The departure of foreign coalition troops from Iraq is picking up pace as the September 30 deadline for their withdrawal approaches, a government spokesman said on Thursday.
“We are witnessing an acceleration in the process of the withdrawal of the international coalition forces, in high-level co-ordination with the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces,” Sabah Al Numan, military spokesman for Prime Minister Ali Al Zaidi, said at a press conference in Baghdad.
Mr Al Zaidi has made meeting the deadline for the withdrawal of the US-led global anti-ISIS coalition one of his main goals since taking office in May, declaring this month that it was “fixed and final”.
Mr Al Numan said September 30, which Mr Al Zaidi also set as the deadline for non-state Iraqi armed groups to surrender their weapons, would be “an Iraqi national celebration and the completion of Iraqi sovereignty”. Officials in Baghdad have said the end of the foreign anti-ISIS mission marked a transition to a new chapter.
“It is a national day on which sovereignty will be fulfilled, and we will move from the umbrella of the multinational coalition to the principle of sustainable relations, while preserving the supreme interests of Iraq as the highest priority,” the spokesman said.
Mr Al Numan was speaking a day after Germany ended its military advisory mission in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. The last German troops left regional capital, Erbil, on Wednesday.
“The German forces … represented an essential part of the international coalition, where their tasks focused on training Iraqi forces and Peshmerga forces, armament programmes, in addition to the role in aerial reconnaissance operations,” Mr Al Numan said.
He said the site used by coalition forces near the Erbil International Airport would be handed over to the relevant authorities, while other military bases would given to the Peshmerga – the Kurdish region's security forces.
Foreign forces have been present in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein and prompted years of sectarian conflict. The US military presence grew to more than 170,000 troops during the peak of Iraq's civil war in 2007. All US combat forces were withdrawn by 2011, but returned in 2014 as part of the anti-ISIS coalition after the extremist group seized large areas Iraq and Syria.
Iraq declared victory over ISIS in 2017, two years before the group was defeated in Syria. Iraq and the US agreed to wind up the smaller US-led operations against the remnants of ISIS in 2024. By last year, US troops had mostly pulled out of Iraqi federal areas but maintained a presence in the Kurdish region.
Bases hosting US troops in the Kurdish region have regularly come under attack since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 28.
