Regime change in Syria has Iraqi factions backtracking on push for US withdrawal

BAGHDAD — The fall of Bashar Assad in Syria has led Iran-allied factions in neighboring Iraq to reconsider their push for U.S. forces to exit the country, multiple Iraqi and American officials told The Associated Press. A high-ranking official in Iraq’s National Security Service said that in a meeting with the Iraqi government, his agency had made the argument that “it is not in Iraq’s interest to request the withdrawal of the US and the international coalition from Iraq at the present time.” “The loud voices that were previously talking about the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq have decreased significantly,” he said. “I expect that there will be no withdrawal this year by the Americans.” A senior U.S. defense official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said that since the fall of Assad in Syria, Iraqi government officials have asked “informally at the highest of levels” to delay the end of the mission in Iraq of an American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Iraqi government spokesperson Bassim al-Awadi said Friday that the “time frames between Iraq and the international coalition have not changed” and that meetings between Iraq and coalition officials are ongoing. Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London, said that while there wasn’t “active coordination” between the U.S. forces and PMF at the time “they were fighting the same war on the same side against the same enemy.” During the war in Gaza, some of the groups that make up the PMF launched drone attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.