As the Taliban continues to take control of Afghanistan while the United States military evacuates the country, there’s a growing fear among people in Iraq who are watching this play out on television.
Barham Ahmed, a journalist and media professor living in Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq near the border with Iran, said many fear what’s happening in Afghanistan could also happen in Iraq. By the end of the year, U.S. troops will pull out of Iraq as part of an agreement to end an 18-year combat mission.
“Iraqi people or Kurdish people in Iraq are concerned and worried,” Ahmed told News4Jax on Monday.
He said the people in his region are seeing television images of U.S. troops evacuating Afghanistan as the Taliban takes over the country. He said he and his fellow citizens fear groups like the Islamic State group will do the same thing later this year in Iraq when U.S. troops pull out and allow the Iraqi military and police to take over security.
He used the events of 2014 as an example when IS took over Mosul, Iraq.
“They took control of Mosul within a few hours. That’s why Iraqi forces and Iraqi people are very concerned and fear when the American and Western forces are leaving us, leaving Iraq, leaving Kurdistan. The Iraqi or local forces cannot fight other groups,” Ahmed said.
The U.S. military has been training Iraqi forces to defend their own country just like U.S. forces trained the Afghan military. But when it was time to defend Afghanistan from being taken over by the Taliban, Afghan military forces backed down and now the Taliban is in control of the government. Ahmed said he fears a parallel situation in Iraq.
“The government is not strong enough to defend, like we see in Afghanistan in the past few days when the governmental forces and armed forces could not defend against the Taliban,” Ahmed said.
The U.S. is leaving Iraq at the end of the year because of the July agreement between President Joe Biden and the Iraqi prime minister. There are currently 2,500 troops in Iraq trying to counter the remnants of IS.