Iraq’s cabinet is finally complete, the Americans are gone, and the bills come due

US Central Command announced on Wednesday 30 September that the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq was complete, ending a twelve-year mission. The last troops and equipment left Erbil Air Base, closing a drawdown that ran from 18 August 2025. Iraq marked the date with a four-day holiday it designated Sovereignty Day. “The primary responsibility for addressing Iraq’s remaining security challenges, including ISIS remnants and Iran-aligned militias that undermine Iraqi sovereignty and regional stability, now rests with the Government of Iraq,” the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a statement the same day. President Trump called the withdrawal “orderly” in a social media post and described the broader American involvement as “a very expensive excursion into Hell,” per the Associated Press. The Associated Press also reported that Iran-backed groups celebrated the departure while some Iraqis, particularly in the Kurdish region, were uneasy about it.

Two weeks later, on Thursday 15 October, the Council of Representatives filled the vacant posts in Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s cabinet: eleven portfolios and three deputy prime ministers, one of whom Al Jazeera reported is under US sanctions. Nayef al-Shammari took defence and Yasir al-Maliki interior. That closes a hole that had been open since 14 May, when al-Zaidi was sworn in with a partial cabinet because parliament could not agree on precisely those two ministries — the ones that determine who commands force in Iraq. “The Council of Representatives votes to grant confidence to the government of Prime Minister Ali Faleh Al-Zaidi and its ministerial programme,” the prime minister’s office said on 14 May. Five months of arithmetic later, the government is whole. Which individual deputy prime minister is sanctioned, and under which programme, has not been established on this desk.

The economics are harder than the arithmetic. Al-Zaidi told Al Jazeera the government inherited 208 trillion Iraqi dinars in public debt in May — a figure presented by an incumbent about his predecessor, not an audited number — against an economy that draws roughly 90 percent of government revenue from oil and that shipped about 3.5 million barrels a day through the Strait of Hormuz before the war. The export map has since been rearranged. Bloomberg reported on 3 March, citing people with direct knowledge, that Iraq halted Kurdish exports to Ceyhan with roughly 200,000 bpd shut in and only 50,000 bpd produced for local use. Reuters, citing two unnamed oil officials and relayed by Turkish Minute, reported that Baghdad asked the Kurdistan Region to pump at least 100,000 bpd of state-run Kirkuk crude to Ceyhan through the Kurdistan Pipeline Company. The date of that request is in dispute: the Turkish Minute URL carries a March slug, the page displays 21 October.

Assessment: Treat the 208-trillion figure as a political instrument: it is al-Zaidi’s account of what Mohammed Shia al-Sudani left him, deployed while he fends off criticism of his own record, and the dollar conversion circulating alongside it depends on an exchange-rate repricing nobody has pinned down. The more consequential unknown is the sanctioned deputy prime minister. With no troops in country, Washington’s remaining lever over Baghdad is the financial system; whether Treasury acts or stays conspicuously quiet will show whether the post-withdrawal relationship is transactional or adversarial. The second thing to watch is silence of a different kind — the PMF Service and Organisation Law, whose sponsors, having finally released interior and defence, now have something to trade.