Secretary of State Pompeo travelled to Baghdad, where he met with Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi and President Barham Salih. Pompeo recounted that "we talked to them about the importance of Iraq ensuring that it's able to adequately protect Americans in their country" and also "let them know about the increased threat stream we had seen". These threats, he indicated, "were very specific. These were attacks what were imminent; that is, they were attacks that were going to happen fairly soon". Pompeo went on to remark that "we've talked for a long time about Iran's influence with militias that are here. We have urged the Iraqi Government, for its own security, to get all of those forces under Iraqi central control. In each of those meetings, those two leaders promised that that was their objective too, they were moving towards that goal, and we talked about how we could assist them with that". "So long as there are Iranians there who have the capacity in terms of weapons systems who aren't under Iraqi government control", Pompeo added, "then the Iraqi people are at risk and it's a less stable nation".