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# The Last U.S. Troops Just Left Iraq. Tehran Is Taking a Victory Lap.
- URL: https://askablackman.me/the-last-u-s-troops-just-left-iraq-tehran-is-taking-a-victory-lap/
- Published: 2026-09-30T16:43:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T16:43:06.000Z
- Description: Twenty-three years after the invasion, America's military chapter in Iraq is closed. It ended quietly, on schedule, in the middle of a war with the country next door that has spent two decades trying to push the U.S. out.
- Author: Free Game News
- Tags: Politics

The last American troops in Iraq boarded their final flights out of Erbil Air Base in the country's northern Kurdish region on Wednesday, and with that, a 23-year American military presence came to an end. There was no ceremony on the U.S. side to speak of, just a statement from U.S. Central Command confirming the pullout agreed to by Washington and Baghdad in 2024 was complete.

The timing deserves a long look. The United States is currently at war with Iran, a conflict that began in late February and has repeatedly spilled into Iraq, where Iran-aligned militias spent months firing on American bases and personnel. NATO pulled its troops out of Iraq back in March because of that war. And still, in July, with the fighting underway, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi flew to Washington and both governments reaffirmed that every remaining American soldier would be gone by September 30\. Al-Zaidi called the date "fixed and final." He kept it.

So what exactly happened here? The official story is success. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the departure "reflects the success of a 12-year campaign that defeated ISIS as an organized military threat in Iraq and across the region," and called it a transition "from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort." That is true as far as it goes. ISIS once held a third of Iraq. It no longer holds meaningful territory.

But consider the scoreboard. Iran has wanted American forces out of Iraq since 2003\. Its parliament's deputy national security chairman, Amir Hayat Moqaddam, welcomed the withdrawal this week and said "lasting security will prevail in Iraq" once the Americans leave the region. Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iran-backed militias, issued a statement celebrating the "expulsion of the occupation forces, defeated" and warned al-Zaidi's government that "any government that does not work for the benefit of the people will be overthrown by all means." The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps marked the occasion by urging Americans to vote out President Trump's allies in Congress. Tehran did not achieve this by force. Washington agreed to it, under President Biden in 2024, and carried it out under Trump even while bombing Iran.

Read one way, the withdrawal is exposure management. Every American soldier in Iraq during this war was a target within range of militia rockets and drones, and pulling them out removes hundreds of potential casualties and hostage scenarios from the board. Read another way, the war's cost now includes the strategic position the U.S. spent two decades, more than 4,500 American lives, and what Brown University's Costs of War project estimates at over $2 trillion in the Iraq and Syria war zone, to build and hold.

The people left holding that position are the Iraqis, and they are not of one mind about it. In Baghdad, the mood leaned toward relief. Ahmed Saleh, a 70-year-old resident, told reporters the withdrawal filled his heart with joy and compared the day to being born again. His hope was pointed: with the Americans gone, the militias should surrender their weapons to the government. "There's nothing left," he said. "Surrender your weapons to the government, and let the government be the one responsible to protect me and you."

In the Kurdish north, the mood is closer to dread. The Kurdish regional government's Peshmerga Ministry says the region absorbed more than 1,000 drone and ballistic missile attacks during the U.S.-Iran conflict, and it is now losing the American air defense systems that blunted them. "The departure of the United States from the Kurdistan Region under these complex regional circumstances, without the provision of a defense system, is a matter of concern," the ministry said. Kurdish commander Sirwan Barzani told Reuters his forces have watched ISIS sleeper cells moving for more than two weeks, energized, in his view, by news of the pullout. Iraqi security officials said a suspected ISIS cell was preparing suicide attacks timed to coincide with the withdrawal.

Iraqis have seen this film before. When U.S. forces left in 2011, the Iraqi army they left behind collapsed in front of ISIS three years later, with soldiers famously abandoning their uniforms and fleeing. That history is why Jassim al-Bahadli, an Iraqi analyst who advises the security forces, offered the bluntest warning of the week: "The lesson from the past two decades is that security vacuums can be extremely dangerous."

The whole arrangement now hinges on disarmament. Baghdad originally tied the end of the American mission to bringing Iraq's armed groups under state control. Al-Zaidi has already pushed that deadline to June 30, 2027, with a 90-day quiet period in which militias refrain from attacks in exchange for assurances the U.S. will not target them. Several smaller groups have agreed to hand over weapons. The hardest-line factions, Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, have given no indication they will comply, and these are the same groups Washington accuses of striking neighbors at Tehran's direction, including a major Saudi oil pipeline hit this month.

America invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein, surged past 170,000 troops by 2007, left in 2011, returned in 2014 when ISIS overran the country, and has now left again, this time by negotiated schedule rather than collapse. Parnell says the U.S. "remains committed to counterterrorism" and will keep working with Iraq. What that commitment means without a single soldier or air defense battery on Iraqi soil is the question the next year will answer.

## Free Game Takeaway

Watch the June 2027 militia disarmament deadline. That date is now the real test of whether this withdrawal ends America's Iraq story or just pauses it. If Kataib Hezbollah and the other hard-line factions keep their weapons past that deadline, or if ISIS attacks spike in the Kurdish north now that U.S. air defenses are gone, pressure will build fast for some form of American return, air support, or strike authority, and the 2011-to-2014 pattern becomes the live scenario. For readers thinking about money and markets, the exposure points are oil and insurance: Iraq is a major crude producer, militias just demonstrated they can hit a Saudi pipeline, and renewed instability in northern Iraq or new militia attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure would move crude prices, shipping costs, and defense sector stocks. The near-term signals to track are militia behavior during the 90-day quiet period, any ISIS-claimed attacks timed to embarrass Baghdad, and whether the U.S. quietly backfills the Kurdish region's air defense gap from bases outside Iraq. A generation paid for this position in blood and roughly two trillion dollars. What replaces it gets decided in the next nine months.