Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has welcomed the US withdrawal from Iraq, adding that the Americans should also leave all other countries in the region.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that the last American troops had departed from Iraq after being there for 23 years.
In its statement yesterday dedicated to the US pullout, the IRGC said that it “congratulates the proud nation of Iraq… and the revolutionary fighters of the Islamic world on this historic victory.”
The US lost a total of 4,419 troops in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. The Watson Institute at Brown University has estimated that the invasion cost American taxpayers some $2.8 trillion dollars. “These figures show America’s heavy and disgraceful defeat,” the IRGC statement read.
The Guard insisted that “America’s presence not only brought no security, but was itself the source of insecurity, terrorism and instability in West Asia.”
The US invaded Iraq in 2003, toppling the country’s longtime leader Saddam Hussein, and than carried out smaller-scale operations against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), which emerged in 2014 out of the chaos created by the American interference. According to some estimates, over a million Iraqi civilians lost their lives during the period, with millions more displaced.
“It can be firmly said that America’s expulsion from Iraq is the prelude to its expulsion from all of West Asia… America must leave the region and leave security management to the peoples themselves,” it said.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said on Wednesday that the US withdrawal signaled the beginning of a “new phase, one defined by Iraq’s sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision-making, and balanced partnerships with its friends.”
In a post on his Truth Social platform on the same day, US President Donald Trump described the American involvement in Iraq as “a very expensive excursion into Hell.” Its conclusion is a win for both Washington and Baghdad, he claimed.
It was “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place,” Trump said.
The invasion of Iraq was launched under the administration of then President George W. Bush over accusations the country’s longtime leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which were never substantiated by Washington.
Trump himself initiated a conflict with Iran in late February on the pretext of preventing it from obtaining a nuclear bomb, despite claiming the previous June that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by US-Israeli strikes. Tehran has repeatedly insisted that it is not working on a weapon.
Washington’s position in the Middle East has been dealt a blow during the Iran war, as Tehran has damaged or outright destroyed key US radar, communications, and other military infrastructure at bases in Gulf nations, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and others.
The Pentagon is now considering whether to reduce the US military footprint in the region after the Iran war ends, the Washington Post reported in August, citing anonymous officials. Diplomatic efforts to settle the crisis currently remain in a stalemate.
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