For months, a war has been unfolding across Iraq with little of the fanfare that once accompanied American military campaigns in the region. There are no embedded journalists photographing convoys rolling through the desert, no prime-time presidential addresses. Instead, American warplanes and drones have been systematically dismantling the infrastructure of the Popular Mobilization Forces. American forces have carried out repeated airstrikes on P.M.F. headquarters in Baghdad, Mosul, and Anbar Province, assassinating senior commanders and reducing fortified compounds to rubble. The targets have included logistics networks, weapons depots, and command-and-control nodes that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spent the better part of a decade constructing. General Michael Kurilla, Admiral Cooper’s predecessor at CENTCOM, had for years warned that Tehran was systematically “militarizing” these groups to serve as a forward-deployed deterrent against the United States and Israel.

What American planners may not have fully anticipated is that the P.M.F. factions have spent those same years evolving. They are no longer a monolith under Tehran’s command. P.M.F. commanders, speaking through intermediaries and in rare on-the-record interviews with Arabic-language outlets, are emphatic on this point. “We are Iraqis first,” one senior figure told Al Jazeera. “The Americans think they can erase us, but every strike only deepens our resolve.” It is the kind of defiance that American commanders have heard before in Iraq — and that has rarely proved hollow.

Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has spent two decades tracking the P.M.F., argues that American strikes are producing an unintended consequence. “The P.M.F. is........

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