the Middle East, said officials, who note he will be able to point to the cuts in Iraq as well the reduction of thousands of troops he has directed in US forces deployed in Afghanistan and those permanently based in Germany.

Hinting at the possibility of the coming troop cuts, the US and Iraq said in a communique this month that the main focus of the American and allied mission was shifting from fighting Islamic State militants to training and equipping Iraq’s security forces. It also said that technical talks would be held on how to manage that transition, “including any associated redeployments from Iraq”.

“There’s going to be a requirement for us, our NATO and our coalition partners to have a long-term presence in Iraq,” General Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command, said during an online seminar held by the US Institute of Peace earlier this month. “We don’t want to maintain a huge number of soldiers forever in Iraq. We want to get smaller.”

Some defence officials regard a 3500-troop level as a floor if the US also wants to draw on its Iraq-based force to sustain American operations in Syria. The actual number the US ends up retaining may be slightly more than 3500, due to Pentagon counting rules that often don’t include troops on temporary assignments.

The US military returned to Iraq after Islamic State captured Mosul in June 2014. Over time, the size of the American military presence began to grow to well over 5200 troops, including American advisers who accompanied Iraqi forces onto the battlefield and called in airstrikes.

The risk to US forces rose over the past year as Iran fired missiles at the al-Asad air base in January and Iranian-backed militias fired rockets at other bases where American and allied troops were deployed. The US adjusted by ­redirecting its reconnaissance systems to focus on the militias, sometimes at a cost to its mission of consolidating its gains against Islamic State.

“Over the last seven or eight months, we have had to devote resources to self-protection that we would otherwise devote for the counter-ISIS fight,” General McKenzie said earlier this month. “We’ve had to pull back and our partners have had to pull back. We’ve done some things to harden our positions and to make it more difficult for Iran to actually attack us in Iraq.”

In recent months, the US military footprint has contracted as American and allied troops withdrew from an array of bases, including Camp Taji, a major Iraqi installation northwest of Baghdad from which American forces officially departed last week.

In May, there were 1600 US military personnel at the Taji base as well as 300 coalition troops from other countries, a US military spokesman said. As of Wednesday, all of those troops had left from the installation.

The US and allied officials also are centralising their efforts to mentor Iraqi security forces by doing much of their advising from command centres in Baghdad and Erbil instead of accompanying Iraqi army units in the field.

Nations in the US-led international coalition as well as those in a separate NATO effort are expected to keep troops to train the Iraqis even as the US trims its own forces level. One American official estimated that 2500 non-American troops could stay.

The US also has about 900 troops in eastern Syria and at the al-Tanf garrison, near Syria’s southern border with Iraq and Jordan, officials said.

Still, remnants of the Islamic States have continued to carry out low-level attacks. A July report by the Pentagon Inspector General said that Islamic State militants mostly operate in cells of five to 15 fighters in desert, mountainous or rural areas of western Iraq or in several provinces north of Baghdad. That assessment was based on data from the US-led command that has been fighting Islamic State.

The militants have continued to be targets for US airpower. On August 21, the US carried out an airstrike in the Tarmiyah area north of Baghdad as Iraqi troops moved in on the ground.

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