(Bloomberg) -- Iraq’s parliament voted to expel U.S. troops from the country in response to the assassination of a powerful Iranian military commander by an American drone in Baghdad.
A Lebanese proxy nurtured by the slain general, Qassem Soleimani, vowed to attack American soldiers and bases as Gulf Arab states tried to head off the kind of retribution that would plunge the combustible region into a broad military confrontation.
Iraq’s parliament, which denounced the drone strike early Friday as a violation of the nation’s sovereignty, asked the government to revoke its 2014 request for foreign military intervention to beat back Islamic State, which had conquered large chunks of the country.
“Confidence has been shaken between Iraq and the U.S.,” outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi said in a speech to an emergency session of parliament convened on Sunday to discuss a response to Soleimani’s killing. All 172 legislators present voted for the solution, but nearly 160 mainly Sunni and Kurdish parliamentarians didn’t show up for the vote.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo told CBS TV’s Face the Nation that Abdul-Mahdi has resigned “because of massive Iranian interference in his own government’s ability to execute sovereignty and independence for Iraq.” The U.S. mission against Islamic State “is in defense of the Iraqi people and is good for America, too,” Pompeo said.
The U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State said it has suspended training and operations against the jihadi group in Iraq, with resources redirected to protecting Iraqi bases that host coalition troops.
Deal Retreat
Soleimani was as revered at home as he was reviled in some quarters abroad, and thousands of Iranians, some shouting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” poured into the streets to pay tribute after his body was flown back home. His death dealt yet another blow to world powers’ crumbling nuclear deal with Iran, with Iranian officials meeting late Sunday to consider further retreats from the 2015 pact, which President Donald Trump abandoned more than 18 months ago.
Abdul-Mahdi said he was supposed to be meeting with Soleimani the morning he was killed. The general was carrying Iran’s response to a Saudi letter on how to de-escalate tensions between the two countries.
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, said the the conflict had entered a “new phase” and the price of Soleimani’s death should be the end of U.S. military presence across the region. Tehran’s allies could respond anywhere in the Middle East, Nasrallah said.
“The just punishment is the following: the American military presence in our region, the American military bases, the military ships and every American soldier and officer,” he said.
A U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would close a chapter that began with the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. The proposed pullout came hours after Trump said the U.S. had identified 52 Iranian sites it would hit if Tehran retaliates. Trump said, without providing any evidence, that he approved the strike because Soleimani was plotting “imminent and sinister attacks” against American diplomats and military personnel.
The president’s tough talk late Saturday undercut his assertion a day earlier that the U.S. hadn’t launched the attack near Baghdad airport on Thursday to “start a war.” It also seemed to reverse the efforts of Pompeo, who in the previous two days had repeatedly reaffirmed that the U.S. remains committed to defusing tensions with Iran as he talked with officials across the Middle East and Russia. On Sunday, Pompeo told ABC TV that any attacks against Iran would involve “lawful” targets.
Bracing for Response
Soleimani, who headed the foreign operations of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was venerated in Iran for helping to defeat Islamic State and challenging U.S. influence through militant proxies he nurtured in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and Yemen. His body was flown to Iran at dawn from Iraq, where a Reaper drone homed in on his car early Friday as it traveled on an airport access road.
Its first stop was Ahvaz in Iran’s oil-rich southwest, near the border with Iraq, where Soleimani cut his teeth as a young soldier on the front line of the war with Iraq in the 1980s. About half a dozen Guardsmen stood atop a van shrouded in white and Islamic Republic flags that carried his casket slowly through the crowd. Admirers threw roses at the vehicle as it passed, and traditional Shia eulogies praising Shiite Islam’s most venerated martyr bellowed from loudspeakers.
From Ahvaz, Soleimani’s remains were flown to the northeastern holy city of Mashhad, where state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said 10,000 people had filled wide boulevards and squares around the shrine of Imam Reza, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam. At both stops, many mourners carried placards with Soleimani’s image and chanted anti-American and anti-Israel slogans. He is expected to be buried Tuesday in his southeastern hometown of Kerman, state TV said.
Gulf states that are possible targets for Iranian reprisal urged calm as the prospect of a new conflict in the world’s top energy-exporting region loomed. Tehran’s capacity for retaliation may be crimped, however, by the dire condition of the Iranian economy, which has been clobbered by American sanctions reimposed after Trump withdrew from the landmark nuclear accord in 2018. Moreover, months of anti-government protests have challenged the regime’s dominance at home, as well as in Iraq and Lebanon.
There was some immediate fallout, however. Rockets slammed on Saturday into Baghdad’s Green Zone, which contains the U.S. Embassy and an airbase that houses American troops. No coalition casualties were reported.
Balancing Act
The killing sent global markets reeling.
Oil futures in London and New York at one point surged by more than 4%, gold hit the highest in four months and 10-year Treasury yields headed for the biggest drop in three weeks. The S&P 500 Index declined.
On Sunday, all major Middle East equity gauges fell, and the cost of insuring Saudi Arabai’s debt against default spiked.
“Investors who were hoping for lower geopolitical tension in the Middle East, North Africa region in 2020 got their hopes dashed on the second day of the year,” said Mohammed Ali Yasin, chief strategy officer at Abu Dhabi-based Al Dhabi Capital Ltd. “2020 will continue to be a year of high geopolitical tensions in our region.”
Soleimani’s assassination has set off a flurry of diplomacy, with European allies urging Trump to ease tensions with Tehran and warning of the risks of tit-for-tat reprisals. Turkey and Russia have both spoken with Iranian officials to discuss developments.
The U.K. repeated its call for de-escalation and the EU expressed concern about the increasing tensions in Iraq, including the killing of Soleimani. In a statement, Josep Borrell, the commissioner for foreign and security policy, invited Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to Brussels to continue engagement, reiterating the importance of preserving the nuclear deal.
Borrell “urged Iran to exercise restraint and carefully consider any reaction to avoid further escalation, which harms the entire region and its people.”
--With assistance from Tony Capaccio, Kathleen Miller, Zaid Sabah, John Ainger, Khalid Al-Ansary and Arsalan Shahla.
To contact the reporters on this story: Abeer Abu Omar in Dubai at aabuomar@bloomberg.net;Layan Odeh in Dubai at lodeh3@bloomberg.net;Dana Khraiche in Beirut at dkhraiche@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Riad Hamade at rhamade@bloomberg.net, ;Michael Shepard at mshepard7@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel
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