U.S.-Iraq relationship tested after drone strike.
BAGHDAD — American oil workers were fleeing Iraq on Friday, as fears grew of war between the United States and Iran. At sermons in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, worshippers chanted, “Death to America!”
And in Tahrir Square in central Baghdad, where anti-government protesters have gathered for months, a banner went up with a pointed message to both Iran and the U.S.: “Keep your conflicts away from Iraq.”
Iraqis awoke to the news Friday that Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani of Iran, the architect of Iran’s dominating influence over Iraq, had been killed in a U.S. drone strike, along with several others.
Iraqi factions were weighing their responses. Militias with ties to Iran vowed bloody revenge. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi condemned the attack as “an outrageous breach to Iraqi sovereignty” and said parliament would meet to discuss the future of the U.S. presence in Iraq.
The airstrike on Soleimani “was a clear breach of the terms of the American forces’ presence,” Abdul Mahdi said.
He said that parliament would meet in the coming days to consider “appropriate measures to preserve the dignity of Iraq and its security and sovereignty,” including whether to ask the Americans to leave.
It could well turn out that the killing of Soleimani, intended as a shot against Iran, could accelerate one of Iran’s long-term objectives: pushing the U.S. military out of Iraq.
“I think in his death he put the final nail in the coffin of the U.S. military presence in Iraq,” said Mohammad Shabani, a doctoral researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London who focuses on Iran-Iraq relations. “If Iran can erase the U.S. military presence in Iraq and all it has to do is give up five Iranian military men, would Iran do it? I think the answer is yes.”
The U.S. has nearly 5,000 troops in Iraq on a handful of bases.
More than 16 years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a devastating conflict that cost close to $1 trillion and claimed about 5,000 American lives, Iran is the dominant power in Iraq.
Experts said that if the
Trump administration had a strategy to work with the Iraqi government to achieve stability and sovereignty the killing of Soleimani in a drone strike near the Baghdad airport early Friday would have provided a measure of leverage.
Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA official who is an expert on Iraq and Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said the assassination means that, at least for a time, “Iraqi politicians will be less fearful of Iran and more willing to listen to the Americans.” The Iranians in Iraq, he said, having lost their leader, will be on their heels, trying to figure out what to do next.
But, he said, the U.S. seems to have no policy on Iraq beyond using the country as a base to confront Iran.
“I have been talking to my friends at state and there is no effort to use this to push Iraq in a better direction,” he said. He called the killing “a tactical move directed at Iran without a wider regional strategy.”
Iran, on the contrary, is deeply embedded in Iraq on many levels.
“The United States has only one color, it is the military color, that is all that it spends its money on,” said Qais al-Khazali, the leader of a pro-Iranian militia. “But Iran has many colors — in culture, in politics, in religion, in many spheres.”
While Iraq’s parliament is sure to take up the issue of the U.S. troop presence, few expect the government to actually expel the Americans. Many Iraqi leaders still view an American presence as vital to its security, and depend on U.S. training of the Iraqi security forces and as a counterweight to Iranian influence.
Still, the Americans are left with few vital defenders in Iraq.
“No one is going to speak up for us, despite all we’ve done and in spite of the mistakes — and God knows we’ve done some bad ones,” said Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and now the diplomat in residence at Princeton University. “All we’ve given Iraq, and the Shia in particular, were things they could never have dreamed of before 2003. But that was then and this is now.”