Baghdad bets on state control as US troops complete Iraq withdrawal

BAGHDAD — Iraq is preparing to mark four "Sovereignty Days," a national holiday that will formally celebrate the departure of the last US troops from the country, closing a chapter of foreign military involvement that stretched for more than two decades. The withdrawal deadline falls on Wednesday, when a few hundred remaining American soldiers — serving in advisory rather than frontline roles — will leave the country where they have been stationed as part of a coalition campaign launched in 2015 to fight ISIL.

The scale of what is ending is easy to underestimate. What began as Operation Inherent Resolve, a US-led multinational campaign against the Islamic State group, gradually became a long-term advisory footprint. President Donald Trump began drawing US forces home in 2020, and by the end of 2025 the remaining personnel had consolidated at an airbase in Erbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Iraq has been comparatively calm since the group's territorial defeat in 2017, even as conflict has raged along its borders and repeatedly spilled onto its soil.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's government frames the departure as a restoration of sovereignty rather than a loss of security. Though the withdrawal schedule was set before he took office, he has woven it into a broader project of reasserting state authority — one that includes accelerating efforts to bring all militia weapons under government control by June 2027. That deadline originally was set for September 30, 2026, but al-Zaidi won an extension, giving armed groups linked to Iran more time to comply even as those groups have continued launching attacks across the region during the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly last week, al-Zaidi said his government was "striving to ensure that the state is the ultimate decision-maker in matters of peace and war," with weapons and tools of power held by constitutional institutions. He also cast the transition as an upgrade rather than a rupture, arguing that relations with Washington's "strategic partners" are moving "from military cooperation to economic and development cooperation."

Analysts see a calculated political logic behind the timing. Douglas Silliman, a former US ambassador to Iraq and Kuwait who now leads the Arab Gulf States Institute, said the exit looks designed to "politically weaken" influential militias, including those tied to Tehran. Those groups have long justified holding their own weapons stocks and separate chains of command by pointing to the presence of foreign forces on Iraqi soil, as well as to regional actors such as Turkiye. With the US departing, the argument for retaining independent arsenals becomes harder to sustain in the eyes of Iraqi publics — and some groups have already signalled they will not surrender their arms.

It is a high-stakes gambit with two clear risks. The first is that a narrowed US military presence gives Iran more room to widen its influence over Baghdad, and opens the door to a potentially catastrophic domestic confrontation further down the road. The second is that Iraqi groups aligned with Iran keep targeting American assets, drawing pressure onto a government that has spent two decades courting Western partners.

Silliman said the coming period will test everyone involved. "It's going to be a very difficult series of decisions," he said, "both for the militias and for Prime Minister al-Zaidi and his defence team."

Renad Mansour, who directs the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, is less sanguine about the short term. Militants aligned with Iran's "axis of resistance," he said, remain "in full-on war mode, working with the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] in the region," and so "they will continue to target US and US interests." In other words, a 90-day calm offers a pause, not a resolution.

That pause appears to be deliberate. Al-Zaidi told The New York Times earlier this month that both the US government and Iran-aligned militias have given assurances that they will refrain from launching attacks for 90 days following the US withdrawal — an attempt to prevent the situation from devolving immediately. Reports have also surfaced of Iraqi officials pressing Washington for carve-outs from measures tied to the wider regional conflict, including a request for an exemption from a ban on Iranian flights.

Behind the public language of continued partnership with the West, Mansour detects growing unease in Baghdad. The government's anxiety, he said, is that Washington may conclude it no longer needs Iraq — or, in the worst case, come to view it as a pariah state, too closely aligned with Iran, and therefore a legitimate target. Such pressure, he warned, could take the form of sanctions or an escalation of US and Israeli strikes on Iraqi territory.

The regional backdrop sharpens those concerns. US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have publicly warned about the risk of Iraq's "Balkanisation" as armed factions compete for territory and influence, while the war with Iran has repeatedly placed Iraqi groups at the centre of US military planning. For Baghdad, the paradox of the moment is that celebrating a US exit and begging for continued US economic engagement — and for relief from US pressure measures — are happening at the same time.

Iraq has some buffers in place, analysts note. The state has spent years integrating Sunni and Shia factions into its security structure, and pro-government elements of the Popular Mobilisation Forces have been folded into official chains of command. But the disarmament timetable is short, the militias' external patrons remain active, and neighbouring conflicts show no sign of quieting.

Mohammad Salih, a non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on Iraq, is among the analysts weighing in on the enthusiasm surrounding the US troop withdrawal. His views, and those of other experts, underline how much of Iraq's security future now rests on decisions made in Baghdad alone — with fewer outside guarantees than at any point since 2003.

For Iraq, the celebrations will be celebratory, but the tests begin immediately. The state has won the symbolism of sovereignty; whether it can turn that symbolism into actual control over weapons, borders and decision-making is the harder question the next 90 days will begin to answer.