The consensus read on the US military exit Iraq is that it marks a definitive close: bases shuttered, the forever war finally ended, a new Iraqi prime minister installed as a reliable partner. The evidence coming out of Baghdad in the days immediately surrounding the withdrawal suggests that read is optimistic to the point of being fanciful.
America’s departure came after more than 23 years and $1.7 trillion, with the last major US military base closing on Wednesday. President Trump, during a White House visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in July, offered a characteristically breezy assessment. ‘We don’t think we need the military there anymore,’ he said. ‘We have a fantastic champion, a new champion. He’s young, and he’s handsome.’
Beside him sat al-Zaidi, a 41-year-old businessman who had never held public office before becoming prime minister in May. He announced a deadline, also set for Wednesday, for Iranian-backed militias to hand over their weapons. ‘There is no justification for their existence after the 30th of September,’ al-Zaidi said.
The Disarmament Timeline Is Already Unravelling
That deadline did not survive the week intact. According to i24NEWS, al-Zaidi subsequently announced that armed factions now have until June 30, 2027, to turn over their weapons to the state. He framed the original September 30 date as a symbolic threshold rather than an operational one. ‘October 1 is considered a serious beginning to address the issue of weapons outside state control,’ he said, backing away from what had been presented publicly as a firm cutoff.
A nine-month extension on a deadline that was already aspirational is not a negotiating posture. It is a concession. And the factions on the receiving end of that concession have not been gracious about it. Kataeb Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups immediately rejected the revised timeline, declaring they are ‘not bound by any timetable or agreement.’ That statement, noted by i24NEWS, undercuts the core assumption on which the US exit rests: that al-Zaidi has the authority and leverage to force disarmament.
The scale of the problem is not small. The Trump administration is counting on al-Zaidi to disarm militants numbering in the tens of thousands, including paramilitary groups that receive funding or weapons from Iran. Kazem al-Fartousi, a spokesman for Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada, a paramilitary group the US has designated as a terrorist organisation, put the militia position plainly in an interview in Baghdad: ‘These weapons are for our sovereignty, our freedom.’ A forced disarmament by the government ‘will not happen,’ he said. His group and allied militias hold top positions in ministries and dozens of seats in Iraq’s parliament, where they helped broker al-Zaidi’s selection following last year’s election.
The US Military Exit Iraq and the Question of What Fills the Vacuum
Al-Zaidi’s record complicates the picture further. His bank was banned by the US Treasury Department from dollar transactions in 2024 over suspicions it helped finance Iran and its proxies. Al-Zaidi denied knowing about such transactions, and former US officials said they did not believe he had any personal involvement. The Trump administration has chosen to treat that chapter as closed and has embraced him as someone, in the Wall Street Journal’s framing, they can do business with. He owns a bank, an insurance company, and media and construction firms.
One move that has received less attention is al-Zaidi’s diplomatic activity on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. According to FDD’s Long War Journal, al-Zaidi met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the trip, and the two leaders agreed that Turkey would gradually hand over a key military base in northern Iraq. That is a substantive piece of statecraft for a prime minister eight months into his first public role, and it illustrates that al-Zaidi is manoeuvring across multiple fronts simultaneously. Whether those manoeuvres add up to effective governance of a country with well-armed militias tightening their grip is a different question.
On the ground in Baghdad, the mood among ordinary Iraqis is not celebratory. Militants and Iranian forces launched more than 600 attacks on US diplomatic and military facilities in Iraq in the first two months of the war in Gaza, according to The Wall Street Journal. The US Embassy currently sends roughly two security warnings per week specifically regarding kidnapping by militants. ‘If the troops were to leave, why were they here in the first place? They were here to accomplish a goal. Did they? No,’ said Mustafa Al-Zaidi, a 22-year-old medical student who plans to work abroad. ‘Will we be like Afghanistan or like Yemen and Syria?’
Al-Zaidi’s next formal marker is now June 30, 2027. The militias have already answered: they will not be meeting it.
