A policeman is killed near Kirkuk as Baghdad insists Iraqi forces can hold the line alone

The US military announced on Wednesday 30 September that it had completed the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq, ending a twelve-year mission against Islamic State, as reported by the Associated Press from Baghdad and by Al Jazeera. The last departure was from Erbil Air Base, the main operational hub for Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which had hosted most of the roughly 1,500 American and coalition personnel still in the country; the US troop level had stood at about 2,500 for years before the drawdown, against a peak of some 170,000 in 2007. CENTCOM described an orderly withdrawal. President Trump, writing on his own platform, called the deployment a “very expensive excursion into Hell.” The prior milestone was Ain al-Asad in Anbar, handed to the Iraqi army on 17 January 2026 — a year after it was reported that at least 250 US troops would remain there.

On 6 October an Iraqi police officer was killed in an attack near Kirkuk, carried out with semi-automatic machine guns and sniper fire. Islamic State claimed responsibility; Reuters carried the claim, which has not been independently established. The National, reporting the killing the same day, noted that since the group’s territorial defeat in late 2017 its remnants have operated as small cells in remote desert and valley terrain, and that clashes in or near urban areas are unusual. On 8 October Asharq Al-Awsat’s Baghdad correspondent Hamza Mustafa reported Iraqi officials warning of an Islamic State resurgence after attacks north of Baghdad. The Files could not retrieve the body of that report and therefore cannot name the official, the locations or the casualties.

Assessment: Two things are being counted here and they are not the same thing. One is incidents; the other is the willingness of Iraqi officials to describe incidents as a trend. The second changed this week, nine days after the Americans left, and it changes for reasons that are political as much as forensic: the al-Zaidi government and the Coordination Framework hold that Iraqi forces can secure the country alone, while some Sunni and Kurdish politicians dispute it, so every dead policeman is immediately an argument. Distrust the word resurgence until someone publishes a monthly series from a specialist tracker. Distrust equally the flat claim that all US forces have gone: whether any residual, liaison or contractor presence survives in the Kurdistan Region is unresolved, and CENTCOM announced a completion rather than demonstrating one.