Trump Meets With Iraqi Leader Amid Negotiations Over U.S. Troop Levels

On a call with reporters held before the visit, senior administration officials stressed that there were no “no hard and fast timelines, and there are no hard and fast numbers” on when any reduction of troops would happen, but U.S. commanders have already pulled back hundreds of troops from several Iraqi bases, consolidating them at half a dozen locations in the country.

The Pentagon has also advised Mr. Trump that a small contingent — about 2,500 troops or so — should remain to advise and assist the Iraqi government in its fight against pockets of Islamic State fighters, and to act as a bulwark against Iranian influence in Iraq, where skirmishes between the United States and Iran have played out on the country’s soil.

Other members of the 29-country American-led military coalition in Iraq have already cut their numbers in half, to about 1,200 troops, largely because of the coronavirus pandemic that has suspended most training.

“We don’t want to maintain a huge number of soldiers forever in Iraq. We want to get smaller,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of the military’s Central Command, told an online security conference last week, noting that Iraqi forces are largely ready to take on the fight by themselves.

The Pentagon is reluctant to keep more than the absolute minimum of troops in Iraq because they have been attacked by Iranian-backed militias. An attack on an Iraqi base in March killed three soldiers of the American-led military coalition in Iraq, two of them Americans, and wounded 14.

“Everyone’s saying the numbers will come down,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who met with Mr. al-Kadhimi and his top aides this week.

In an interview with The Associated Press before his departure from Baghdad, Mr. al-Kadhimi said Iraq still needed American assistance to counter the Islamic State but not direct military support on the ground.