New Iraqi PM Will Press for Foreign Forces Pullout

“Abdul Mahdi will abide by security agreements with all countries according to the security requirements of the country and will work to remove all foreign troops from Iraqi territory, after completing the formation of the cabinet," al-Sunaid’s press statement read on Monday.

He continued that the new PM’s priority is the national sovereignty and that he will work to end the foreign military presence in the country.

One of his measures, according to al-Sunaid, a fellow party member of the outgoing PM Haider Al-Abadi, will be negotiating a timetable for the foreign troops’ withdrawal from the Iraqi territories.

He noted that the new leader believes that the Iraqi security forces are fully capable of maintaining the security in the country.

The Iraqi President Bahram Salih named Adel Abdul Mahdi as a new PM on October 3.

The key target of the remarks appears to be the US which currently holds some 4,000 troops on the Iraqi soil despite an agreement with Baghdad in 2008 to remove all of its forces.

The US withdrew a large part of its forces from Iraq in 2011 but kept what it called military advisors and trainers on the Iraqi ground.

Following the emergence of ISIS in Iraq in 2014, the White House redeployed its troops to Iraq, against the terms of the US-Iraq security pact, under the excuse of the need for it to fight the terrorist group.

The government of Haider al-Abadi announced the defeat of ISIS in 2017 but the American leaders kept their forces in the Arab country to date.

Pressures have been mounting from various Iraqi parties against the outgoing PM to ask the Americans out of the country. Saerun and Nasr alliances, the key winners of the election, insisted that uninvited foreign troops should pull out of the country. The US, however, said that it set no plans to remove forces despite the calls.

In March, Iraq’s parliament demanded that the government set a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign troops, referring to the US-led coalition forces in the country.

Some Iraqi parties have been accusing Washington of shielding ISIS to prolong its presence in Iraq to justify the American military dispatch to Iraq. The American fighter jets several times bombed the Iraqi army and the Public Mobilization Forces (PMF), a voluntary force formed in opposition to ISIS, while they were chasing ISIS and other terrorist groups’ remains on the border with Syria.

In addition to the US, a set of other countries have a questioned military presence on the Iraqi soil, mainly uncalled for by Baghdad. France, Turkey, Britain, Germany, and some other European states have troops operating in various Iraqi regions under the coalition’s name.