First Afghanistan, now Iraq.
During the visit of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mustafa al Kadhimi, to the White House last Monday, it was announced that all US combat troops will be out from Iraq later this year as part of an ongoing Strategic Dialogue between the two countries.
This raises two key questions: what difference will this make on the ground? And does this open the door for the return of the so-called Islamic State (IS), the group that terrorized much of the Middle East and attracted recruits from as far away as the UK, Trinidad and Australia?
Eighteen years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the latter country only has about 2. 500 regular soldiers on Iraqi soil, plus a number small and undisclosed number of Special Operations forces fighting IS.
Concentrated in just three bases, they are a small fraction of the force of 160. 000 troops that occupied Iraq after the invasion, but are still subject to attacks with misites and drones of alleged militias backed by Iran.
The work of the U.S. Army is to train and assist security forces d Iraqis still fighting a sporadic but deadly insurgency by IS jihadists.
But the presence of the US Army in the country is controversial.
Iranian-backed politicians and militias want them out, especially after the US assassinated the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force, General Qasem Soleimani, already at a high Iraqi Shiite Muslim militia commander at Baghdad airport in January 2020.
Even non-aligned Iraqis would like their country to get rid of foreign forces, because the notion of foreign occupation is a controversial issue.
In Washington there are many who agree, although not at the cost of “giving Iraq to Iran.”
United States has been trying for a long time to free himself from what the pr President Joe Biden calls his “eternal wars” in the Middle East.
Hence the accelerated withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, as the United States and its allies increasingly focus their attention on the Asia-Pacific region and the South China Sea.
Islamic State 2.0?
Lurking in the environment is the specter of a resurgence of IS and the possibility of history repeating itself.
In 2011, then-President Barack Obama announced that US troops were withdrawing from Iraq.
Since then a small number have remained .
But that decline, combined with a toxic Iraqi political mix and a burgeoning civil war across the border in Syria, created the space perfect for IS eventually to seize Mosul, the country’s second city, and then control a territory of the size of a European country.
Could this happen again now? Could a reconstituted IS 2.0 once again push aside a demoralized Iraqi army deprived of US combat support?
It is much less likely, for several reasons.
IS was able to capitalize on the massive discontent felt by Iraq’s Sunni Muslims towards the highly partisan Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki at the time.
Al Maliki ruled the country between 2006 Y 2014, and systematically disenfranchised Sunnis, pushing many into the arms of IS.
The current political equation, while far from perfect, is more acceptable to ethnic groups competitors from Iraq.
Since the defeat of the IS, the United States and the United Kingdom have also dedicated a lot of time and effort to training Iraqi counterinsurgency forces and that training will continue, with the support of NATO.
Third, ISIS’s strategic leadership, or what remains of it, appears to be more focused on exploiting the ungoverned spaces in Africa and Afghanistan than on fighting well-armed security forces in its Arab heartland.
“ISIS insurgents’ attacks appear to be controlled by Iraqi government forces,” says Brig Ben Barry, a former British Army officer and now defense analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Although it adds that “without a political agreement with the Iraqi Sunnis, the root causes of the insurgency will remain.”
Islamic State was able to carry out a successful blitzkrieg campaign across the region in the summer of 2014, partly because the West had stopped looking at the ball in Iraq.
Then a coalition of was needed nations for five long years and billions of dollars to defeat it and no one wants to go through all that again.
So, despite the reduction in US troops, the West will be watching to see if IS or any other jihadist group seems to use Iraq as a springboard to carry out transnational attacks, especially in the West.
“If the United States detected that the Islamic State in Iraq is preparing an attack against American interests outside of Iraq, Washington would probably attack unilaterally”, says Barry.
And with considerable resources nearby and offshore in the Gulf, the Pentagon certainly has the means to do it.
The long game of Go an
The broader, long-term picture here is one that favors Iran.
Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the country has been trying to dislodge American forces from its neighborhood and become the main power in the region.
It has had little success in the Arab Gulf states, where distrust of Tehran runs deep and where the US military has facilities in six countries, including the headquarters of the powerful US Navy Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
But the overthrow of the regime by Saddam Husse in Iraq, led by the United States in 2003, removed the most effective obstacle to Iranian expansion, and Tehran has not missed the opportunity since.
It has successfully inserted its Shiite militias into the fabric of the security system Iraq, and its allies have a powerful voice in Parliament.
Syria’s civil war has opened the door to a significant Iranian military presence there, while next door in Lebanon, the ally Iran’s Hezbollah has become the country’s most powerful force.
Iran is playing long-term. Its leaders hope that if they keep up the pressure, both open and covert, they will eventually make the Middle East a region in which the United States will not be worth the effort to remain militarily involved.
Hence the frequent rocket attacks on US bases and Iran’s support for the civil protest calling for US troops to leave.
An agreement that includes the end of US combat operations in Iraq will be seen by many in Tehran as a step in the right direction.
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