By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

The end of the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan and the total
collapse of the American-trained Afghan army, are being viewed with
optimism in Iraq, where the people and political parties resent the unwanted military presence of the hated Yankees.
The Iraqi nation not just wants the closure of all US bases but the exit of
every single American soldier, including those whom Washington wants to keep in Iraq after its expected withdrawal later this year, on the pretext of training the Iraqi armed forces.
It is indeed a joke to think that US-trained forces are capable of holding their ground in any military confrontation, especially after what we witnessed in 2014 when thousands of Iraqi soldiers fled helter-skelter rather than face a few hundred Takfiri terrorists sweeping across the cities of Mosul, Ramadi, Tikrit and Fallujah.
The same scenario was repeated in Afghanistan earlier this month when the US-trained Afghan national army melted away against the Taliban
onslaught, to yet again prove the worthlessness of American training methods.
So the prime question among the Iraqi people is: Why is the interim
government gifting billions of petro dollars to the US occupiers, when a
fraction of this amount could well be given to the Hashd ash-Sha’bi for
mobilizing popular forces for strengthening the defences of the country against foreign hegemony and terrorism?
It is now crystal clear why the US occupiers and their few local agents
demand the disarming of the Popular Mobilization Units that saved Iraq from turning into Takfiristan, thanks to the edict of Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Sistani of Najaf and the timely help in arms and advisors provided by the fraternal and friendly Islamic Republic of Iran.
It seems Washington wants to implement the Afghan agenda in Iraq in order to have an indirect control over the country, similarly to what London had done exactly a century ago by installing an imported king in Baghdad rather than continue its costly and troublesome direct rule over Mesopotamia which it seized in 1917 from the Ottoman Turks.
Thus, after a series of secretive talks (and stealth supply of military
hardware), the Americans ditched their own protégés in Kabul by allowing the Taliban militia to overrun the country.
They might be plotting the same scenario in Iraq, as could be gauged by calls for further delay of the general elections, coupled with the poisonous propaganda against the patriotic Hashd-ash-Sha’bi and the mysterious surge in attacks by Daesh terrorists, who could be used to give a rude shock of removal to the interim government which wrongly thinks it has American backing.
It is worth recalling that in 1921 on August 23, a year after barely defeating the popular uprising of 1920 (Thawrat al-Ashreen) and exiling to Iran the leading ulema of the holy cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Kazemayn, the British appointed Faisal the son of the Sharif of Mecca as king in Baghdad.
Those were the days of lethargy in the region when British appointees ruled the roost in Iran as well, and London was in the process of creating a
spurious state called Saudi Arabia for the Wahhabis of Najd and later
carving up Palestine to plant the illegal Zionist entity for the non-Semitic Jews of Eastern Europe.
As a result, with lack of consciousness at home and no support from Muslim brethren in slumber abroad, the Iraqi people had to endure in humility 37 years of foreign monarchial rule, followed by a series of coups by minority dictators culminating in the Ba’thist reign of terror that climaxed under the brutal Saddam.
The situation is vastly different from what it was a century ago. Thanks to the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 that threw into the
dustbin of history the British-installed and American-backed Pahlavi regime, the entire region has been totally transformed for good.
Today, the Resistance Front, which includes countries and popular forces, has acquired formidable status despite the destabilization efforts of the US and its economic terrorism.
It means, no matter what the US desires, it will never be able to hold Iraq in ransom, or for that matter Syria or Lebanon.
In other words, it is only a matter of time before the curtain comes down on the illegal Zionist entity with American occupiers expelled from the whole region and Palestine back into the Islamic fold.
Iraq has a date with destiny. According to prophecies in religious texts it will be the centre of the global government of peace, prosperity and justice of Prophet Muhammad’s (SAWA) Last and 12th Infallible Heir, the Awaited Imam Mahdi (AS), among whose loyal followers will be the Khorasani and the Yamani.