(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) US troops will remain at the Ain al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq, reversing plans to withdraw from the military installation, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said on Monday.
According to Stars and Stripes, al-Sudani said about 250 to 250 US military personnel will remain at Ain al-Asad, as well as at the al-Hahrir Air Base in the Erbil Governorate in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
A US War Department official said earlier this month that the US was in the process of withdrawing from Ain al-Asad and that the US planned to keep the majority of its troops in Erbil and was leaving some military personnel in Baghdad. The official also said that the US was bringing its overall troop numbers in Iraq from 2,500 to below 2,000 under a drawdown deal signed with the Iraqi government last year.
Al-Sudani said the US troops will stay at Ain al-Asad to help forces fighting ISIS in Syria. “These personnel will assist in surveillance and coordination with US forces at the al-Tanf base in Syria to ensure that IS does not exploit the security vacuum,” he said.
While the deal the US and Iraq signed last year was framed as a withdrawal agreement, the US has been clear since it was signed that it would not lead to a full US withdrawal from Iraq. The agreement outlines a formal end to the US-led anti-ISIS coalition’s mission in Iraq, but US troops will remain in the country under a “bilateral security partnership.”
Washington and Baghdad began negotiations on the deal after al-Sudani called for an end to the foreign coalition’s mission in Iraq following a series of US airstrikes against the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of Iraqi Shia militias that are part of Iraq’s security forces.
The US was bombing the PMF in retaliation for rocket and drone attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria that were launched in response to US support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Those operations culminated in the January 2024 attack on Tower 22, a secretive US base in Jordan near the Syrian border, which killed three US Army Reserve soldiers and wounded dozens of National Guard members. The US launched major airstrikes against the PMF in response, and the militias largely ceased attacks on US bases since early 2024 due to pressure from the Iraqi government and Iran.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
