US forces have fully withdrawn from the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq, with the Iraqi army now assuming full control of the strategic facility, Iraqi officials said on Saturday.

The withdrawal came as part of an agreement reached between Washington and Baghdad in 2024 to wind down the US-led military coalition in Iraq by September 2025. Under the agreement, US forces were to depart bases where they had been stationed as part of operations claimed by Washington to be aimed at the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani had previously said that the original agreement called for a full US pullout from Ain al-Asad by September 2025. The United States, however, delayed the full withdrawal, citing, what it called, developments in neighboring Syria.

Iraqi Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Abdul Amir Rashid Yarallah visited the base on Saturday to oversee the reassignment of duties and responsibilities to Iraqi military units following the withdrawal.

In a statement, the Iraqi military said Yarallah had instructed commanders to intensify coordination among units stationed at the base and to fully utilize its capabilities and strategic location.

A senior official at Iraq’s ministry of defense, speaking on condition of anonymity, was cited by The Washington Post as confirming that US forces had completely vacated the base and removed all American equipment.

There was no immediate statement from the US military regarding the withdrawal.

The handover followed earlier announcements by Iraqi military officials that the mission of the US-led coalition at Ain al-Asad had ended.

In late December, Deputy Commander of Iraq’s Joint Operations Command, Lt. Gen. Qais al-Muhammadawi said coalition forces would withdraw from the base and transfer control to Iraqi security forces, adding that the process had been coordinated through the Joint Operations Command.

The coalition headed by the US rolled into Iraq in 2014 at the head of scores of Washington’s allies under the pretext of battling Daesh.

US-led military campaigns that followed would feature carpet bombing strikes against various Iraqi cities that attracted widespread criticism for their sheer scale and indiscriminate nature resulting in wholesale destruction of large areas.

The campaigns were also brought into question for their inefficiency that saw Daesh continuing to wreak havoc and stage bloodshed across Iraq.

The group had reared its head amid significant and drawn-out chaos throughout Iraq resulting from the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion of the Arab country that was followed by momentous rise in anti-American sentiment.

Following 2014, various US military interests, including its troops at Ain al-Assad, turned into a sustained target of repeated rocket attacks.

In early 2020, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) launched a retaliatory ballistic missile strike against the base following the US’s assassination of the Islamic Republic’s top anti-terror commander, General Qassem Soleimani.

The commander had played an indispensable role in helping Iraq and Syria defeat Daesh three years earlier.

PressTV report