ILLUSTRATIVE IMAGE
On April 7, forces of the US-led coalition in Iraq handed over a headquarters of French advisers in Baghdad to Iraqi security forces.
Yehia Rasool, a spokesperson of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, said in a statement that the handover of the coalition’s site came after “fruitful dialogue” between US-led coalition forces and the Iraqi government.
Rasool did not name the site, but according to local media the coalition withdrew a detachment of French advisers from a military base in Baghdad’s western suburb of Abu Ghraib.
The Abu Ghraib base became the fifth military base of the US-led coalition in Iraq that has been abandoned by US-led forces. The previous ones were of al-Qaim and al-Habbaniyah in western Iraq, and al-Qayyara and K1 in the north.
On January 5, the Iraqi Parliament passed a resolution requiring the Iraqi government to put an end to the presence of US-led coalition forces in Iraq. This happened two days after a U.S. drone strike on a convoy at Baghdad airport, which killed Qassem Soleimani, former commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolution Guards Corps and several other prominent Iranian and Iraqi commanders.
There are over 5,000 U.S. troops deployed in Iraq in the framework of the US ‘effort against ISIS’ in the Middle East. Local soruces claim that the US is just using the ISIS threat as a pretext to continue its operations in the area.
