Fallout from the 2020 Baghdad International Airport Airstrike

The Iraqi parliament in an emergency session has reportedly passed a law bringing to an end agreements made four years ago allowing US troops to use Iraqi soil as a base, ostensibly for fighting ISIL. This is a result of the missile strike of 3rd January 2020 that hit a convoy near Baghdad International Airport, killing Iranian Major general Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (Popular Mobilization Forces leader). The US admitted responsibility, indeed boasted about it, shortly afterwards.

Only two weeks ago, talks were ongoing on continuing collaboration in this area between the US and Iraq to prevent the resurgence of ISIL. All that has changed with the assassination.  It is notable that the press announcement ends 'His Excellency also warned that taking unilateral decisions will have negative reactions that are difficult to control and threaten the security, sovereignty, and independence of Iraq'. Apparently, Washington did not understand what that means.

Now (well after the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq after the 2003 invasion), US troops seem likely to be ordered to leave Iraq in the near future, and America is banned from using Iraqi soil and airspace to launch attacks on another country in the region (Syria too). This comes after the Iraqi prime minister Prime Minister Adil Abdl Mahdi read a statement that the US had persuaded Iraq to mediate with Iran. The Iraq PM asked Soleimani to come and talk to him about the current position, and Washington treacherously assassinated the envoy at the airport. Rather like in the same region in the second decade of the thirteenth century, the Khwarezmids murdered the Mongol envoys and a little further to the west, Athenian and Spartans murdered Persian envoys. It ended badly for them, too.

The Iraqis are apparently furious that the US abused their position as guests to mount an attack on a man on a diplomatic mission from a neighbouring country on Iraqi soil from one of their bases within Iraq, and justifiably worried that there will be Iraqi civilian casualties from any attack on US personnel now in Iraq.

But, though this is not the most important right now, the Americans should be prevented from removing from Iraq the 28 year old Iraqi citizen Nisreen Assad Ibrahim Bahar (aka Umm Sayyaf), who they are believed to still be holding and who they have charged in the USA (Virginia). Neither should the retreating American forces be allowed to remove or destroy any of the material and documentation seized in the illegal May 2015 Abu Sayyaf raid in Syria. This was also launched from one of the US Iraqi bases, when US military killed her husband and kidnapped her. She was initially released to the Kurds, but since the Kurdish region was abandoned by the US late last year and parts of it overrun by Turkey (in the process of which former ISIL members held prisoner were allowed to escape), her present whereabouts is unclear. I think the 'documentation' that was said to have been seized, and purports to show how the ISIL-run antiquities trade worked, are fakes. I think we'd have better chance of finding out more about this trade if the documents are not hidden away by sneaky Washington in some closed secret archives.

Iraq is now going to try to tackle the task of preventing the resurgence of ISIL without the help of the international coalition (there are British and Polish troops there too affected by this) that has shown itself unworthy of the trust put in them. Since there are a number of former members that had been imprisoned now walking free (also because of the US treacherously abusing agreements with former allies) and we suspect there are the financial resources still in ISIL hands (including, but not only, unsold antiquities), there is a real danger that ISIL, or some offshoot of it will indeed rise up again in the region.