When the US embassy in Baghdad told all American citizens they should leave Iraq immediately on Saturday, the warning was a clear escalation from the US government’s previous recommendations, which only 24 hours earlier had instructed Americans to keep a “low profile”, but not to evacuate.
The warning said that “Iran and its aligned militias” were posing a “major threat to public safety in Iraq”. It came after Iran-aligned militias had launched numerous attacks on civilian facilities and government buildings owned by the US and its regional allies. The previous night, the US embassy itself had been attacked for the second time in two weeks, and an Iran-backed militia group, Kataib Hezbollah, claimed responsibility.
The shift in tone signalled the growing American anxiety about Iran-aligned armed groups in Iraq, which appear to be trying to open another front for the US to worry about in West Asia, according to experts on Iraq and former officials.
“This is a dramatic tightening of American concern,” said James F. Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Iraq and an expert on West Asia at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. “This is a real concern about losing people, but it is also in line with a larger policy that has recently been accelerated to get the Iraqi government to rein in the militias.”
Myles B. Caggins III, a retired US Army colonel with long experience in the region, said the war in Iran had clearly spilled over into Iraq. Iran-aligned militias have hit American, Emirati, French and Kurdish diplomatic, civilian and military facilities more than 200 times in recent days.
“The US has repeatedly warned Baghdad to get control of these militia groups,” he said.
Iran-backed militias have long operated in Iraq and are part of Tehran’s regional network of armed forces, which include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. In the current war, which started when the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28, the militias have claimed responsibility for attacks on a US military base and a consulate in the northern city of Erbil, in addition to the American embassy in Baghdad.
Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country has struggled to balance its relationship with the US and its precarious ties with its neighbour, Iran, with which it has a long and complex history. (The two countries fought a bitter, eight-year war in the 1980s.) In recent years, Iran’s influence in Iraq has grown.
There are indications that in recent days, the US government has been pressuring Iraq’s government to dismantle the militias. In a telephone call this week, the American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, urged Iraq’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, to take steps to safeguard US diplomatic personnel and buildings from attacks by the militias, according to the state department.
At the same time, Iraqi officials have expressed outrage over a series of attacks in recent days on bases of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, a group of former militias, some with ties to Iran, that now operates under government control. Iraqi security officials have blamed the US for the assaults, claiming the group was being targeted because some of its units maintain ties to Iran-allied militias outside the government.The US military has declined to comment on those allegations.
The bases of Iran-linked militias outside government control have also been struck, in what they called American or Israeli attacks.
Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said recent attacks underscore Washington’s frustration with the Iraqi government’s tolerance of the Iran-aligned militias, as well as the risks facing Americans in Iraq as the spreading US-Israeli war with Iran emboldens them.
“Iran has made clear that it and its proxies want to target the US, putting US citizens in Iraq at risk,” she said.
New York Times News Service