
Iraq's Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi has said the killing of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in the US airstrike violates the conditions for the presence of American troops in the country.
Muhandis, Iraq’s deputy head of the Iran-backed Shia paramilitary forces known as the PMF, was killed alongside top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in the airstrike.
“It is a flagrant violation of the conditions for the presence of the American forces in Iraq and their role which is supposed to be limited to training Iraqi forces and fighting ISIS within the international coalition forces, under the supervision and approval of the Iraqi government”, Abdul Mahdi said in a statement issued Friday.
He went on to call for an extraordinary parliamentary session to convene and decide on the next steps Iraq could take.
On Thursday evening, US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said he had received requests from Iraq to downsize the US military presence in the country, currently at about 5,000 troops.
The US confirmed it was sending around 750 additional soldiers to the Middle East on Wednesday, after attacks broke out in Baghdad among hundreds of protesters in response to airstrikes in Iraq and Syria conducted by US forces.