Iraq Marks 'Sovereignty Days' as US Troops Exit, Setting Up Showdown With Militia Fatigues

BAGHDAD — Iraq is preparing to mark four "Sovereignty Days," a national holiday timed to the complete departure of US troops from the country after more than two decades of foreign military intervention. The withdrawal deadline falls on Wednesday and clears out the last few hundred American soldiers, who have remained in the Iraqi theatre primarily in advisory roles supporting a coalition campaign against ISIL that was first launched in 2015.

The symbolism of the moment is difficult to overstate. For a country that spent years after 2003 defined by the presence of foreign armies, the end of the US mission represents a formal closing of one era and the opening of another — one in which Baghdad, not Washington, will set the terms of its own security.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi did not design the exit, but he has moved quickly to make it serve a broader project: the reassertion of Iraqi state authority. That vision extends to accelerating efforts to bring all militias under state control by June 2027, a deadline he has pushed back from an initial target of September 30, 2026. The campaign covers some of the most powerful armed groups in the country, including several pro-Iran factions that have fired across the region during the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, al-Zaidi said his government was "striving to ensure that the state is the ultimate decision-maker in matters of peace and war, and that weapons and tools of power remain in the hands of its constitutional institutions." He added that with the coalition's mission ending, relations with strategic partners are entering "a new phase, moving from military cooperation to economic and development cooperation in service of our common interests."

Analysts say the sequencing is deliberate. Douglas Silliman, a former US ambassador to Iraq and Kuwait who now heads the Arab Gulf States Institute, said the US exit appears to be part of a strategy by al-Zaidi to "politically weaken" influential militias, including those linked to Tehran.

The logic runs as follows: those groups have long justified their weapons stockpiles and separate chains of command by pointing to the presence of US troops — and of other foreign actors such as Turkiye. Remove that external foil, and the political case for retaining independent armed power becomes far harder to make to an Iraqi public. Some of the militias have already signalled that they will refuse to surrender their arms.

That is why the timing matters so much. The move opens the door to greater Iranian influence inside Iraq and, in Silliman's words, leaves room for a potentially catastrophic domestic confrontation further down the road. It also creates the possibility of increased pressure from Washington on Baghdad if Iraq-based groups continue to strike US assets and interests.

"It's going to be a very difficult series of decisions," Silliman said. "Both for the militias and for Prime Minister al-Zaidi and his defence team."

Despite the surrounding wars, Iraq has been comparatively stable in recent years, a record that has largely held since ISIL's territorial defeat in 2017. That stability has persisted through the US troop withdrawal that began in 2020 under President Donald Trump, with the remaining military personnel consolidated at an airbase in Erbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, at the end of 2025.

Al-Zaidi has tried to build in safeguards. In addition to extending the weapons-control deadline to June 2027, he told The New York Times earlier this month that both the United States and the Iran-aligned militias have given assurances that they will refrain from launching attacks for 90 days following the withdrawal — an attempt to prevent the situation from spiralling in the immediate term.

That buffer, however, does little to change the underlying direction of travel. Renad Mansour, director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, said militias aligned with Iran's "axis of resistance" remain "in full-on war mode, working with the IRGC in the region," and therefore "will continue to target US and US interests." The 90-day pause, in that reading, is a pause rather than a resolution.

There is also quiet disquiet behind the government's cooperative language with Western partners. Mansour said the anxiety inside Baghdad now is that Washington "might not need Iraq any more, or might, in the worst case, view Iraq as a pariah state, too close to Iran, and therefore another target." He said such pressure could eventually take the form of sanctions, or an escalation of US and Israeli strikes on Iraqi soil.

The regional backdrop has made those fears more concrete. Security personnel were deployed in Baghdad's Tahrir Square this month as Iraq marked the second anniversary of the Israeli strike on Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the departure of US forces is unfolding against a wider cycle of escalation — from Secretary of State Marco Rubio's warnings about the possible "Balkanisation" of Iraq, to Baghdad's own request for an exemption from a ban on Iranian flights.

Mohammad Salih, a non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on Iraq, also agreed that enthusiasm for the US troop withdrawal is understandable, reflecting a widespread Iraqi wish to see an end to two decades of foreign military involvement.

What happens next will test whether that sentiment can survive the harder work that follows. Celebrating sovereignty is straightforward; enforcing it against armed factions operating under foreign command structures is a different proposition — and one Iraq now has little international military support to fall back on.