Stay connected with KayaToday, follow us on Instagram and Facebook for the latest news and reviews delivered straight to you.
Twenty-three years after American tanks rolled into Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein, the last US forces have quietly departed Iraq. There were no dramatic scenes at Kabul airport this time, but the strategic consequences may prove just as significant. The withdrawal, completed on Wednesday, closes a chapter that cost 4,500 American lives and reshaped the entire Middle East, while opening questions that nobody in Baghdad, Tehran, or Washington has fully answered.
The departure had been agreed in 2024 under President Joe Biden and was carried out by the Trump administration, even as Washington simultaneously wages a broader confrontation against Iran. That timing is not incidental. Tehran has celebrated the exit as a victory for what it calls its “axis of resistance,” the network of armed proxy groups it sponsors across the region. The optics, at minimum, belong to Iran.
A Vacuum That History Warns Against Leaving Unfilled
The pattern is not new, and that is precisely what worries Iraqi security analysts. US forces withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011, and within three years the country was engulfed in a catastrophic war against Islamic State, which at its peak occupied a third of Iraqi territory. American troops returned in 2014 to help Iraqi forces fight that war, a campaign that ran until 2017 and required years of grinding urban combat to undo what the earlier vacuum had allowed.
Jassim al-Bahadli, an Iraqi analyst who advises the country’s security forces, put the risk plainly. “The lesson from the past two decades is that security vacuums can be extremely dangerous,” he told reporters. The concern is not abstract. Islamic State was militarily defeated but never dismantled. Its fighters retain a sleeper cell network across Iraq, and the group has shown repeatedly that it can reconstitute when pressure eases and intelligence coverage thins.
That intelligence coverage is precisely what the US provided. American forces gave Iraqi security services critical information on Islamic State movements, aerial surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that Iraq’s own military cannot yet replicate independently. Retired Iraqi Army General Mohammed al-Jubouri, who commanded a brigade during the war against Islamic State, framed the stakes bluntly. “The most important question now is whether Iraq’s security institutions have prepared a viable Plan B for the post-coalition phase,” he said. His worst-case scenario is pointed: Islamic State acquiring armed drones or improvised explosive drones at a moment when Iraq still lacks adequate air defence systems to counter them.
Iran’s Proxies Stand to Gain the Most
If Islamic State represents the threat from below, Iranian-backed militias represent the threat from within. Iran has long wielded influence in Iraq through a web of armed factions that operate alongside, and sometimes in competition with, the official Iraqi state. With a Western military presence removed, Baghdad-based political analyst Ahmed Younis argues the more immediate danger is not direct Iranian intervention but the emboldening of those proxy groups.
“What is further concerning is not necessarily direct Iranian intervention, but the possibility that Iran’s proxies will feel increasingly empowered in the absence of a Western military presence,” Younis said. “These groups may attempt to expand their role in shaping state policies and consolidating their presence within key institutions.” That is a description of political capture as much as military threat, and it is the harder problem to solve with any conventional security response.
Iran’s stated strategic goal is the removal of American forces from the entire Middle East. Whether or not Wednesday’s withdrawal advances that goal in a lasting way depends on what comes next inside Iraq, but Tehran’s allies are already treating it as a symbolic win. Seven of the 18 US service members killed in this year’s conflict with Iran died in Iraq, the last an army sergeant who died during a controlled detonation of a drone near Erbil in July. The war with Iran, in other words, was still claiming American lives in Iraq even as the withdrawal was being finalised.
Why This Matters Beyond the Middle East
For Southeast Asian governments and security establishments, the Iraq withdrawal carries lessons worth absorbing. The episode reinforces how difficult it is to build durable security institutions through external sponsorship, and how quickly those institutions can be tested once that sponsorship ends. Malaysia and Singapore both maintain active counterterrorism cooperation frameworks, and both have tracked the movement of Islamic State-linked fighters through the region since the group’s territorial collapse in 2017. A reinvigorated Islamic State, even one operating primarily in Iraq and Syria, would add pressure to those monitoring efforts.
More broadly, the withdrawal adds to a pattern of American strategic retrenchment that regional governments are already calculating into their foreign policy positions. The abrupt end to the Afghanistan mission in 2021 was the most visible example. Iraq is a quieter exit but carries the same underlying message about the limits of American commitment to long-term ground presence in complex conflicts.
The withdrawal is broadly popular among ordinary Iraqis, who have lived under foreign military occupation for most of the past two decades. That popular sentiment is legitimate and should not be dismissed. But popularity and strategic wisdom are not the same thing, and the security officials who worry about what comes next are not wrong to do so. Iraq has been here before, and the last time it left a vacuum unfilled, the consequences took years and thousands of lives to reverse. Whether Baghdad has genuinely built the capacity to prevent a repeat is the question that will define the next chapter of this long, unresolved story.
Read More: A NYT Executive Shot Dead in a Car Park, Allegedly by His Own In-Laws
