WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd August, 2020) Baghdad and Washington will soon set up a technical committee to discuss specifics of the planned reshaping of the US military presence in Iraq that they both agree on, Iraq's Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said on Friday.
Hussein confirmed both sides agree in principle that most US forces will eventually leave Iraq, but the country's security forces will continue to be trained by US advisers and benefit from intelligence-sharing.
"The technical committee will come together soon, they will be formed soon and then they will discuss it. But it's clear for us that we decided... to reshape the existence of American forces there. We need Americans but in a different way," Hussein said during a online briefing at the Atlantic Council think tank.
"We are talking about the redeployment of the American forces from Iraq and we are also talking about the timing, schedule of redeployment... We agreed about these issues and left it to the technical committee [to work them out]," he said.
Hussein pointed out that Iraq awaits on the United States to set up its portion of the technical committee.
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump said that country's troop levels in Iraq are already very low and at some point they will leave. In January, the Iraqi parliament voted to ban the presence of any foreign troops.
