Iraq after the regional ceasefire: US bases and unresolved political questions

Shafaq News

Since April 8,
no confirmed attack has been recorded against US military installations in
Iraq. Drone activity has continued in Erbil and Al-Sulaymaniyah provinces in
the days following the ceasefire, though these targeted Kurdish security sites
and Iranian opposition camps rather than aUS positions directly.

The ceasefire,
reached through Pakistani mediation between Washington and Tehran, has held on that
specific front; however, it has not altered any of the conditions that made
those attacks possible, effective, and, according to the armed factions
themselves, far from over.

The United
States spent the 40 days between February 28 and April 8 absorbing an
unprecedented tempo of drone and missile strikes on its installations,
diplomatic facilities, and contractor personnel across Iraq. It responded with
retaliatory airstrikes on Iran-aligned armed factions, groups formally
integrated into the Iraqi state.

That
calculation -keep Iraq a manageable distraction, not a second front- shaped
every American decision in the country during the conflict. The ceasefire
preserved it, for now, but the factions, the vulnerabilities, and the political
dysfunction that made the campaign possible are all still in place. And
Baghdad’s newly designated prime minister, a political novice with a
complicated financial biography, has 30 days to form a government capable of
navigating what his predecessors could not.

The Campaign

When the United
States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, targeting
military infrastructure and killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iraq and
Lebanon immediately became secondary theaters of the wider war. The Islamic
Resistance in Iraq (IRI), an umbrella grouping of Iran-aligned armed factions
that had already conducted more than 170 attacks on US military assets since
October 2023, dramatically escalated its operations. Washington’s preference
was clear: keep the Iraqi front contained, manageable, and below the threshold
that would require the kind of direct, sustained military engagement that would
consume attention and resources needed elsewhere.

That preference
was immediately tested. Between February 28, 2026, and the ceasefire
announcement on April 8, Shafaq News documented over 900 strikes landing on the
US logistical support center at Baghdad International Airport and the US
Embassy compound in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, causing damage and
triggering lockdowns. Air defense systems engaged repeatedly over Erbil and
around Harir Base in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the American presence is
significant. The scope of attacks expanded to energy infrastructure in northern
Iraq, including the Lanaz refinery in Erbil and the Sarsang oil field in Duhok.

In the
Kurdistan Region alone, about 650 attacks were recorded over those 40 days,
with US diplomatic and military facilities among the primary targets.

The IRI’s
campaign extracted concessions from the strategic environment without battlefield
victory. It operated on a logic of attrition: not destroying American assets,
but making the cost of maintaining them —in personnel, contractor presence, and
political capital— prohibitively high. Nowhere was this logic more precise than
at Martyr Brigadier General Ali Flaih Air Base, formerly known as Balad,
located roughly 70 kilometers north of Baghdad in Saladin province.

Balad is the
operational hub of Iraq’s American-supplied F-16 fighter fleet, maintained
under a contract worth over $252 million awarded to V2X, a Colorado-based
defense firm formed through the merger of Vectrus and Vertex Aerospace, and
running through late 2026. A senior security source inside the base told Shafaq
News it sustained approximately 13 drone attacks during the heightened US-Iran
tensions. The strikes were aimed not at the aircraft but at the contractors
responsible for maintaining them. The F-16s remain protected in more than 35
hardened underground shelters.

In an interview
with our agency, security expert Abdul Sattar Al-Jubouri said the withdrawal of
foreign contractors created a technical vacuum that Iraqi personnel cannot
fill, particularly for software systems, advanced avionics, and complex
component overhauls.

Former Iraqi
Air Force officer Jamal Al-Azzawi described Iraqi teams at Balad as capable of
handling routine maintenance, but acknowledged the gap left by the contractor
departures.

An employee of
V2X, speaking anonymously to a British outlet in March, called the base a
high-value target with more than 200 American nationals on site, and reported
that some Iraqi military and contract employees had been passing sensitive
operational information to IRI-affiliated contacts in preparation for further
strikes.

Renad Mansour,
a senior research fellow at Chatham House, described the governing dynamic that
makes this possible: the armed factions “have one foot in the state and one
foot out of the state.” That hybrid model, simultaneously part of Iraq’s formal
security apparatus and operationally autonomous from it, is precisely what
allows IRI-affiliated networks to gather intelligence inside a base nominally
under Iraqi government control.

The Ain al-Asad
Air Base in western Al-Anbar province —historically the larger of the two
principal American installations in Iraq— is no longer part of this equation.
On January 18, 2026, the United States completed a full withdrawal from the
base, handing control to the Iraqi army. What remained of the American
footprint before February 28 was concentrated at Erbil Air Base in Iraqi
Kurdistan and the contractor presence at Balad. The IRI’s campaign targeted
both.

Read more: Drone incidents reported across 14 Iraqi provinces in latest escalation

The Ceasefire

The two-week
ceasefire, brokered by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, required Iran
to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while the United States and Israel halted
strikes on Iranian territory. The IRI simultaneously announced a suspension of
its operations in Iraq and across the region. Then, the Iraqi flags and Iranian
flags were waved together in Tahrir Square in Baghdad.

The ceasefire
frayed almost immediately. Iran-aligned armed factions continued drone attacks
near the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center and Baghdad International Airport on
the day it took effect, prompting the US Embassy to warn American citizens
against further possible attacks and to avoid air travel. Since the ceasefire’s
implementation, the Kurdistan Region has been hit by a further 48 attacks. All,
according to Shafaq News sources, directed at Iranian Kurdish opposition sites
and conducted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rather than
IRI-affiliated factions, bringing the documented total since February 28 to
695. The ceasefire, extended at least once at Pakistan’s request, has been
violated by both sides and functions as a negotiating framework rather than a
durable agreement.

What the
ceasefire does not address is as significant as what it halted. Iran’s 10-point
counter-proposal, which Tehran has framed as the basis Washington accepted,
includes the withdrawal of all American forces from bases across the region.
That demand, if pressed in negotiations, would eliminate the residual US
presence at Erbil Air Base and the contractor mission at Balad, both of which
Baghdad has simultaneously asked Washington to maintain.

Meanwhile, the
armed factions have made their own position explicit. Hezbollah Al-Nujaba, one
of the IRI’s most prominent constituent factions, declared this week that Iraq
would permanently remain the “striking force” of the Resistance Axis and
described its fighters as “martyrdom projects” on that path. “We renew our
pledge and covenant,” the group said in a statement addressed to Ayatollah
Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the assassinated Supreme Leader, “we —the sons of
al-Nujaba— will remain your loyal soldiers.” Al-Nujaba, along with other
IRI-affiliated factions, claims hundreds of attacks on US military
installations in Iraq and across the region since February 28 —a figure that
cannot be independently verified but is directionally consistent with
documented evidence. The guns have paused. The intent has not.

Read more: Iraq’s Islamic Resistance after Ali Khamenei

The New
Government

Into this
environment steps Ali Al-Zaidi, named prime minister-designate on April 27 after
a political deadlock that lasted more than five months following Iraq’s
November 2025 parliamentary elections. Al-Zaidi, 40, is a businessman who has
never held government office. His path to the nomination was shaped as much by
what he is not as by what he is: former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, a
deeply divisive pro-Iran figure, withdrew after his candidacy ran into fierce
opposition —both from some parties within the Coordination Framework (a
Shiite-led coalition that underpins the current parliamentary majority) itself
and from Washington, which threatened to cut all US support to Iraq if he took
office and suspended nearly $500 million in dollar shipments to Baghdad to
reinforce the point. Al-Zaidi emerged from the wreckage of that deadlock as a consensus
no one had planned for.

The US Embassy
in Baghdad quickly welcomed the outcome, extending its “best wishes”
to Al-Zaidi and expressing support for Iraq’s sovereignty and “security
free from terrorism” —language that functions as diplomatic shorthand for
Washington’s core demand: meaningful action against IRI-affiliated armed
factions operating inside the Iraqi state.

Tehran moved
with equal speed, though with markedly different emphasis. Iran’s Foreign
Minister Abbas Araghchi congratulated “my brother” Al-Zaidi on his designation
and affirmed Tehran’s “respect for Iraq’s sovereignty” and support
for “political stability, development, and enhanced cooperation”
serving the interests of both peoples —a formulation that conspicuously
sidesteps the security architecture question altogether and instead frames the
relationship in terms of bilateral economic and political alignment.

That both
capitals issued congratulations within the same diplomatic window, yet in
languages pointing in opposite directions, captures precisely the structural
bind Al-Zaidi inherits: a government whose external legitimacy depends on
satisfying patrons whose core demands are mutually exclusive.

Al-Zaidi’s
biography complicates the picture. He served as chairman of Al-Janoob Islamic
Bank, which faced restrictions on US dollar transactions as part of a wider
crackdown on sanctions evasion, and has been linked in reports to alleged money
laundering on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Those
allegations remain unverified. But they frame the central question his
nomination poses: Is Al-Zaidi a genuine compromise figure capable of navigating
between Washington and Tehran, or a lowest-common-denominator candidate whose
financial entanglements will limit his room to move on the question that
matters most —the armed factions?

The next Iraqi
government will face a set of overlapping challenges shaped by both domestic
constraints and external pressure. Washington is expected to press Baghdad to
move against Iran-aligned armed factions it designates as terrorist
organizations, even as those same groups remain embedded within Iraq’s ruling
coalition and maintain close ties to Tehran.

At the same
time, Baghdad will need to rebuild relations with Gulf states that were
targeted by Iranian drones and missiles during the conflict and are now calling
for clear steps to curb the influence of armed factions operating from Iraqi
territory.

Economic
pressures are also likely to weigh heavily. Disruptions to oil exports during
the closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the country’s reliance on crude
revenues, which make up around 90 percent of the state’s income.

Another
unresolved issue concerns the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a
state-sanctioned paramilitary network formed during the fight against ISIS.
While formally integrated into the armed forces in 2016, many of its factions
continue to operate with significant autonomy. Their political influence,
particularly within the Coordination Framework, limits the scope for any
government seeking to impose tighter control.

What Remains

Before February
28, the attrition campaign against US installations could be framed as a
manageable, if persistent, security challenge —episodic strikes, intercepted
drones, pro forma condemnations from Baghdad that no one took seriously. Forty
days of open warfare stripped that framing away and made visible what had
always been structurally true: the United States is trying to sustain a
military and contractor presence in a country whose government shares power
with the armed factions attacking it.

Iraq’s air
force flies American jets, maintained by American contractors, inside a base
where IRI-affiliated networks have been mapping personnel and passing
intelligence to the factions that attacked it. The government that formally
asked the United States to leave has asked it to stay. The Coordination
Framework that nominated Al-Zaidi includes, among its constituent members, the
leader of Asaib Ahl Al-Haq —a US-designated terrorist organization. American
retaliatory airstrikes during the conflict hit Kataib Hezbollah and Badr
Organization positions —both formally integrated into the Iraqi Armed Forces—
placing Baghdad in the position of explaining US strikes on its own security
services.

Washington’s
preference throughout has been to keep Iraq a secondary theater, a manageable
distraction rather than a second front. The ceasefire preserved that
preference. But the armed factions have explicitly rejected the premise.
Al-Nujaba’s pledge of permanent war, issued during an active ceasefire,
addressed to a new Iranian Supreme Leader, signals that the pause is tactical,
not terminal. The factions are not standing down. They are waiting.

Al-Zaidi’s
predecessors, operating with deeper political experience and more stable regional
conditions, could not resolve the contradiction at the core of Iraq’s security
architecture. Nothing in al-Zaidi’s biography, his political base, or the
diplomatic framework currently on the table suggests he has a theory of how
Iraq escapes the position it is in.

Written and
edited by Shafaq News staff.