Two decades after US troops battled Iran-backed militias on Iraq's streets, Foreign Editor David Pratt asks: Are we witnessing a rerun of American intervention?
LIKE some ghostly mirage, their convoy of trucks appeared out of the dust thrown up by the desert. Within minutes, they had pulled up on the roadside next to us.
The ageing vehicles were heavily laden, packed with bags and bedding on top of which sat men in paramilitary uniforms layered in fine dun-coloured dust and cradling assault rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers.
At first sight, they were a rough-looking and intimidating bunch, most either sullen or hyped up having just spent weeks on the frontlines of the small Iraqi city of Tal Afar, notorious for sectarian hatred and slaughter.
“Hashd al-Shabi,” announced my Arabic-speaking colleague ominously, referring to the Iraqi Shi’ite Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) to which these fighters belonged.
Their identity was further borne out by the huge flags and banners draped from their vehicles depicting Iraqi cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and a few of his Iranian counterparts, including the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Mostafavi Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Despite their gruff appearance, the men turned out to be an affable lot, engaging openly in conversation with the two Western journalists they had unexpectedly stumbled across en route to the Iraqi city of Mosul. There they were to reinforce other PMF units fighting the Sunni jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group.
Looking back on that encounter 10 years ago, I know it would be all but impossible today or perhaps have a very different outcome in light of events currently playing out in the region.
At this precise moment, it’s hard to imagine such fighters being well disposed towards Western journalists because of the joint United States-Israeli war against Iran, the country which both helped construct and continues to support Iraq’s PMF.
In fact, during a very recent visit to Iraq, that very point was driven home by my local “fixer” with whom in the past I have regularly encountered fighters of the PMF.
Though often met with suspicion, never previously was there any outright hostility. More recently, however, things on the ground have changed for the worse, the “fixer” told me on my last visit.
The reasons for such a shift in mood are clear. Just this past week, US Central Command announced that American and Saudi forces had jointly struck PMF targets in Iraq after the militias had conducted drone attacks launched from Iraqi territory toward Saudi Arabia.
The wave of US-Saudi airstrikes in response is said to have killed 20 PMF members, with at least another 32 wounded. The attacks ranged across seven Iraqi provinces, including Baghdad, Wasit, Nineveh, Basra, Kirkuk, Karbala, and Diyala.
But as journalists who have reported from the ground since the start of the current war in Iran will attest, at least a hundred more PMF fighters have been killed during that time.
In turn, PMF units have struck at US military bases and diplomatic facilities, many operating under the umbrella of what’s known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI).
Among the targeted US facilities has been Camp Victoria, a heavily fortified US military base located right next to Baghdad International Airport.
In Iraqi Kurdistan in the north, meanwhile, US facilities located primarily at the Erbil International Airport military complex and the nearby Harir Air Base have also been hit.
While last week’s American statement might have been the first publicly announced admission of such strikes against the PMF in Iraq, such US operations have in fact been ongoing since the start of the current war in Iran.
That so little has previously been forthcoming from the Americans about such operations stems from the fact that Washington has been keen to play down such attacks for fear of suggesting a degree of “mission creep” is under way.
Any such a denial now though is pointless, for as last week’s statement effectively acknowledges, the war in Iran is seriously spilling over into neighbouring Iraq.
Once again, American forces are being drawn back into a place where they spent years fighting insurgents and endured heavy casualties after the 2003 invasion that deposed Saddam Hussein.
Or, to put this another way, Iraq is now the battlefield where the US and its allies are actually fighting Iranian “troops” on the ground, albeit in the shape of Iran’s proxies – the PMF.
So, just who is the PMF and the umbrella group under which it operates and how did it get drawn into the latest conflict? What too does it mean for America, not least in its relationship with the Iraqi government in Baghdad?
The first thing to recognise here is that Iraq is home to dozens of armed militias, a legacy of the 2003 US-led invasion and the war against the extremist Islamic State (IS) group. These militias first formed as a result of the US presence and occupation which gave rise to widespread anti-American sentiment in Iraq, while simultaneously Iran was steadily expanding its influence inside Iraq’s fractured political and security institutions.
When the extremists of IS launched their massive offensive across northern and western Iraq, capturing major cities including Mosul and Tikrit back in 2014, the PMF militias were then seen by supporters as saviours who sacrificed thousands to defend the nation in its darkest hour.
Iraq being about 60% Shia, the PMF rapidly became a bulwark against the predominately Sunni extremists that comprised IS. PMF fighters – including those I encountered back in 2016 near Mosul – fought alongside the Iraqi army on numerous frontlines.
Some at the time even co-operated with the US-led coalition fighting IS. But while most factions of the PMF were formally integrated into Iraq’s armed forces in 2016, they still largely operated independently, sometimes undermining the Iraqi government’s interests and routinely wielding violence against domestic rivals.
Among the PMF forces that succeeded with American and Iranian support in ousting the IS from much of Iraq was a militia called the Badr Organisation.
It was also accused at the time of atrocities against members of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority and today it has become a thorn in the side of both the Americans and Iraqi government.
In fact, it was the Badr Organisation that was one of the groups targeted in last Wednesday’s joint US-Saudi airstrikes.
But while the Badr Organisation perhaps holds the greatest political and institutional power, it is another group within the PMF, Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH), that is widely considered the most powerful military faction.
Kata’ib is generally regarded as Tehran’s closest military partner in Iraq and the dominant force under the PMF umbrella grouping of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI).
Kata’ib’s founder, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, was killed alongside Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in a 2020 US Reaper drone airstrike near Baghdad airport that was ordered by US president Donald Trump.
The Iranian Quds Force is the elite, clandestine external operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It serves as Iran’s primary mechanism for unconventional warfare, foreign espionage and projecting regional influence by managing a sprawling network of proxy militias including the PMF in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Trump in his official address at the time of the US assassination of Soleimani, delivered from his private residence in Mar-a-Lago, famously stated: “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.”
But the death of Al-Muhandis and Soleimani far from stopping the threat posed by Kata’ib and the PMF, today sees them once again sucking Trump and the US into conflict in Iraq.
All this too puts tremendous pressure on the Iraqi government and current prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, who has sought to walk the same tightrope so many recent Iraqi leaders have done in trying to navigate between Washington and Tehran.
Soon after he came to power in April, Zaidi ordered the country’s PMF militias to come under direct state control in an attempt to rein in armed groups, but almost instantly the most powerful PMF groups rejected the latest government attempt.
In turn, Zaidi’s effort to reorient Iraq away from Iran’s grip was dealt another blow last week with the US-Saudi airstrikes just as the Iraqi leader was about to visit the Gulf kingdom.
That trip has now reportedly been cancelled. For its part, Saudi Arabia issued a forceful condemnation of the PMF drone attacks on its oil installations and demanded that Zaidi and his government take immediate steps to ensure that they are not repeated.
Achieving that, though, is far easier said than done, as Zaidi and numerous Iraqi leaders have previously found to their cost. Riling the powerful PMF that sits within their country’s borders comes with enormous risk.
Or, to put this another way, more often than not it’s Shia Iran that calls the political shots in predominately Shia Iraq and the PMF is the leverage by which it brings its influence to bear.
It’s a measure of the political balancing act that Zaidi has to perform that at one and the same time last week, his government was compelled to condemn the US-Saudi strikes on the PMF as “a blatant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty”, while rejecting the use of Iraqi land “as a launching pad or arena for attacks on neighbouring countries or for settling regional and international scores”.
So where does all this leave Iraq and America’s war on Iran? Well, many analysts are of the view that Iraq is under increasing threat of destabilisation. Certainly on my last recent trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, there was a prevailing feeling not of if but when this would happen.
With its population of 46 million, Iraq remains fragile and any post-war progress made in recent years could quickly unravel, many local officials and commentators I talked with told me.
That mood was recently summed up by Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Centre, a New York-based think tank dedicated to researching and analysing global security challenges and counter-terrorism.
“The chances of Iraq being pulled deeper into the Iran war are extremely high,” Clarke warned.
“That’s partly a result of Tehran’s influence, especially over the past two decades, where the regime has become in many ways inextricably linked with Iraqi militias.”
FOR its own part, the US, meanwhile, is presented with a dilemma in that it can continue to bomb Iran itself, diminishing its capacity to strike back, but that leaves Tehran’s proxies in neighbouring Iraq free to carry out attacks on America’s allies and the Gulf states.
Despite the ongoing US attacks to erode the PMF, the militias retain significant fighting capabilities, according to experts. While the strength of each PMF group varies widely, with some containing as few as 100 members, others such as Kata’ib boast around 10,000 fighters.
Signalling its defiance earlier in March, Kata’ib issued a statement demanding that every “foreign soldier” leave Iraq, where at least around 2000 US military personnel remain stationed.
For the Trump administration, the challenge is obvious. Short of a lasting peace deal with Iran, even if the US was to neutralise Iran’s military threat for now – which it is failing to do – Tehran’s proxies in the PMF could continue to cause havoc in the region from Iraq alone.
Which begs the question that while a US “boots on the ground” option might have been ruled out for Iran itself given the scale of likely opposition, might Washington go for a more pronounced military presence inside Iraq to counter the PMF and/or encourage the Iraqi Kurds to do likewise?
On numerous occasions in the past, some Iraqi-based Kurdish militias, especially those formed from the ranks of Iranian exiles, have taken the fight to the PMF.
Trump himself reportedly at one point early in the Iran war even considered using the same Kurdish forces inside Iran to help bring about regime change in Tehran, but this idea was eventually sidelined.
None of these options bode well for Iraq, of course, and leave further destabilisation or all-out civil war a real possibility and concern.
Of all the countries being pulled into the US-Israeli war on Iran, it is Iraq – a country that still bears the political, emotional and physical scars of the last time the Americans tried to reshape the region by force – that is perhaps the most vulnerable.
Last week’s open admission by Washington that it struck PMF targets inside Iraq might only then be the beginning.
Two decades ago, American troops battled Iran-backed militia groups on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Right now, it would be hard to deny that the Iran war is inexorably pushing the US military back into combat in Iraq – against that very same old foe.
