Iran’s Fair-Weather Friends |
As the United States and Israel bombard Iran, its “axis of resistance” is getting involved in what is now a regional war. The first members to act after the war began on February 28 were the militias Iran created and cultivated in Iraq, which struck Kurdish and American targets inside Iraq and in neighboring countries. Soon after, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah launched a volley of rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Iran’s regional network of proxy groups had been severely weakened before this latest round of fighting began. Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have not only devastated Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza but also significantly degraded the military capabilities of Hezbollah in Lebanon, eliminating its entire leadership, and pummeled the Houthis in Yemen, as did the United States. The only members of the axis to have survived the past few years mostly unscathed are the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq. While Iran’s partners in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen fought and suffered the consequences, the Iraqi militias chose to mostly stay out of the fray. After the October 7 attacks, they began executing small-scale drone strikes on Israel and U.S. targets in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, seeking to minimize damage to U.S. personnel, according to the Militia Spotlight project. In January 2024, after a drone strike killed three American service members on the Jordanian-Syrian border, the United States struck back, assassinating several militia commanders. The militias immediately halted their attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq. According to a senior Israeli official, after Israel threatened to bomb Iraqi infrastructure in mid-2025, the militias ceased their attacks on Israel, too.
Formally, the pro-Iranian Iraqi militias include over 100,000 fighters and effectively control the Iraqi state; they could, in theory, be a formidable partner fighting on Iran’s behalf. Yet even in Tehran’s hour of greatest need, the militias across the border are remaining cautious. While small Iranian-run networks within a handful of militias are engaging in limited drone and missile attacks, others have done no more than issue statements expressing support for Iran. At their inception, these groups were more eager to engage in combat and some members and commanders shared the Iranian regime’s ideological commitments, but the militias have changed over the decades. Now, they are motivated more by material concerns than by religious zeal, and leaders and rank-and-file members alike prioritize survival above all else. I have seen what drives them up close: I spent 903 days in captivity of Kataib Hezbollah, the largest pro-Iranian militia in Iraq, and I have interviewed about a dozen politicians, journalists, personal friends of militia leaders, and former militia members who have insider knowledge of these groups. Fighting an existential war on Iran’s behalf is not what Iraq’s militiamen signed up for.
THE MAKING OF A MILITIA
Starting in about 2006, the Quds Force, the arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that focuses on foreign operations, set up pro-Iranian militias in Iraq to resist the U.S. occupation of the country. The Quds Force provided financing and training to groups within the Mahdi Army, the main Shiite militia fighting U.S. forces at the time; these groups would later, at Iran’s urging, break off from the Mahdi Army and become independent Iranian-backed militias. Another Iranian-run paramilitary group known as the Badr Corps focused on embedding itself inside the Iraqi state, particularly within the security forces. Kataib Hezbollah, founded with Iranian support in 2006–7, drew many of its leaders from the Badr Corps.
According to people I interviewed, the militias were initially not as motivated by material gain as they are today. During those early years, militia members faced significant danger and risked their lives both fighting U.S. occupation and waging a sectarian war against Iraq’s Sunnis. Those who joined were a mix of cold-blooded criminals, action seekers, youth eager to fight a foreign occupier or the Sunnis, and militiamen seeking the higher salaries provided by Iranian operatives, as well as religiously motivated recruits. Ghaith al-Tamimi, a former senior member of the Mahdi Army, was detained by U.S. forces in Iraq from 2006 to 2010 alongside many of the leaders of these militias. He explained to me that one of his fellow detainees, Qais al-Khazali, who was a commander in the Mahdi Army, would choose fighters “who were prominent people, ideological, more organized” to join breakaway groups. Although most militias overwhelmingly recruited criminals, a well-connected Iraqi journalist told me that Kataib Hezbollah “looked for people known for their religiosity.”
Iraqi militias became more profit-driven when the groups swelled during the Syrian civil war and the war against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). In 2013, the militias began to fight in Syria to prop up Bashar al-Assad, an ally of the Iranian regime. An Iraqi politician told me that “some went to Syria due to religious or sectarian fervor, but most didn’t,” lured instead by the promise of salaries and other benefits, including the opportunity to profit from drug smuggling. Then, in June 2014, Syrian-based ISIS fighters invaded Iraq and within two weeks took over roughly a third of its territory. Tens of thousands of Shiite Iraqis joined the militias to defend their country against the Sunni jihadists. Others joined for opportunities to loot. Between revenues from the Syrian drug trade and the systematic plundering of Iraqi state infrastructure in Sunni-majority areas, the militias were beginning to run a highly profitable business. Starting in 2014, for instance, the militia Khazali leads, Asaib Ahl al-Haqq, dismantled the Baiji oil refinery and nearby government-run factories in northern Iraq and then sold the parts, even attempting to sell stolen materials back to the state.
Iraqi militias have moved billions of dollars out of Iraq’s state coffers and into Iran’s.
The proportion of ideological recruits dropped again as the ranks of the Iranian-backed militias ballooned even further after the end of the fight against ISIS. When ISIS lost its last territorial stronghold in Iraq in 2017, the militias numbered about 70,000 members, operating under an umbrella group, the Popular Mobilization Forces. The PMF is formally under the command of the Iraqi prime minister and draws salaries for its 250,000 fighters from state coffers. In reality, the roughly 100,000 PMF fighters who belong to Iranian-backed militias follow the orders of the Quds Force and their own commanders. The number of active fighters is lower than this; many of the members of the pro-Iranian militias do not report for duty, and commanders pocket the extra salaries. Some ideologically committed members remain. At least one or two of the 45 Kataib Hezbollah members I encountered in captivity were devout and appeared genuine when expressing their desire to sacrifice their lives for the cause, and the most dedicated loyalists often belong to cells under direct Quds Force command. But new militia members largely are not driven by religious fervor or commitment to Iran. They did not rush to the frontlines when Sunni jihadists were taking over large swaths of Iraq, including areas near shrines holding the graves of two Shiite imams; they joined when the threat was gone and salaries were available.
Like their foot soldiers, most militia leaders are not ideologically motivated, either, according to several of my interviewees who know these men personally. When these groups were formed, some leaders were driven by desire to gain power or influence, or to kill with impunity. One Iraqi politician recounted that Khazali said he had taken up weapons because he did not want Shiites to be upstaged by Sunnis in the fight against occupation. Another former high-ranking Iraqi politician said that another militia commander had first sought U.S. backing to lead a faction against Iranian-aligned groups but, when that effort failed, moved on to lead an Iranian-backed militia.
Having access to vast riches has changed the commanders’ motivations. Nearly all of them had come from poverty. Tamimi explained that although “at first, making money wasn’t the goal,” the commanders “got used to the money” over time. Abdul Razzaq al-Hayyali, who joined the Badr Corps in 1982 after being captured during the Iran-Iraq War as a young officer, told me that after the group returned to Iraq in 2003 and proceeded to take over several state institutions—which meant access to the oil revenues—its leaders “started competing with each other over who gets more billions, they all have palaces, they have banks filled up with money in Iraq, Iran, the Gulf, abroad. They’re stealing as if possessed.”
In their public rhetoric, the Iranian-backed militias insist their goal is to resist what they still refer to as U.S. occupation (around 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq) and to defend Shiite Islam. But these militias have not engaged in any major battle on Iraqi soil for almost a decade since the war with ISIS, and their attacks on U.S. targets and Israel have been mostly for show, causing little damage. Internally, fighters pretend to each other and lie to themselves that they are devout and committed holy warriors, but most joined for material reasons and many are not particularly religious. Everyone wants to avoid getting killed. The leaders want to enjoy the fortunes they have amassed, and the foot soldiers want to continue drawing their paychecks.
Until now, the material pursuits of the Iraqi militias matched the preferences of the Iranian regime. The militias have focused on the mass embezzlement of Iraqi state coffers and extortion of Iraqi citizens and businesses, establishing economic offices and companies to help them guzzle up those resources and then splitting the profits with the IRGC. Tehran has been happy with this arrangement. After all, it has not needed the militias to fight on Iraqi territory anymore; the U.S. military presence in the country is confined to a single base in Iraqi Kurdistan and is set to end in September. But it has needed them to help the Iranian economy stay afloat. A deadly mix of corruption and increasingly tight foreign sanctions have taken a heavy toll, and Iran has relied on its Iraqi proxies to smuggle in U.S. dollars to keep the Iranian currency from total collapse and to smuggle out oil and drugs (particularly meth) into Iraq and other Arab states to generate much-needed revenue for the regime. The militias’ economic offices have concocted various schemes that enabled them to move billions of dollars out of Iraq’s state coffers and into Iran’s.
In addition to enriching the Iranian regime, the Iraqi militias advance both parties’ interests by securing their own political dominance, which in turn provides Tehran authority over Baghdad. The militias have maintained their position through repression, such as when they violently crushed anti-regime protests in Iraq in 2019. They have carried out acts of political violence, too: in 2021, when a Shiite-Kurdish-Sunni coalition sought to form a government excluding some of the militias’ parties, the militias targeted its Kurdish and Sunni members with drones until they gave up on the plan. The militias have also taken steps to capture the state by appointing loyalists or pliable figures to key judicial and executive positions and through mass vote buying in the November 2025 parliamentary elections, as documented in videos and testimonies of people who were hired by political parties as election observers in exchange for their votes and the votes of their relatives.
Iran recognizes that if the Iraqi militias were to take significant military action against the United States and Israel, the devastating response that action would trigger would undermine the militias’ grip on power and their ability to siphon off Iraq’s resources. According to the commander of Israel’s Northern Command, General Ori Gordin, Tehran pressured Lebanon’s Hezbollah to intervene when Israel and the United States attacked Iran in the 12-day war; in contrast, according to Iraqi sources speaking to the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat and the British think tank RUSI, Tehran discouraged the Iraqi militias from entering the fray. The purposes of the two proxies are different. Hezbollah receives massive financial assistance from Iran and from the Iraqi militias, and its function is to fight on Iran’s orders. The Iraqi militias’ job in recent years has been to preserve Iran’s influence over Iraqi politics and to continue the plunder of Iraq’s resources.
STAYING OUT OF TROUBLE
Today, with a war underway between Iran, Israel, and the United States, the interests of the Iraqi militias and Iranian regime may be diverging for the first time. U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated that he hopes the war will bring down the regime itself, but most militia leaders and rank and file do not want to go down in flames alongside it.
Wealthy militia commanders are wary about fighting Iran’s wars. According to an attendee at a tribal iftar gathering on February 24, Khazali, whose militia is nominally loyal to Iran, cursed fellow commanders who are eager to fight the Americans, saying at the dinner, “We don’t want to enter a war with the U.S., we want a stable Iraq. A war is not in the interest of Iraq.” According to acquaintances who knew Khazali in the 1990s, he used to suffer from hunger and wear cheap nylon pants and plastic shoes. Now, according to an Iraqi politician, Khazali “is the strongest economic actor in Iraq.” The militia commander is “afraid of being killed by the Americans or Brits,” the politician added. “If you offer Qais now to become a Mossad agent”—that is, an agent of the Israeli intelligence service—“he would, merely to avoid getting killed.”
There are still committed cells within the Iraqi militias run directly by the Quds Force, but their numbers amount to a few thousand fighters, at most, out of the tens of thousands of militia members, and the arsenal they have access to is not impressive—mostly drones and some ballistic missiles. Since the outbreak of the war, these cells have attacked U.S. and Kurdish targets, carrying out dozens of drone strikes and a few missile strikes that so far have caused material damage but no loss of life. Their purpose appears to be to show symbolic support for Iran while avoiding anything that could invite significant retaliation.
The Iraqi militias are not likely to make a difference militarily as the fight continues. If the war ends with some version of the current Iranian regime still in charge, however, the militias will continue to serve as Tehran’s economic life support. Whatever comes next, the militias’ focus on self-enrichment would be a vulnerability their adversaries can exploit. Unlike the suicidal jihadists they claim to be, militia members do not want to die and will comply when credibly threatened. This is why I was released after 903 days in Kataib Hezbollah captivity. Mark Savaya, Trump’s Iraqi-American campaign backer and friend, met with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in early September and, as he recounted to me later, told Sudani to convey a message to the militia’s leadership: “Trump is pissed, and if Elizabeth is not released within a week, the U.S. will kill you.” I was free a week later.
Although the use of force and credible threats have proved effective at compelling the militias to change their conduct, there are plenty of other ways to reduce their power. The large numbers of personnel who are interested in their salaries alone can be easily bought off by foreign intelligence services. Sanctions on the militias’ leaders, their businesses and financial networks, and the Iraqi officials who funnel funds to the militias can restrict the groups’ profits if sanctions are applied consistently and updated to include new shell companies. The militias’ dependence on state resources also makes them vulnerable to sanctions on Iraqi oil, for example, which provides 92 percent of the government’s revenues. The government’s own vulnerability means, too, that pressure from high-level U.S. officials can force Iraq’s political leadership to shut down the countless schemes the militias use to siphon off state resources.
This armed network has largely captured the Iraqi state, but dismantling it would not be as difficult a task as it seems. That task will become an urgent one, too, if the Iranian regime survives this war. In that scenario, the economic lifeline the militias provide would pose a long-term threat to Western interests. All forms of pressure should thus be brought to bear on the Iraqi militias to prevent them from helping reinvigorate and sustain the battered regime in Tehran.
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