US President Donald Trump held a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart, Barham Salih, on the sidelines of the Davos economic conference in Switzerland.
The meeting was the first between President Trump and any
Iraqi official since the killing of Iranian Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in
Baghdad, after which Iraq’s Prime Minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, called for the
expulsion of American troops, prompting the country’s parliament to pass a bill
to this effect.
President Trump has formally rejected an Iraqi request to
draw up a road map for a troop pullout. The US military has since resumed
counter-terrorism operations in the nation against Islamic State, and is slowly
moving to restart train-and-support missions with Iraqi forces.
These missions were suspended in the wake of Soleimani’s
assassination in an operation that also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a deputy
commander of Iranian-backed Iraqi armed groups collectively known as the
Popular Mobilization Forces. The Trump-Salih meeting comes amid political
gridlock in Baghdad, with competing factions still unable to agree on the
formation of a new cabinet in the wake of November’s resignation of
Abdul-Mahdi, who is now overseeing the government in a caretaker capacity.
