Iraq navigates post-occupation sovereignty amid competing regional powers after 20-year US military presence
Original framing: “US forces exit Iraq, emboldening Iran's proxies and Islamic State - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Iraqi tribal confederations (ashira) and religious authorities (marja'iyya) in Najaf have historically mediated between foreign powers and local populations, issuing fatwas against both ISIS and foreign occupation. The 2014 fatwa by Ayatollah Sistani for 'defensive jihad' mobilized volunteers who became the Popular Mobilization Forces — not Iranian creations but Iraqi responses to state collapse. Contemporary Iraqi youth movements (Tishreen, 2019) explicitly rejected both US and Iranian tutelage, demanding 'homeland' (watan) over sectarian quota systems (muhasasa) imposed by the 2003 occupation architecture.
The Reuters headline reproduces the founding myth of the 2003 occupation: that US military power is the ordering principle of Iraqi reality.
In truth, every actor the framing treats as an external disruptor — Iranian-backed militias, ISIS, Turkish incursions — was midwifed by US policy choices: de-Ba'athification created the Shia militia vacuum; Camp Bucca incubated ISIS leadership; the 2005 constitution's muhasasa system institutionalized sectarian warlordism. Iraqi agency appears only as a void. The systemic insight is that Iraq's stability requires not a US security umbrella but the dismantling of the occupation's constitutional and security architecture — a process Iraqis have demanded since 2019, and which regional powers (Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Gulf states) now have convergent interests in supporting, provided it proceeds without US veto power. The trickster's lesson: the 'withdrawal' that 'emboldens enemies' is the same withdrawal Iraq's parliament voted for, Iraq's youth protested for, and Iraq's religious authorities blessed. The headline's causality is inverted; the occupation was the emboldening.