EDITORIAL:
The end of New Zealand's military presence in Iraq cannot come soon enough. The 10th and last rotation of NZ Defence Force personnel at camp Taji near Baghdad will finish by June 30 this year.
Their mission, called "building partner capacity", made sense when it began in 2015. The United States and its allies were doing what they could to bolster Iraqi forces against Isis. Now "building partner capacity" seems a hopeless task under a US President who seems hell-bent on fanning the flames of conflict with Iran.
The assassination of Iran's foremost military figure, General Qassem Soleimani, at Baghdad's airport last Friday will have raised tensions in Iraq's Shia majority population as well as further antagonising the people of Iran. Iraqi militia leaders opposed to the US presence were killed in the same airstrike. Iraq's Government, closely allied with Iran, has condemned the airstrike on Iraq's soil and its Parliament has called for all foreign forces to leave.
Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp's elite Quds Force, was the best-known commander of Iran's proxy forces in surrounding countries, including those that helped Syrian President Bashar Assad defeat Isis and rebels supported by the US. He has long been a target of US drones and any President would probably have given the order to shoot when Soleimani was in US sights last Saturday. But not many might have preened themselves publicly with it.