US President Joe Biden and Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani have said they would keep working towards the withdrawal of a US-led anti-militant coalition in the country, AFP reports.

Their meeting at the White House came amid soaring tensions in the Middle East after Iraq’s neighbour Iran launched a massive retaliatory aerial attack on US ally Israel over the weekend.

The US-led military coalition was formed in 2014 to fight the militant Islamic State group — the year the jihadists overran nearly a third of Iraq’s territory and swaths of neighbouring Syria.

Iraq, hoping not to be consumed by US-Iran hostility, strongly protested a US drone strike in February that killed an Iraqi militia leader, carried out in retaliation for an attack that killed three US service members in Jordan.