The United States said Wednesday it had completed the withdrawal of its remaining forces from Iraq, closing out a military presence that began with the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and, in its final phase, the campaign launched in 2014 against the Islamic State group. Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's office had set September 30 as a "fixed and final" deadline for the U.S.-led international coalition to leave, and officials said the last several hundred American personnel, based in the semi-autonomous Kurdish north, were being redeployed to Jordan and other bases in the region this week, according to Deutsche Welle.
About 2,500 U.S. troops had remained in Iraq for training and counter-ISIS operations before the final drawdown began. Most bases in Baghdad and central Iraq were vacated last year, and the pullback from the northern city of Erbil started roughly three weeks ago. Military equipment, including air-defense systems, is also being removed as part of the handover, leaving Iraqi forces solely responsible for securing the country for the first time in more than two decades.
A Mission Two Decades in the Making
Washington and Baghdad agreed in 2024 to wind down the much smaller counter-ISIS mission that had operated since 2014, when Iraq's government requested outside help to beat back the militant group's advance across the north. That arrangement replaced the far larger occupation force that followed the 2003 invasion, at its peak more than 170,000 U.S. troops stationed in the country. The final exit has been underway in stages since 2025, as detailed in a timeline of the drawdown.
Iraqi government spokesman Sabah al-Numan said the country was prepared to manage its own security going forward, though he acknowledged unresolved questions about the armed factions that have operated alongside, and sometimes independently of, the Iraqi state. "Discussions and dialogues are ongoing, and the file will be resolved after the withdrawal," he said, according to reporting from TimesLIVE.
Militias Reject Disarmament
Al-Zaidi has linked the American departure to demands that Iran-aligned militias, chief among them Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, give up their weapons, arguing the groups would have "no justification for their existence" once foreign forces are gone. The militias have shown little sign of complying. "There is absolutely no decision among the factions to surrender weapons," one militia official said. The leader of Harakat al-Nujaba went further, warning that any American soldier who remained past September 30 would not "return home safely."
Iraqi analyst Sajad Jiyad was blunt about the prospects for disarmament: "There will be no disarming of any groups by September 30," he said, predicting that any resolution would instead come through a slower process of folding militia fighters into Iraq's formal security structure.
Tehran Welcomes the Exit
Iran, which has long pushed for a complete removal of American forces from the Middle East, welcomed the withdrawal, according to DW. The pullout lands amid broader regional tension between Washington and Tehran, including the continuing standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran's closure of the waterway has roiled oil markets for months. Analysts say Iraq, long caught between its alliance with Washington and its economic and religious ties to Iran, will remain a proxy battleground for that rivalry even without American troops on the ground.
For now, the immediate test is security. Iraqi forces have taken over bases, checkpoints and air-defense responsibilities that the coalition held for more than a decade, and officials in Baghdad and Washington have not disclosed whether a new bilateral security agreement will replace the coalition framework that just expired. The Kurdistan region, which relied on U.S. air defenses to help fend off Iranian- and Turkish-launched strikes in recent years, is seen as particularly exposed in the transition.
Iraqi officials have cast the withdrawal as a milestone of sovereignty nearly a quarter-century after the invasion. Whether it also marks the end of Iran-aligned militias' outsized role in Iraqi security, however, remains, by most accounts, an open and unresolved question.
