Last Wednesday, September 30, 2026, Iraqis disagreed over what to call the day. Some named it "Evacuation Day," others "Sovereignty Day." Both names contain a measure of fallacy, even in their dating. The departure of American forces in 2026 does not end the presence that began in 2003, since the United States ended its first military presence in Iraq in December 2011, before returning in 2014 at Baghdad's request to confront ISIS.
September 30 was therefore the end of a military presence Iraq summoned at a moment of the state's collapse before ISIS, not the end of the presence that began with the toppling of Saddam's regime. Comparing the two dates reveals two contradictory paths. The first was the end of a phase in the life of a system born under American-Iranian understanding, which after the American withdrawal leaned increasingly into the Iranian sphere. The second opens a different phase, whose heading is a more direct American-Iranian confrontation, placing the Iraqi government face to face with the parallel forces that have come to confiscate a large part of its decision-making.
In the founding phase of the 2003 system, the struggle within the Shiite political house turned on the state, power, and weapons. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's confrontation with the Mahdi Army in 2008 was its clearest expression: a Shiite government seeking to establish the state's right to a monopoly of force, and Shiite militias contesting that right, while the American army was part of the equation protecting the state against an armed force from within its own political milieu.
But after 2011, the function of the weapons was inverted. With the outbreak of the Syrian war and the widening of sectarian polarization, the armed factions were no longer presented as a challenge to the state, but as a line of defense for the political system established in 2003- that is, for the ruling power. Here a crisis of confidence emerged among the advocates of "sectarian hakimiyyah" and the power elites in the capacity of the armed forces and the state's agencies to protect the 2003 system, and they contributed, directly or indirectly, to reproducing the armed environment they would later need.
The researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research, Dr. Hisham Dawood, explains this as a transition from the concept of the "penetrated state," or even the "hybrid state," to that of the "faction-producing state." What is meant, as he makes clear, is not that the government decided at some moment to create the militias, nor that all the factions are the state's handiwork, but that the structure of the rentier, quota-based state, and the way it distributes resources, jobs, and positions, made armed organization capable of turning into a political and economic actor.
Later, the fall of Mosul in 2014 converted security necessity into political legitimacy, and led to the armed factions being brought into the state's legal and security structure, before they moved from the front to parliament, the government, and the economy. Here the transformation was complete: the militias that had contested the state's legitimacy over weapons became a fundamental part of the system that grants the state its legitimacy.
The first shock came with the October 2019 Uprising, which revealed the depth of the crisis. This time the objection came from within the Shiite community itself, saying that representing the majority was no longer enough to produce the state's legitimacy. The question was no longer only who governs Iraq, but who holds the capacity to influence whoever governs it.
Today Baghdad faces a paradox it did not know in 2008. Maliki was confronting militias that contested the state's authority; the present government confronts factions that have come to control the system that produced them. Confining weapons to the hands of the state is therefore not a security measure but a redefinition of power.
As for the "Balkanization" US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned of, it draws its meaning from the Balkan experience itself, where accumulated national and sectarian grievances turned into wars that ended in the breakup of Yugoslavia. Iraq is not necessarily repeating that experience, but it carries elements that deserve concern: weapons of multiple loyalties, unresolved sectarian tensions, and negative accumulations between Baghdad, Erbil, and some of the factions present in power and in the Kurdistan Region. A political dispute, if coupled with weapons, may become a security alignment the state will struggle to contain.
The real test after September 30, then, is not the departure of the Americans, but Iraq's capacity to recover the state from the forces that have become part of its system.
Sovereignty, accordingly, does not begin when the American leaves. It begins when the decision of war and peace, of weapons and of the economy, becomes a single Iraqi decision.
