On October 1, 2026, Iraq will celebrate what it calls Independence Day — four public holidays marking the departure of the last 2,500 US troops and the formal end of the 12-year Operation Inherent Resolve mission against ISIS. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi framed it as the completion of national sovereignty. The reality is messier. Baghdad originally tied the US withdrawal to disarming Iraq's constellation of armed militias and folding them into state security forces. That condition has now been quietly decoupled from the withdrawal and pushed to a new deadline of June 30, 2027, with a 90-day ceasefire window and a graduated weapons-handover plan that the most powerful groups have already rejected. The three hardest-line militias — Kata'ib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada — have given no indication they will surrender weapons or integrate into Iraq's armed forces. These are Iran-backed organizations with deep ties to Iraq's political landscape, a fragmentation that has persisted since the 2003 US invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. Renad Mansour of Chatham House predicts that even by next year, many armed groups will remain free of central government control. The disarmament deadline extension surprised no one who watches Iraq closely. The withdrawal creates immediate security exposure for Iraq's minorities and the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region. US air defense systems are leaving Erbil, the Kurdish capital, which has been targeted hundreds of times by Iran and Iran-backed Iraqi militias. Kurdish Prime Minister Masrour Barzani has already called on Baghdad for protection. On Monday, three drones struck a camp affiliated with Iran's Kurdish opposition near Erbil — local officials said the drones were Iranian-made, though responsibility was not independently confirmed. Since the US-Israeli war with Iran began in February, attacks on US-linked targets in Erbil by Iraq's Iran-backed groups have increased. The US departure does not mean the end of all foreign military presence. Turkey still maintains troops in northern Iraq, though Ankara said this week it would gradually hand over a military base to Baghdad. The more consequential shift is in the nature of the US-Iraq relationship itself. Both sides are framing this as a transition from a security-focused relationship to one centered on economic ties and commercial cooperation. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with al-Zaidi in July and spoke of mutually beneficial commercial and defense cooperation — but added the caveat that a normal bilateral defense relationship requires a secure environment free from terrorist coercion. Al-Zaidi's core political problem is positioning. He needs to demonstrate sovereignty to domestic audiences while convincing Washington that Iraq is not drifting into Iran's orbit. This balancing act grows harder as the US and Israel remain at war with Iran, and Iran-backed militias operate freely on Iraqi soil. The withdrawal gives al-Zaidi a sovereignty narrative, but the militia question — the structural one — remains unanswered. Yerevan Saeed of the Atlantic Council warns that vulnerable communities — Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds — lose a security buffer on October 1. The US military presence was never solely about fighting ISIS; it was a tripwire that constrained the behavior of armed groups and regional actors. With that tripwire removed and disarmament deferred, the leverage dynamics inside Iraq shift toward whoever has the most guns and the least accountability to Baghdad. The 20-year arc of US involvement in Iraq — invasion in 2003, withdrawal in 2011, return in 2014, final withdrawal in 2026 — ends not with resolution but with deferral. The ISIS territorial threat is gone. The militia fragmentation that ISIS exploited is not. Baghdad has bought itself nine months to solve a problem that eight years of war and two decades of political fragmentation created. The deadline will almost certainly slip again.
