Four people familiar with the matter said the Trump administration is planning to stop military aid to a longtime partner in the Middle East. That partner helped the United States defeat the Islamic State group and is now under attack from Iran. In recent meetings, U.S. Defense Department officials told leaders of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region that the administration is not planning to renew an agreement that funds the Peshmerga, the Kurdish security force. The BBC spoke with two officials who took part in those talks and two other people with direct knowledge of the issue. They described the discussions on the condition that they not be named. Kurdish officials said they fear a cutoff would leave a power vacuum and encourage Iran. They pointed to hundreds of missiles and drones fired into Iraqi Kurdistan since President Donald Trump started the war with Tehran. Pentagon officials said they do not plan to renew the Peshmerga aid deal Analysts said ending that assistance would weaken a longtime partner in Iraq and signal that the United States cannot be counted on to stand by its allies. US plans to cut off military aid to key Middle East ally, BBC told https://t.co/UezOaJoGlo— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 28, 2026 “The US would be cutting off the Kurds, who shed so much blood to help the Americans achieve their goals in Iraq and the wider Middle East,” Yerevan Saeed, the director of the Global Kurdish Initiative for Peace at American University, said. “This is going to be a big win for Iran, China, and Russia if the Kurds are left so exposed.” Trump has pledged in his second term to pull the United States back from foreign fights in places such as the Middle East. He also started the war with Iran, and that conflict hit the six-month mark on Friday and has no end in sight. The written understanding between the Pentagon and the Kurdish Regional Government expires on September 30. That is the same day the United States and other countries plan to pull their last troops out of Iraq. The pullout is set to close the international campaign against the Islamic State, a fight in which the Peshmerga fought next to coalition forces. The last U.S. military base still open in the country sits in Irbil, the Kurdish capital, and is due to shut next month after coalition forces leave. The Peshmerga numbers about 180,000 troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. In fiscal year 2026, it received $61 million through the Pentagon’s counter-Islamic State program for weapons, training, and pay. The Pentagon asked Congress to drop all of that aid in the fiscal year 2027 budget, saying the Islamic State had been defeated and the money should go elsewhere. That budget request remains frozen during a wider spending fight in Congress. Research compiled by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, using the latest figures available, showed Iran and Iran-backed militias had carried out 158 missile or drone attacks inside Iraqi Kurdistan by late May. This escalation comes amid broader Iranian aggression, such as when Iran launched drone and missile attacks on US military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. Even so, Defense Department officials told Iraqi and Kurdish leaders in recent talks that the United States was not planning to extend the memorandum of understanding, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions, as the BBC reported. The Pentagon first signed that agreement in 2016 and renewed it in 2022. One person familiar with the Pentagon’s thinking said a final decision on future security ties with Kurdistan is still under review. The same sources said Washington is looking at ways to keep some security help in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan after U.S. troops leave. A Pentagon spokesperson pointed to a statement about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi. “The United States, Iraq and Coalition partners have achieved tremendous success in defeating ISIS and now the Iraqi Security Forces, including the Peshmerga and other Iraqi Kurdistan Region security forces, will lead the fight against terrorists in Iraq,” the statement said. A State Department spokesperson told the BBC the department is focused on carrying out the troop withdrawal and “ensuring that Prime Minister Zaidi is positioned to disarm Iran-aligned terrorist militias and safeguard Iraqi sovereignty.” James Jeffrey, who led the global coalition against the Islamic State during Trump’s first term, said the United States could avoid repeating that error by keeping support for the Peshmerga. “It’s money well spent, as we found out when the Islamic State rolled into northern Iraq,” Jeffrey said. Officials have said publicly that Washington is open to a bilateral security agreement with Iraq. The two sides discussed a possible defense pact in the recent meetings, though it remains unclear how any pact would be written or what role Iraqi Kurdistan would play. The administration’s stance on troop levels remains unclear too, as Donald Trump has announced U.S. troops are no longer needed in Iraq while touting new oil partnerships. Al-Zaidi, elected in May, highlighted the withdrawal during a trip to Washington last month, when he met Trump at the White House along with Hegseth and members of Congress. “October 1 will mark a new day in the trajectory of the Iraqi state, as Iraq will be free of any foreign military presence,” his office said at the time. Analysts said the pullout would lower the risk to U.S. troops in the region, who have come under Iranian attack during the war, including at the base in Irbil. Jason Campbell, a former U.S. defense official now at the Middle East Institute, said, “The Peshmerga have been the frontline in the US and international war with ISIS.” He added, “If the US moves forward with this, it’ll make the Kurds perhaps the most vulnerable potential targets of Iran.”