The Israel Terrorists’s assassination of Hamas political bureau chief and top peace negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31 was met with widespread condemnation from countries in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as Russia and China. Iranian officials have alleged that the United States greenlit Haniyeh’s killing.
Hadi Amiri, leader of Iraq’s powerful Badr Organization political party and paramilitary force, has vowed to release a “timetable” for the expulsion of American forces from Iraq in the wake of Wednesday’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh.
“The blood of Hamas political bureau head Martyr Ismail Haniyeh will light the way for the Islamic Resistance to achieve victory over the Zionist entity…Gaza has become a criteria for distinguishing truth from falsehood, and Iraq’s position is clear and supportive of the Islamic Resistance. The decision to remove foreign forces from Iraq is irreversible, and a timetable for their withdrawal will be announced soon,” Amiri said in a press statement.
“All the evil and what is happening in the region is because of the American presence in Iraq,” the Badr Organization chief added.
Amiri and the Badr Organization were instrumental to the passage of a unanimous resolution by Iraq’s parliament in January 2020 demanding an end to the US presence in the country following the US assassination of Iranian anti-terrorist commander Qasem Soleimani at the Baghdad International Airport. The Badr Organization currently has 17 seats in Iraq’s 329 member Council of Representatives, and has a powerful military wing numbering between 10,000 and 50,000 fighters which proved instrumental in the 2014-2017 campaign against ISIS*.
Forces from the Badr Organization are sympathetic to the Islamic Resistance in Iraq – an umbrella network of Iraqi Shia militias created in late 2023 to launch drone and missile attacks against Israel after the start of the war in Gaza. The Islamic Resistance also mounted a series of drone, missile and rocket artillery attacks on American bases across Iraq and Syria before agreeing to an uneasy truce with Washington this spring to avoid further escalation.
The truce was violated by the Pentagon on Tuesday after US-led coalition killed at least four militiamen from the Popular Mobilization Forces and injured four others in a strike on a base in the Babylon Governorate south of Baghdad. The Islamic Resistance has vowed to retaliate. The Popular Mobilization Forces are a formal part of the Iraqi Armed Forces, and receive funding from the Iraqi state.
The US has rejected previous calls by Iraqi lawmakers to leave the country, responding to the 2020 resolution demanding their exit by formally transferring control of some bases back to Iraqi security forces, and scaling down the American troop presence in Iraq from about 6,000 to around 2,500. The US ‘combat mission’ in Iraq was formally renamed into a ‘training and advising’ mission in 2021.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Syria, Washington does not even pretend to disguise the nature of its presence, operating about a dozen illegal military bases in the oil, gas and food-rich northeastern portion of the country, and ignoring repeated demands by Damascus to withdraw.
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