LANSING, MI — Iraq’s leader will travel to Michigan on Thursday after speaking with President Joe Biden to meet the state’s large Iraqi community and brief them on escalating tensions in the Middle East following Iran’s airstrike on Israel last weekend.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s trip to both Washington and Michigan to discuss US-Iraq relations was planned well before Saturday’s drone and missile launches by Iran-backed groups. The visit has been put in the spotlight as tensions escalate in the region following the attack, which included drone and missile launches that flew over Iraqi airspace, and others launched from Iraq by Iranian-backed groups.
Michigan has one of the largest populations of Iraqis in the country, and many local Democrats have pushed back against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The state has the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country.
The Iraqi prime minister is expected to land in the Detroit area Thursday evening and be met by local leaders, including Wayne County Executive Warren Evans and Assad I. Turfe, a deputy Wayne County executive. He will then travel to a mosque in Dearborn Heights to meet with Iraqi community members and officials to provide an update on his meeting with Biden, in which he discussed economic ties between Iraq and the US, according to Mohammed Al- mawla, a community member involved in planning.
There are just over 90,000 residents of Iraqi descent in Michigan, the largest of any state, according to the most recent U.S. census. In Wayne County, home to the cities of Detroit and Dearborn, 7.8% of residents identified as having Middle Eastern and North African descent, alone or in some combination, the highest percentage of any U.S. county.
The concentration of these residents in Detroit’s suburbs has led to multiple visits to the area by officials involved in Middle East relations.
Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to Biden, traveled to metro Detroit in March to meet with Lebanese Americans and discuss efforts to prevent the conflict from spreading along Israel’s northern border, where Hezbollah operates. Several White House officials also traveled to Dearborn in February to meet with Arab-American leaders to discuss the conflict.
Fears of an expansion of the war grew over the weekend after the attacks and the developments have raised further questions about the viability of the two-decade US military presence in Iraq. However, a US Patriot battery in Irbil, Iraq, designed to protect against missiles, shot down at least one Iranian ballistic missile, according to US officials – one of dozens of missiles and drones destroyed by US forces in addition to Israeli attempts to destroy it. beat the country. the attack.
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Hamada reported from Houston.