CAIRO, January 5. /TASS/. Iraq’s parliament voted on Sunday to put an end to the presence of foreign troops in the country, Al Arabiya television channel said.
In the resolution adopted at the emergency session of Iraq’s Council of Representatives, the lawmakers said the "government must work to end the presence of any foreign troops in the republic and to cancel work under the security agreement with the international anti-terrorism coalition."
The resolution says in particular, that "the government must take practical steps to ban any foreign troop presence, to prohibit them from using the country’s airspace and to revoke the request for assistance from the international coalition fighting the Islamic State terrorist organization (banned in Russia - TASS)."
The majority of legislators present in the parliament backed the resolution, although the Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers did not show up for the emergency session.
The session was convened in the wake of a sharp deterioration in the country after a series of US strikes on Iraqi soil. On January 2, General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy leader of Iraqi Shiite paramilitary force Hashd al-Shaabi, were killed in one of the US strikes.
On January 3, the Pentagon confirmed that a missile strike near Baghdad’s airport killed Soleimani. The US Department of Defense said that the attack was carried out following President Donald Trump’s order, which Congress had not been notified of beforehand.
After the attack, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council vowed at an emergency session to exact "severe revenge" on those involved in the killing of Soleimani, blaming the US for the attack. In a telephone call with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif bashed the attack as an act of terrorism by the US.