Foreign drones over Kurdistan as Washington closes out a twenty-three-year military presence
A drone struck an Iranian Kurdish opposition party in northern Iraq at 4:50am on 7 September. Baghdad, three weeks from declaring sole control of Iraqi territory, said nothing publicly.
The withdrawal itself is the best-confirmed thing on this desk. A US official told the Associated Press on 12 August that Washington expects to complete its pullout by 30 September, but declined to say how many troops remain in Iraq or where they would be redeployed. The Washington Post, datelined Baghdad the same day, reported the military was on track to remove all its forces by the end of September, ending a presence that began in 2003; the Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker records Trump announcing the end of a twenty-three-year deployment. Al Jazeera reported that US troops left bases in most of Iraq last year and retained a presence in the Kurdistan region. Ain al-Asad airbase was vacated by mid-January, CENTCOM sources told Fox News, with an unnamed US official arguing ISIS in Iraq no longer exceeds Iraqi capacity.
What Baghdad inherits is a territory other states are still operating over. FDD’s Long War Journal reported that on 7 September a drone struck the Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan party in the Kurdistan Region at 4:50am, according to Komala official Amjad Hussein Panahi; attribution of the launch to Iran is the party’s and FDD’s, with no CENTCOM or KRG statement in hand. On 1 September the IRGC claimed a combined missile and drone attack on US facilities in Erbil province, saying it destroyed a repair centre and warehouses and set fuel tanks alight — damage claimed by Tehran and unconfirmed by Washington. In May, unnamed US officials told the Wall Street Journal that Israel had covertly run a base on Iraqi soil and killed an Iraqi soldier, prompting a complaint to the United Nations.
Assessment: The asymmetry is the story: the departure is verifiable and the sovereignty it is supposed to restore is not. Every strike on Iraqi soil this month has been claimed by its author or by the victim, never confirmed by the state that owns the ground — which is itself a measure of what the federal government can observe and enforce. Treat the FDD figure of more than 1,000 drone and missile attacks on the Kurdistan Region with care: no date range or method is given, and a four-figure cumulative count without a baseline is rhetoric, not data. After 30 September there will be no coalition to blame and no coalition to shelter behind.