As Iraqi paramilitary groups vowed to enforce a year’s-end deadline for the withdrawal of the U.S. military from their country, one influential faction has told Newsweek that Iraq’s militias managed to force U.S. troops out a decade before the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, and that such success could soon be replicated in Iraq.
“The Iraqi resistance was earlier than the Afghans in forcing the United States to withdraw from Iraq in 2011,” Nasr al-Shammary, spokesperson for the Hezbollah al-Nujaba Movement, told Newsweek, “and today the Iraqi resistance is stronger and more numerous.”
The resistance, he argued, “has the ability to confront, prolong, and insist on expelling any foreign forces from Iraqi soil.”