"You're not going to see a full American withdrawal from Iraq,” Douglas Silliman told Rudaw’s Bestoon Khalid on August 11.
The United States is ending its 20-year war in Afghanistan, aiming to complete its evacuation of US forces and Afghan personnel who worked with Western allies by the end of August. As the US pulled out, the Taliban quickly took over. Iraqis watching events in Afghanistan wonder if they’ll see similar things at home, where American troops are under pressure from Iranian-backed militias to leave the country.
Silliman said that the situation is different between Iraq and Afghanistan. "Iraq, for the United States, is a much more strategically important country. It is the crossroads between Europe, Asia, and Africa," he explained. "Stability in Iraq creates stability in the rest of the region."
He believes the current administration in Washington under President Joe Biden will have a more balanced policy on Iraq than that of former President Donald Trump.
"The Trump administration's policy toward Iraq was very much focused on putting additional pressure on Iran, and there was much less of an independent American policy dealing with Iraq or Iraqi issues," the former ambassador said. "President Biden, who really had charge of the Iraq file when he was vice president under Barack Obama, knows a lot more about Iraq, and has a lot of ideas about having an independent Iraq policy, or an Iraq policy that is not simply a subset of its Iran policy."
By the end of this year, the US will no longer be focused on combat operations in Iraq, the remaining troops in the country will formally shift focus to training and assisting Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
"After the departure of US combat forces, there will still be American military trainers, advisors, there will continue to be American military assistance to the Iraqi army, counter-terrorism services, the navy, the air force, the Peshmerga, and this is not going to change," Silliman said.
The end of the combat mission was agreed as part of US-Iraq strategic talks. US President Joe Biden received Iraqi PM Mustafa al-Kadhimi in late July, announcing that the combat mission in Iraq will be over by the end of the year.
Silliman downplayed the significance of a US shift in mission, explaining that "American soldiers play very little of a combat role now in the fight against Daesh [Islamic State, ISIS]," adding that "most combat forces left in 2017 and 2018 after the real defeat of Daesh."
When asked whether ISIS may resurge, he said that US combat troops withdrawing "might in the short-term lead to an increase in attacks by Daesh in areas that they felt they could not attack if there was a little bit more American support," but he noted that the reality is the Iraqi army and the Peshmerga have been the ones carrying the burden of the fight against ISIS.
ISIS seized control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The last of its so-called caliphate was defeated in Syria in 2019, but the group remains a threat on both sides of the border.
The former ambassador also discussed Iraq’s economy, saying, "Developing the Iraqi economy, and helping diversify that economy and link it with the rest of the world will be as important for the future of Iraq as will the security situation itself."
Iraq's GDP contracted by 11 percent in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It will take until 2024 to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, the IMF predicts, and that rebound is dependent on the government making "wide-ranging structural reforms."
In October, the United Nations and World Bank predicted Iraq's poverty rate would rise from 2017-2018 figures of 20 percent to just over 31 percent in 2020. The provinces of the Kurdistan Region are among the better off in Iraq, but they are not immune to rising poverty.
