US and Iraqi officials will launch a bilateral working group in the coming days to discuss the future of the roughly 2,500 US troops in Iraq, which have become a point of contention after clashes in the Middle Eastern country with Iranian-backed militias.
The Pentagon announced Thursday that meetings of the US-Iraqi Supreme Military Committee will begin soon as part of a planned process the two countries committed to last August, which is not linked to recent tensions with Iranian-backed militias.
During the talks, representatives will discuss how the war against the Islamic extremist group ISIS can move to a new phase, based on the current threat posed by ISIS and the capabilities of Iraqi security forces trained by US forces, along with operational requirements.
“Expert working groups of military and defense professionals will study these three factors and advise HMC on the most effective development of the coalition’s mission against ISIS, ensuring ISIS never re-emerges,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.
A senior US defense official said the two sides were committed to “carefully reviewing the timing issue and ensuring that HMC is a comprehensive, effective, and professional process.”
“We will continue this strong security partnership to advance our shared goals and interests. Hamad Medical Corporation will help us determine what form this partnership will take,” the official said. “Iraq’s stability and sovereignty are essential to regional peace and security,” the official said.
While Washington and Baghdad have held previous bilateral talks, the discussions saw renewed importance after war broke out between Israel and Hamas in October, with the United States now fighting Iranian-backed militia groups across the Middle East.
In Iraq, the clashes raised great concerns among the government. Iraqi Prime Minister Muhammad Shiaa Al-Sudani condemned the strikes launched by Iran and the United States on his country this month.
Sudanese Wednesday He said during a national security meeting He said that the recent attacks in Iraq “constitute a blatant violation of Iraqi sovereignty.”
He also stressed “the necessity of taking all necessary political, diplomatic and security measures to protect Iraq’s sovereignty and maintain its security.”
The United States is in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government to train and assist local forces to fight ISIS. The government first asked Washington for help in the fight against ISIS in 2014 after the group came to power in Iraq.
If Iraq asks its forces to leave, the United States will have no choice but to leave without severing the relationship with Baghdad.
Iraq says it now has the ability to deter ISIS, which has been largely defeated since it invaded Iraq in the mid-2000s. But the group still maintains sleeper cells and was responsible for a deadly bombing in neighboring Iran this month that killed dozens.
A senior US Defense Department official said that ISIS no longer poses a significant threat to the region and is largely “suppressed”, but the official stressed that it was necessary to ensure Iraq maintained the capabilities necessary to continue suppressing them.
“They are in complex mountainous terrain and environments, or in some less controlled areas in the desert in Syria or in some places in central Iraq,” the official said of ISIS fighters. He added, “The forces are constantly working with their intelligence platforms to detect and track these small ISIS cells.”
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