BAGHDAD: Iraq’s powerful Kataeb Hezbollah on Tuesday again demanded US troops to withdraw from Iraq, months after the group suspended attacks against American forces.
Washington and Baghdad have been engaged in negotiations over the presence of US troops in Iraq, who are stationed there as part of a global anti-jihadist coalition.
A spokesman for Kataeb Hezbollah, Abu Ali Al-Askari, in a statement, said they have not seen the necessary seriousness from the Iraqi government to remove the American troops from Iraq.
The United States designated Kataeb Hezbollah a terrorist group and has repeatedly targeted its operations in recent strikes.
For the past three months, as regional tensions increased over the devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, US troops were targeted more than 165 times in the Middle East.
The Islamic Resistance of Iraq, a loose alliance of groups including Kataeb Hezbollah, had claimed responsibility for the majority of the attacks.
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But a deadly drone attack in late January sparked retaliation, with US forces conducting dozens of strikes against Iran-backed groups, including Kataeb Hezbollah.
Three US troops were killed in the January 28 drone strike in Jordan, near the Syrian border. Two days later, Kataeb Hezbollah announced the suspension of attacks on US forces.
In February the United States and Iraq restored talks on the future of the US-led coalition’s presence in Iraq, after a request by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Al-Sudani who has been calling for an end to the mission of the coalition.
The United States has presence of 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria as part of the international alliance against the Islamic State (IS) group.
The coalition was deployed in 2014 to Iraq at the government’s request to fight IS.
