On Tuesday, the US embassy in Baghdad was hit by a rocket and drone attack. The attack was carried out by Iraqi Shia Islamist militiamen of the Hashed al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Formations (PMF). It was the latest incident in the least-reported front of the current war underway in the Middle East.
Sabereen (“Patient Ones”) News, a Telegram channel associated with the pro-Iran Shia militias in Iraq, carried footage earlier this week of what it described as “the moment that the strongholds of the terrorist Iranian Kurdish parties in the Koya district of Erbil were bombed.”
The 30-second clips shows what looks like a missile flying toward a built-up structure, as small arms fire tries vainly to bring it down. The clip concludes with an explosion as the projectile slams into its target. The footage is accompanied by dramatic music.
Sabereen, which has over a million subscribers, has become somewhat frenetic in its output since the beginning of the current war. The footage of the Koya attack, in which one person died, was followed by a similarly excited depiction of what it describes as “thick plumes of smoke rising after the Fujairah oil port in the UAE was targeted.”
The Sabereen footage is of an attack on the base of the Azadi Camp in the Koya district in northern Iraq, in the area administered by the Kurdish Regional Government. Five missiles were launched at the site, which is maintained by the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI). PDKI is one of the largest of the Iranian Kurdish armed political movements engaged in opposition to the Iranian regime. Koya is located about 200 kilometers from the Iraq-Iran border, not far from the Iraqi Kurdish capital city of Erbil.
I have visited the PDKI’s base at Koya on two occasions, the last time in late 2022. It would be wrong to picture it as a bristling, front-line position. It houses the families of fighters and civilian activists, as well as the party’s Peshmerga (combatants). Undefended from the air, it has been attacked by Iranian ballistic missiles on two occasions in the years prior to the current war. In 2022, I interviewed a PDKI member whose infant son was killed in one of the attacks.
Iran-backed militias open third front
CHANNELS LIKE Sabereen News exist to convey to the overwhelmingly Shia supporters of Iran and its “Mehwar al-Muqawama” (Resistance Axis) a sense that a combined regional struggle is underway, between the united forces of Iran and the “Israeli Entity” and its American ally. The impression the channel and others like it try to get across is that the Iranian and pro-Iran side is scoring an uninterrupted chain of triumphant victories.
This triumphalist tone may appear somewhat ridiculous. But the statistics indicate that a determined Iranian and allied campaign is indeed underway in Iraq, making the country a third front in the current war, alongside the direct confrontation between the US, Israel, and Iran, and Israel’s battle with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Nearly 300 missiles and drones have been launched at the Kurdistan Region by Iran and the Shia militias since the current war began. The Iranians and their allies have struck at Erbil International Airport, which houses US forces, at the US Consulate, and at the Harir Air Base. The US has struck back, targeting Shia militia positions in Mosul, Ninawa, Kirkuk, and Anbar.
During the war between Israel and Iran last year, and indeed throughout the period of conflict since October 7, the Iraqi Shia militias were notable mainly by their absence. At that time, many observers concluded that the militias now favored their own interests over their patrons, and were concerned above all with avoiding retribution from Israel or the US.
This assessment should be revised. The current pattern of behavior of the militias indicate that they remain very much servants and assets of the regime in Tehran, and are currently carrying out a military campaign on its behalf.
In the manner now familiar, these militias, in accordance with the playbook of the IRGC, are burrowed deep within the structures of the Iraqi state. They possess armed capacities at least as strong as those of the official state itself. They are also, in their political iteration, a key component of the governing coalition.
THE COORDINATION Framework, of which Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s movement is also a part, includes the main representatives of the pro-Iran militias.
Of these, the Badr Organization, led by Hadi al-Amiri, is the most veteran and well-established. Kataib Hezbollah, founded by the late Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was killed by the US together with IRGC Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani on the road from Baghdad Airport in January 2020, is the most militant and efficient.
Alongside their political status, the militias are part of the officially organized security forces of the state, mustered in the framework of the PMF Commission and under the formal authority of the prime minister’s office. In practice, as with their fellow Shia militiamen in Lebanon, the most significant of the PMF militias are part of a command structure headed by the IRGC in Tehran.
This situation, in which an Iran-controlled militia structure is in political alignment with a government led by an individual whom the US president has described as a “friend,” was precarious and contradictory from the start. Now, however, with the militia structure engaged in open war on Iraqi soil against the US and its allies, it has become untenable.
As in Lebanon, there is no chance of successful and normal development for Iraq alongside the continued presence of the Iran-aligned militias. It is one or the other. But the persistence of these frameworks is testimony to the continued durability of the Iranian model of power-by-militia throughout large parts of the Middle East, in spite of premature claims that Israel and the US had effectively defeated this model a year ago.
The reality is that Israel and the US’s vast conventional superiority can damage, weaken, and diminish the militias and their patron, but only the destruction of the Iranian regime or the building of effective local forces against these groups can lead to their final eclipse.
A Badr officer speaking to me at the movement’s headquarters in Baghdad in 2015 described his organization’s ambition in the following terms: “In Iran, they have the Artesh and the Revolutionary Guards. So that’s exactly how it should be here too. We’ll have the Iraqi army, and then also the PMF as permanent formations.”
That was 11 years ago. The officer, if he is still alive, is no doubt gratified that his wish has been achieved. Western policy on Iraq needs to catch up with this reality.