How many troops have withdrawn from iraq

Trump added to the perception of a growing split with Pentagon leaders when he said on Monday that they want to fight wars to boost the profits of defense companies.

Trump has been trying to make the case that he has fulfilled the promises he made four years ago as he campaigns for a second term. In June, McKenzie announced that the number of U. On Wednesday he spoke confidently, however, about conditions in Iraq and the outlook for stability there. McKenzie said the remaining U. Although Trump has talked of withdrawing completely from Iraq, Pentagon officials have cautioned that a U.

Trump aides have faulted the Obama administration for having pulled out of Iraq too soon in but say the time is now right. Tensions spiked between the U. US troops have been in Iraq since , when around , American soldiers arrived in March of that year, ostensibly to destroy "weapons of mass destruction. After President Barack Obama took office in with promises to pull out of Iraq, numbers began to fall steadily. And US troops have supposedly been "transitioning to an advisory role" for years now, as foreign policy observers have pointed out on Twitter.

The same sort of language was being used as far back as and Unable to mount a significant defense at first, the Iraqi army and Iraqi Kurdish forces were heavily dependent on US aerial strikes to fend off the extremists. Around 5, US soldiers were in the country at that stage. The IS extremists have since been more or less defeated, so this number has steadily reduced. Late last year President Trump decreased the total to 2, As for ordinary Iraqis themselves, Monday's purely political agreement is unlikely to change much for them.

Once-ubiquitous American checkpoints have long gone. Now, city checkpoints are mostly manned by Iraqis, soldiers or members of the PMF. And other than hearing about US drone or aerial strikes, most ordinary Iraqis haven't seen an American soldier in the flesh for years.

Drone attacks are causing a crisis in the Mideast and experts are calling for a better regulatory regime. But would more rules even have an impact in the region? The Pentagon refused to say where the technology is being relocated. Visit the new DW website Take a look at the beta version of dw. Go to the new dw. More info OK. Wrong language? Change it here DW. COM has chosen English as your language setting. COM in 30 languages. However, they returned at the request of the Iraqi government three years later, when IS militants overran large parts of the country.

Following the military defeat of IS in Iraq at the end of , US forces remained to help prevent a resurgence of the group. The political situation in Iraq is more acceptable to the country's competing ethnic groups than it was in The US-led coalition has spent a lot of time and effort in training up Iraq's counter-insurgency forces, and the IS leadership currently appears to be more focused on exploiting the ungoverned spaces in Africa and Afghanistan, our correspondent adds.

Ever since Iran's Islamic Revolution in it has been trying to evict US forces from its neighbourhood and become the premier power in the region. It has had little success in the Arab Gulf states where mistrust of Tehran runs deep and where the US military has facilities in all six countries.

But the US-led toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq removed the most effective obstacle to Iranian expansion, and Tehran has not passed up on the opportunity since then. It has successfully inserted its Shia militias into the fabric of Iraq's security establishment, and its allies have a powerful voice in parliament. Syria's civil war has opened the door for a major Iranian military presence there, while next door in Lebanon Iran's ally Hezbollah has become the most potent force in the country.

Iran is playing the long game.