Paramilitary groups who have been protesting against U.S. air strikes in Iraq began to withdraw from the perimeter of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Wednesday, although some supporters remained.

By Wednesday afternoon many had left the embassy and started setting up a protest camp in front of a nearby hotel. A small group of protesters remained and said they would not leave till U.S. forces were expelled from Iraq.

This protest as led by Badr Corps chief Hadi Ameri.

This same faction leader Hadi Ameri was once invited to the Obama White House!

Did you know Badr Corps chief Hadi Ameri, who led today's raid on the US Embassy in Iraq, was once invited to the @WhiteHouse by @BarackObama?

FYI: Ameri & the Badr Corps get their salary & orders from Iran's dictator Ali Khamenei. CC: @realDonaldTrump @VP @SecPompeo @PressSec pic.twitter.com/sEORXzSpNB — M. Hanif Jazayeri (@HanifJazayeri) December 31, 2019



And here is Hadi Ameri meeting with Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Everyone seems to forget who helped Hezbollah and the Iran-backed militia that is attacking our embassy in Iraq.

The Obama administration followed up a planeload of $400 million in cash sent to Iran in January 2016 with two more such shipments in the next 19 days, totaling another $1.3 billion, according to congressional officials briefed by the U.S. State, Treasury and Justice departments.

As Bloomberg reported back in 2015 U.S. weapons intended for Iraq’s beleaguered military are winding up in the possession of the country’s Shiite militias, according to U.S. lawmakers and senior officials in the Barack Obama administration. These sources say that the Baghdad government, which was granted $1.2 billion in training and equipment aid in the omnibus spending bill passed last month, is turning hardware over to Shiite militias that are heavily influenced by Iran and have been guilty of gross human-rights violations.

One senior administration official told us that the U.S. government is aware of this, but is caught in a dilemma. The flawed Iraqi security forces are unable to fight Islamic State without the aid of the militias, who are often trained and sometimes commanded by officers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. And yet, if the U.S. stopped sending arms to the Iraqi military, things would get even worse, with IS overrunning more of the country and committing human-rights horrors on a broader scale. The risk of not aiding them was greater than the risk of aiding them, the official said, adding that this didn’t mean the administration was unconcerned about the risks involved.

The official added that while the government in Baghdad under new Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has been more responsive to U.S. concerns about weapons transfers than the previous government of Nouri al-Maliki, it has not been vigilant enough.

On Facebook, members of Iraqi Shiite militias proudly display American arms, such as this photo from October of an M1A1 Abrams tank draped in a Hezbollah flag:



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