US congressman says he would try to ‘block’ any future withdrawal from Iraq

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – US Congressman Mark Green said that he and his fellow Republican lawmakers in the United States would do everything in their power to stop a withdrawal of troops from the Kurdistan Region if it were to be proposed in the future.

The politician, a former major in the US Army, equated the withdrawal of his country’s forces from Afghanistan with the decision to pull US troops from Iraq in 2011, calling it a “horrific thing to do.”

Green said the 2011 withdrawal meant abandoning US allies who later faced the frightening rise to prominence of ISIS in Iraq in 2014.

The current US withdrawal from Afghanistan is not based on conditions on the ground, he argued, but rather on “a political timeline,” noting that the country’s provincial capitals are quickly falling to the Taliban.

Green said he hoped what happened in Iraq people after 2011 does not happen in Afghanistan now, “but I fear it will.”

“There are those of us in America who are with you; we won’t abandon you,” the congressman concluded, extending his appreciation to the Kurdish people and Peshmerga for fighting alongside American soldiers.