--- title: "Iraq: Caught Between Washington and Tehran as War Engulfs the Region" description: "Last month, Iraq's highest security body convened an emergency meeting in Baghdad. On the agenda was a single, startling item: green-lighting the country's paramilitaries to fire on American troops by \"all available means.\" The government that Washington installed in 2003, paid to rebuild, and has spent two decades propping up had just authorized attacks on American soldiers stationed on Iraqi soil.\n\nYet the United States is hardly the only nation on which Iraq depends. Baghdad has spent twenty years taking weapons and money from Washington while importing electricity and nearly everything else from Tehran. It is one of the most delicate balancing acts in the modern Middle East, and it only works so long as those two powers are not killing each other.\n\nFifty days into the war between the United States and Iran, that is precisely the position in which Iraq finds itself. The country sits atop one of the strangest geopolitical arrangements in the region, and the coming weeks will decide whether that balance survives the war or whether Iraq becomes its next casualty.\n\nThis is the story of how a state designed to be balanced between two patrons may have already lost the power to choose between them.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- On March 24th, Iraq's Ministerial Council for National Security formally authorized Iraqi security forces, including the paramilitaries, to respond to future American strikes by \"all available means,\" pushing firing authority down to individual unit commanders with no central sign-off required.\n- The Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) draw Iraqi state salaries and a federal budget share now grown to $3.6 billion a year, yet a significant portion answer not to Baghdad but to Tehran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.\n- Iraq is structurally bound to both belligerents: Iran supplies about a third of its electricity and $12 billion in annual trade, while the United States controls the dollar pipeline through the Iraqi Central Bank's account at the New York Federal Reserve.\n- The PMF was born from the 2014 collapse at Mosul, where roughly 60,000 Iraqi troops abandoned their positions to a few thousand ISIS fighters, and it went on to help win the war against the Islamic State, earning a legitimacy Baghdad could not later strip away.\n- Analysts warn this may be the slow-motion transformation of a state that, when forced to choose between Washington and Tehran, may find the choice was already made for it by the militias it has been bankrolling.\n\n## Who Is Really in Charge?\n\nOn the afternoon of March 24th, an emergency meeting convened at the Ministerial Council for National Security, Iraq's highest security body. The prime minister was present, along with the national security adviser, the heads of Iraq's intelligence services, and nearly every other senior figure in Baghdad. Also in the room was a rotating collection of figures representing the country's paramilitary forces, the armed groups that officially sit under the Iraqi state but in practice often report to someone else, somewhere else, entirely.\n\nEarlier that morning, a US-Israeli airstrike had hit one of their bases in Anbar province, killing 15 fighters. The question on the agenda was how Baghdad would respond. There was no call for restraint and no urging of dialogue. The council formally authorized Iraqi security forces, including the paramilitaries, to respond to future American strikes by \"all available means.\"\n\nIt was about as broad an authorization as the council could issue. Firing authority was pushed straight down to individual unit commanders, with no sign-off from central command required. The government Washington created in the aftermath of the Iraq War had answered a request to target Americans on Iraqi soil with, in effect, a shrug of assent.\n\n## The State That Does Not Command Its Own Guns\n\nA source close to the prime minister told the Alhurra network that he had signed the directive under pressure from the paramilitaries themselves. That account is plausible: earlier in the month, the premier had refused even to name the groups responsible for attacks on American targets, even as those groups claimed the strikes on social media in real time.\n\nThe directive makes more sense once you understand what these paramilitary groups are. Officially, they are a state-recognized security institution, drawing funding partly from the federal budget, with a commander who reports directly to the prime minister. In reality, a significant portion of them answer not to Baghdad but to Tehran, whose Revolutionary Guard Corps has trained, funded, and in several cases directly commanded them for the better part of a decade. When those two theories of who is in charge collided in that room on the 24th, the outcome showed which way the balance tilts.\n\nThese networks had not been waiting for permission. In the weeks before the March 24 meeting, they had already launched hundreds of drone and rocket strikes on American and Kurdish targets, with some days reporting dozens of launches.\n\n## An Honest Assessment From the Foreign Minister\n\nFuad Hussein, Iraq's foreign minister, offered perhaps the most candid assessment of the country's predicament. In a Kurdish TV interview on March 22nd, he was asked whether Baghdad could control its own paramilitaries if it came to it. His answer, on the record and on camera, was unsparing: \"I don't believe so. If it becomes a matter of control leading to conflict, I don't know who holds the balance of military power.\"\n\nThe picture grew darker still around the same time. The spokesman for a group that had just bombed Iraq's intelligence services, killing one, went on television to accuse its Kurdish officers of being Mossad spies. He singled out the deputy director, a sitting Iraqi state official, as a foreign agent. A militia inside the state was publicly branding the state's own officials as enemy assets, and doing so with impunity.\n\nIt is a great deal to absorb. In the midst of an on-again, off-again war with Iran, Iraq now appears to be edging into the fight itself. But the situation is comprehensible once you grasp the basics, and those begin more than a decade ago.\n\n## Ghosts of Mosul\n\nThe story really starts in the summer of 2014, with one of the more dramatic military collapses of the 21st century. By that time, the US-trained, US-equipped Iraqi army had been steadily pushed back across the country's west by fighters from the Islamic State, who had spilled over from the chaos in Syria and begun carving out a self-governed region across Iraq's Sunni-majority provinces. Fallujah had fallen in January, Ramadi was under siege by spring, and by early June, ISIS fighters were arriving at the gates of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city.\n\nMosul was officially guarded by some 60,000 Iraqi troops and federal police, facing an ISIS force numbering in the low thousands. The battle lasted four days before those 60,000 troops abandoned their positions, left behind their US-supplied Abrams tanks and Humvees, and ran. This was a few hours' drive from Baghdad, and nobody could stop them.\n\nMuch of the blame, both then and now, landed on one man: Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister at the time. A 2015 Iraqi parliamentary inquiry formally recommended criminal charges. Maliki had spent his second term systematically purging non-loyalist officers from the army and stacking the senior ranks with Shia cronies of questionable qualification. His domestic policy was so transparently sectarian that it helped turn Iraq's Sunni provinces into recruiting pipelines for jihadists.\n\n## Soleimani's Offer and Sistani's Decree\n\nTo its credit, Iraq's government had seen the collapse coming and repeatedly requested air assistance from the United States. But the Obama administration, still nursing the wounds of its 2011 withdrawal and dreading a return to Iraq, declined. Iran did not hesitate. ISIS was a catastrophic threat to the Islamic Republic, and Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was reportedly on a flight to Baghdad within days of the Mosul collapse, offering advisers, weapons, and cash. There were strings attached, of course, but given the situation, the Iraqi government had little alternative.\n\nIran also leveraged its shared religious identity with the majority of Iraqis. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, issued a religious decree calling on every able-bodied Iraqi man to take up a rifle and volunteer for the defense of the country. Tens of thousands answered, producing the largest military mobilization in Iraq's modern history. With the existing army evaporated, the government was forced to improvise a structure capable of absorbing them.\n\n## The Birth of the Popular Mobilization Forces\n\nWhat emerged was an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF. On paper it looked like an emergency wartime measure. In practice, the structure also absorbed a pre-existing network of Iranian-backed militias, groups that had spent the previous decade fighting the American occupation on Tehran's behalf. By the end of 2014, groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq had embedded themselves inside the new structure, drawing Iraqi state salaries while still taking orders from Tehran.\n\nWhat makes all of this so difficult to untangle a decade later is that the PMF actually helped win the war against ISIS, at least inside Iraq. With the regular army still in pieces, it fell to the PMF, later backed by desperately needed air support from the US-led coalition, to do the brutal house-to-house work of retaking cities like Tikrit and Fallujah. The Iraqi government eventually earned back some legitimacy by retaking Mosul itself, where thousands of PMF fighters died in the campaign.\n\nBy the time ISIS was territorially defeated in 2017, the PMF had emerged as the heroes, especially among the Shia community but even in Sunni areas that had lived under Islamic State control. For people who saw the PMF, and not the army, come to their aid, that was something they would never forget.\n\n## Absorb, Pay, and Hope\n\nGiven that legacy, Baghdad could not simply disband them. The state's method for dealing with the PMF has been the same one it has used since 2003 for every other sectarian faction in the country: absorb them into the system, give them enough money to keep them happy, and hope they do not cause too much trouble. In 2016, parliament formally folded the PMF into the Iraqi security forces as an independent institution reporting to the prime minister. The factions got their salaries, their legal cover, and a guaranteed slice of the federal budget that has since grown to $3.6 billion a year.\n\nWhat they did not get, and what Baghdad never really tried to impose, was a chain of command that actually ran through Baghdad. The state purchased the loyalty of the institution without ever purchasing its obedience. The bill for that omission would eventually come due.\n\n## The World's Most Awkward Love Triangle\n\nThe answer to the question \"what could go wrong?\" arrived on February 28th, 2026, as American and Israeli bombs crashed down on Iran. The structural problem for Iraq is brutally simple: its two most important international partners are, at this exact moment, shooting at each other through Iraqi territory.\n\nThe first partner, Iran, is Iraq's immediate neighbor, with whom it shares a 1,500-kilometer border. Trade between the two countries came in at roughly $12 billion in 2024, making Iraq Tehran's second-largest partner after China. Because so much of Iraq's manufacturing base was destroyed during the ISIS years and never came back, this dependence is critical. Everything from food to construction materials to pharmaceuticals flows in from the Islamic Republic. Beyond goods, Iranian energy supplies about a third of Iraq's electricity, and when Tehran turns that off, as it did multiple times in 2024 and during the opening days of the current war, entire Iraqi cities go dark.\n\n## Washington's Kill Switch\n\nThe second partner, the United States, plays an equally vital role. Since 2014, Washington has funneled more than $15 billion in security assistance into Iraq, training the Counter-Terrorism Service, the only genuinely cross-sectarian elite unit in the Iraqi military, and providing air power that did much of the heavy lifting in pushing ISIS out of the country's north.\n\nBeyond the military relationship sits the financial architecture. Roughly 90 percent of Iraq's government revenue comes from oil sales, conducted in dollars that must first pass through an account the Iraqi Central Bank keeps at the Federal Reserve in New York. That arrangement gives Washington something close to a kill switch on the Iraqi economy. When the Treasury tightened the rules on how those dollars cleared, as it has done repeatedly since 2022, blacklisting individual Iraqi banks and holding up specific transfers, the dinar wobbled and import prices spiked within days.\n\nBaghdad cannot afford to lose that pipeline any more than it can afford to lose the Iranian electricity that keeps half the country lit. Picking between them is not really an option, yet since early March the two partners have been actively killing each other's forces on Iraqi soil.\n\n## Fifty Days of War on Iraqi Soil\n\nSince the first week of the war, the Iran-aligned factions of the PMF have waged what amounts to a coordinated campaign against American and Iraqi government targets from inside Iraqi territory. The attacks have struck some of the country's most important locations: drones on Harir Air Base, where US troops are stationed, rockets on the US consulate in Erbil, and a strike on Camp Victory near Baghdad, among others. American and Israeli fire, meanwhile, has left around 80 PMF fighters dead and over 250 wounded, with Iraqi army, police, and civilians killed in the crossfire.\n\nIn a bitter irony, it was Erbil, the Kurdish capital that had spent most of the post-2003 era as the country's stable corner, that wound up taking drone and missile fire on a near-daily basis. The one region that had escaped two decades of chaos became a front line.\n\nOn April 7th, Washington and Tehran announced a two-week ceasefire, and the Iran-aligned PMF factions followed suit a day later. Things have mostly held since, but at the time of recording, that ceasefire is set to expire in just a few hours.\n\n## A Political Crisis at the Worst Possible Moment\n\nWhat can be said for certain is that the last six weeks have fundamentally transformed Iraq, and they have done so while Baghdad was already in a fragile place. After parliamentary elections last November, the country has been stuck in limbo, unable to form a government. The holdup comes down to the largest bloc in parliament solidifying around Nouri al-Maliki as its choice for prime minister.\n\nThis is the same Nouri al-Maliki whose previous premiership oversaw the rise of the Islamic State and the complete collapse of the Iraqi army. The caretaker prime minister, Sudani, remains in office, and while he may end up securing a second term, it would be through sheer lack of a viable alternative rather than any ringing endorsement of his tenure.\n\nIn isolation, none of this would be unfamiliar ground for Baghdad, a government so chronically dysfunctional that it would make Belgium look like a paragon of calm and thoughtful governance. The danger is the timing. This political crisis is peaking at the exact moment that Iraq's two most important partners are trying to force Baghdad to make a choice: a shotgun marriage with the United States, or betrothal to the Islamic Republic next door.\n\n## Tehran Is Not Leaving It to Chance\n\nIran is not waiting around. Over the weekend, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani made his first appearance since the war with the United States broke out, but not in Tehran or Esfahan. He was in Baghdad, reported to be \"holding meetings with pro-Tehran militias and political leaders as a fragile ceasefire with the US holds.\"\n\nTo Tehran's point, time may be of the essence. Multiple scholars have framed this as a do-or-die moment for Iraq to rein in its militias before it is too late. David Schenker of the Washington Institute wrote that \"if Baghdad does not act soon, Iraq, too, will become a failed state.\"\n\nOthers are even less charitable, including Chatham House's Renad Mansour and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' Bridget Toomey. There is real logic to their pessimism. Mansour argues that \"the [Iraqi] government is so fragmented and lacks the power to be able to go after some of these groups, even if there is some will from some of the political elites in Baghdad to put an end to these militias.\" Toomey adds that \"government officials in Baghdad will only act against the militias under U.S. pressure.\"\n\n## A Wedding Already Planned\n\nSo where does that leave Iraq? There are no indications it will see a repeat of 2014; the PMF will make sure of that. But beyond that immediate point lies a deeper concern: that what we are witnessing is the slow-motion transformation of a country that, when the war ends and Baghdad is finally forced to pick a side, may discover the choice was already made for it.\n\nThe wedding bells, in this telling, are already ringing in Tehran, and the ceremony has been planned out by the very militias Baghdad has been bankrolling all along. Iraq's government may not collapse in the old-fashioned sense. But it may have already lost control of its most effective fighters, and with them, its ability to decide its own future.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What did Iraq's security council authorize on March 24th?\n\nThe Ministerial Council for National Security, Iraq's highest security body, formally authorized Iraqi security forces, including the paramilitaries, to respond to future American strikes by \"all available means.\" Firing authority was pushed down to individual unit commanders, requiring no sign-off from central command. The meeting followed a US-Israeli airstrike that morning on a paramilitary base in Anbar province, which killed 15 fighters.\n\n### What are the Popular Mobilization Forces, and who do they actually answer to?\n\nThe PMF is a state-recognized Iraqi security institution that draws partial federal funding and whose commander officially reports to the prime minister. In reality, a significant portion of its factions answer to Tehran, whose Revolutionary Guard Corps has trained, funded, and in several cases directly commanded them for nearly a decade. Groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq draw Iraqi state salaries while taking orders from Iran.\n\n### How did the PMF originate, and why couldn't Baghdad dismantle it afterward?\n\nIt emerged from the 2014 ISIS offensive that saw roughly 60,000 Iraqi troops abandon Mosul to a few thousand ISIS fighters. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a decree calling on able-bodied men to volunteer, producing the largest military mobilization in Iraq's modern history. The PMF helped win the war against ISIS and earned enormous legitimacy, particularly among Shia communities; parliament formalized it as an independent security institution in 2016 with a $3.6 billion annual budget, making disbandment politically impossible.\n\n### Why can't Iraq simply choose between the United States and Iran?\n\nIraq is structurally bound to both belligerents. Iran supplies about a third of Iraq's electricity and roughly $12 billion in annual trade, including food, construction materials, and pharmaceuticals, much of which is critical because Iraq's manufacturing base was destroyed during the ISIS years. The United States has provided more than $15 billion in security assistance since 2014 and controls the dollar pipeline through the Iraqi Central Bank's account at the Federal Reserve in New York — giving Washington something close to a kill switch on the Iraqi economy.\n\n### What role is Iran playing inside Iraq during the current war?\n\nIran-aligned PMF factions launched a coordinated campaign from Iraqi territory against American and Iraqi government targets, striking Harir Air Base, the US consulate in Erbil, and Camp Victory near Baghdad. American and Israeli fire killed around 80 PMF fighters and wounded over 250. After a two-week ceasefire was announced on April 7th, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani appeared in Baghdad — his first public appearance since the war began — meeting pro-Tehran militias and political leaders.\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/iraq-the-middle-easts-next-crisis.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/iraq-the-middle-easts-next-crisis datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/oYL-dj5AHvM/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 1f250e1f6e62abba2323cb1d58634a37967f908729ac88eb28feefe7948e5963 tokens: 5125 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/iraq-the-middle-easts-next-crisis.md.summary.md --- Last month, Iraq's highest security body convened an emergency meeting in Baghdad. On the agenda was a single, startling item: green-lighting the country's paramilitaries to fire on American troops by "all available means." The government that Washington installed in 2003, paid to rebuild, and has spent two decades propping up had just authorized attacks on American soldiers stationed on Iraqi soil. Yet the United States is hardly the only nation on which Iraq depends. Baghdad has spent twenty years taking weapons and money from Washington while importing electricity and nearly everything else from Tehran. It is one of the most delicate balancing acts in the modern Middle East, and it only works so long as those two powers are not killing each other. Fifty days into the war between the United States and Iran, that is precisely the position in which Iraq finds itself. The country sits atop one of the strangest geopolitical arrangements in the region, and the coming weeks will decide whether that balance survives the war or whether Iraq becomes its next casualty. This is the story of how a state designed to be balanced between two patrons may have already lost the power to choose between them. ## Key Takeaways - On March 24th, Iraq's Ministerial Council for National Security formally authorized Iraqi security forces, including the paramilitaries, to respond to future American strikes by "all available means," pushing firing authority down to individual unit commanders with no central sign-off required. - The Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) draw Iraqi state salaries and a federal budget share now grown to $3.6 billion a year, yet a significant portion answer not to Baghdad but to Tehran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. - Iraq is structurally bound to both belligerents: Iran supplies about a third of its electricity and $12 billion in annual trade, while the United States controls the dollar pipeline through the Iraqi Central Bank's account at the New York Federal Reserve. - The PMF was born from the 2014 collapse at Mosul, where roughly 60,000 Iraqi troops abandoned their positions to a few thousand ISIS fighters, and it went on to help win the war against the Islamic State, earning a legitimacy Baghdad could not later strip away. - Analysts warn this may be the slow-motion transformation of a state that, when forced to choose between Washington and Tehran, may find the choice was already made for it by the militias it has been bankrolling. ## Who Is Really in Charge? On the afternoon of March 24th, an emergency meeting convened at the Ministerial Council for National Security, Iraq's highest security body. The prime minister was present, along with the national security adviser, the heads of Iraq's intelligence services, and nearly every other senior figure in Baghdad. Also in the room was a rotating collection of figures representing the country's paramilitary forces, the armed groups that officially sit under the Iraqi state but in practice often report to someone else, somewhere else, entirely. Earlier that morning, a US-Israeli airstrike had hit one of their bases in Anbar province, killing 15 fighters. The question on the agenda was how Baghdad would respond. There was no call for restraint and no urging of dialogue. The council formally authorized Iraqi security forces, including the paramilitaries, to respond to future American strikes by "all available means." It was about as broad an authorization as the council could issue. Firing authority was pushed straight down to individual unit commanders, with no sign-off from central command required. The government Washington created in the aftermath of the Iraq War had answered a request to target Americans on Iraqi soil with, in effect, a shrug of assent. ## The State That Does Not Command Its Own Guns A source close to the prime minister told the Alhurra network that he had signed the directive under pressure from the paramilitaries themselves. That account is plausible: earlier in the month, the premier had refused even to name the groups responsible for attacks on American targets, even as those groups claimed the strikes on social media in real time. The directive makes more sense once you understand what these paramilitary groups are. Officially, they are a state-recognized security institution, drawing funding partly from the federal budget, with a commander who reports directly to the prime minister. In reality, a significant portion of them answer not to Baghdad but to Tehran, whose Revolutionary Guard Corps has trained, funded, and in several cases directly commanded them for the better part of a decade. When those two theories of who is in charge collided in that room on the 24th, the outcome showed which way the balance tilts. These networks had not been waiting for permission. In the weeks before the March 24 meeting, they had already launched hundreds of drone and rocket strikes on American and Kurdish targets, with some days reporting dozens of launches. ## An Honest Assessment From the Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein, Iraq's foreign minister, offered perhaps the most candid assessment of the country's predicament. In a Kurdish TV interview on March 22nd, he was asked whether Baghdad could control its own paramilitaries if it came to it. His answer, on the record and on camera, was unsparing: "I don't believe so. If it becomes a matter of control leading to conflict, I don't know who holds the balance of military power." The picture grew darker still around the same time. The spokesman for a group that had just bombed Iraq's intelligence services, killing one, went on television to accuse its Kurdish officers of being Mossad spies. He singled out the deputy director, a sitting Iraqi state official, as a foreign agent. A militia inside the state was publicly branding the state's own officials as enemy assets, and doing so with impunity. It is a great deal to absorb. In the midst of an on-again, off-again war with Iran, Iraq now appears to be edging into the fight itself. But the situation is comprehensible once you grasp the basics, and those begin more than a decade ago. ## Ghosts of Mosul The story really starts in the summer of 2014, with one of the more dramatic military collapses of the 21st century. By that time, the US-trained, US-equipped Iraqi army had been steadily pushed back across the country's west by fighters from the Islamic State, who had spilled over from the chaos in Syria and begun carving out a self-governed region across Iraq's Sunni-majority provinces. Fallujah had fallen in January, Ramadi was under siege by spring, and by early June, ISIS fighters were arriving at the gates of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. Mosul was officially guarded by some 60,000 Iraqi troops and federal police, facing an ISIS force numbering in the low thousands. The battle lasted four days before those 60,000 troops abandoned their positions, left behind their US-supplied Abrams tanks and Humvees, and ran. This was a few hours' drive from Baghdad, and nobody could stop them. Much of the blame, both then and now, landed on one man: Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister at the time. A 2015 Iraqi parliamentary inquiry formally recommended criminal charges. Maliki had spent his second term systematically purging non-loyalist officers from the army and stacking the senior ranks with Shia cronies of questionable qualification. His domestic policy was so transparently sectarian that it helped turn Iraq's Sunni provinces into recruiting pipelines for jihadists. ## Soleimani's Offer and Sistani's Decree To its credit, Iraq's government had seen the collapse coming and repeatedly requested air assistance from the United States. But the Obama administration, still nursing the wounds of its 2011 withdrawal and dreading a return to Iraq, declined. Iran did not hesitate. ISIS was a catastrophic threat to the Islamic Republic, and Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was reportedly on a flight to Baghdad within days of the Mosul collapse, offering advisers, weapons, and cash. There were strings attached, of course, but given the situation, the Iraqi government had little alternative. Iran also leveraged its shared religious identity with the majority of Iraqis. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, issued a religious decree calling on every able-bodied Iraqi man to take up a rifle and volunteer for the defense of the country. Tens of thousands answered, producing the largest military mobilization in Iraq's modern history. With the existing army evaporated, the government was forced to improvise a structure capable of absorbing them. ## The Birth of the Popular Mobilization Forces What emerged was an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF. On paper it looked like an emergency wartime measure. In practice, the structure also absorbed a pre-existing network of Iranian-backed militias, groups that had spent the previous decade fighting the American occupation on Tehran's behalf. By the end of 2014, groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq had embedded themselves inside the new structure, drawing Iraqi state salaries while still taking orders from Tehran. What makes all of this so difficult to untangle a decade later is that the PMF actually helped win the war against ISIS, at least inside Iraq. With the regular army still in pieces, it fell to the PMF, later backed by desperately needed air support from the US-led coalition, to do the brutal house-to-house work of retaking cities like Tikrit and Fallujah. The Iraqi government eventually earned back some legitimacy by retaking Mosul itself, where thousands of PMF fighters died in the campaign. By the time ISIS was territorially defeated in 2017, the PMF had emerged as the heroes, especially among the Shia community but even in Sunni areas that had lived under Islamic State control. For people who saw the PMF, and not the army, come to their aid, that was something they would never forget. ## Absorb, Pay, and Hope Given that legacy, Baghdad could not simply disband them. The state's method for dealing with the PMF has been the same one it has used since 2003 for every other sectarian faction in the country: absorb them into the system, give them enough money to keep them happy, and hope they do not cause too much trouble. In 2016, parliament formally folded the PMF into the Iraqi security forces as an independent institution reporting to the prime minister. The factions got their salaries, their legal cover, and a guaranteed slice of the federal budget that has since grown to $3.6 billion a year. What they did not get, and what Baghdad never really tried to impose, was a chain of command that actually ran through Baghdad. The state purchased the loyalty of the institution without ever purchasing its obedience. The bill for that omission would eventually come due. ## The World's Most Awkward Love Triangle The answer to the question "what could go wrong?" arrived on February 28th, 2026, as American and Israeli bombs crashed down on Iran. The structural problem for Iraq is brutally simple: its two most important international partners are, at this exact moment, shooting at each other through Iraqi territory. The first partner, Iran, is Iraq's immediate neighbor, with whom it shares a 1,500-kilometer border. Trade between the two countries came in at roughly $12 billion in 2024, making Iraq Tehran's second-largest partner after China. Because so much of Iraq's manufacturing base was destroyed during the ISIS years and never came back, this dependence is critical. Everything from food to construction materials to pharmaceuticals flows in from the Islamic Republic. Beyond goods, Iranian energy supplies about a third of Iraq's electricity, and when Tehran turns that off, as it did multiple times in 2024 and during the opening days of the current war, entire Iraqi cities go dark. ## Washington's Kill Switch The second partner, the United States, plays an equally vital role. Since 2014, Washington has funneled more than $15 billion in security assistance into Iraq, training the Counter-Terrorism Service, the only genuinely cross-sectarian elite unit in the Iraqi military, and providing air power that did much of the heavy lifting in pushing ISIS out of the country's north. Beyond the military relationship sits the financial architecture. Roughly 90 percent of Iraq's government revenue comes from oil sales, conducted in dollars that must first pass through an account the Iraqi Central Bank keeps at the Federal Reserve in New York. That arrangement gives Washington something close to a kill switch on the Iraqi economy. When the Treasury tightened the rules on how those dollars cleared, as it has done repeatedly since 2022, blacklisting individual Iraqi banks and holding up specific transfers, the dinar wobbled and import prices spiked within days. Baghdad cannot afford to lose that pipeline any more than it can afford to lose the Iranian electricity that keeps half the country lit. Picking between them is not really an option, yet since early March the two partners have been actively killing each other's forces on Iraqi soil. ## Fifty Days of War on Iraqi Soil Since the first week of the war, the Iran-aligned factions of the PMF have waged what amounts to a coordinated campaign against American and Iraqi government targets from inside Iraqi territory. The attacks have struck some of the country's most important locations: drones on Harir Air Base, where US troops are stationed, rockets on the US consulate in Erbil, and a strike on Camp Victory near Baghdad, among others. American and Israeli fire, meanwhile, has left around 80 PMF fighters dead and over 250 wounded, with Iraqi army, police, and civilians killed in the crossfire. In a bitter irony, it was Erbil, the Kurdish capital that had spent most of the post-2003 era as the country's stable corner, that wound up taking drone and missile fire on a near-daily basis. The one region that had escaped two decades of chaos became a front line. On April 7th, Washington and Tehran announced a two-week ceasefire, and the Iran-aligned PMF factions followed suit a day later. Things have mostly held since, but at the time of recording, that ceasefire is set to expire in just a few hours. ## A Political Crisis at the Worst Possible Moment What can be said for certain is that the last six weeks have fundamentally transformed Iraq, and they have done so while Baghdad was already in a fragile place. After parliamentary elections last November, the country has been stuck in limbo, unable to form a government. The holdup comes down to the largest bloc in parliament solidifying around Nouri al-Maliki as its choice for prime minister. This is the same Nouri al-Maliki whose previous premiership oversaw the rise of the Islamic State and the complete collapse of the Iraqi army. The caretaker prime minister, Sudani, remains in office, and while he may end up securing a second term, it would be through sheer lack of a viable alternative rather than any ringing endorsement of his tenure. In isolation, none of this would be unfamiliar ground for Baghdad, a government so chronically dysfunctional that it would make Belgium look like a paragon of calm and thoughtful governance. The danger is the timing. This political crisis is peaking at the exact moment that Iraq's two most important partners are trying to force Baghdad to make a choice: a shotgun marriage with the United States, or betrothal to the Islamic Republic next door. ## Tehran Is Not Leaving It to Chance Iran is not waiting around. Over the weekend, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani made his first appearance since the war with the United States broke out, but not in Tehran or Esfahan. He was in Baghdad, reported to be "holding meetings with pro-Tehran militias and political leaders as a fragile ceasefire with the US holds." To Tehran's point, time may be of the essence. Multiple scholars have framed this as a do-or-die moment for Iraq to rein in its militias before it is too late. David Schenker of the Washington Institute wrote that "if Baghdad does not act soon, Iraq, too, will become a failed state." Others are even less charitable, including Chatham House's Renad Mansour and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' Bridget Toomey. There is real logic to their pessimism. Mansour argues that "the [Iraqi] government is so fragmented and lacks the power to be able to go after some of these groups, even if there is some will from some of the political elites in Baghdad to put an end to these militias." Toomey adds that "government officials in Baghdad will only act against the militias under U.S. pressure." ## A Wedding Already Planned So where does that leave Iraq? There are no indications it will see a repeat of 2014; the PMF will make sure of that. But beyond that immediate point lies a deeper concern: that what we are witnessing is the slow-motion transformation of a country that, when the war ends and Baghdad is finally forced to pick a side, may discover the choice was already made for it. The wedding bells, in this telling, are already ringing in Tehran, and the ceremony has been planned out by the very militias Baghdad has been bankrolling all along. Iraq's government may not collapse in the old-fashioned sense. But it may have already lost control of its most effective fighters, and with them, its ability to decide its own future. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What did Iraq's security council authorize on March 24th? The Ministerial Council for National Security, Iraq's highest security body, formally authorized Iraqi security forces, including the paramilitaries, to respond to future American strikes by "all available means." Firing authority was pushed down to individual unit commanders, requiring no sign-off from central command. The meeting followed a US-Israeli airstrike that morning on a paramilitary base in Anbar province, which killed 15 fighters. ### What are the Popular Mobilization Forces, and who do they actually answer to? The PMF is a state-recognized Iraqi security institution that draws partial federal funding and whose commander officially reports to the prime minister. In reality, a significant portion of its factions answer to Tehran, whose Revolutionary Guard Corps has trained, funded, and in several cases directly commanded them for nearly a decade. Groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq draw Iraqi state salaries while taking orders from Iran. ### How did the PMF originate, and why couldn't Baghdad dismantle it afterward? It emerged from the 2014 ISIS offensive that saw roughly 60,000 Iraqi troops abandon Mosul to a few thousand ISIS fighters. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a decree calling on able-bodied men to volunteer, producing the largest military mobilization in Iraq's modern history. The PMF helped win the war against ISIS and earned enormous legitimacy, particularly among Shia communities; parliament formalized it as an independent security institution in 2016 with a $3.6 billion annual budget, making disbandment politically impossible. ### Why can't Iraq simply choose between the United States and Iran? Iraq is structurally bound to both belligerents. Iran supplies about a third of Iraq's electricity and roughly $12 billion in annual trade, including food, construction materials, and pharmaceuticals, much of which is critical because Iraq's manufacturing base was destroyed during the ISIS years. The United States has provided more than $15 billion in security assistance since 2014 and controls the dollar pipeline through the Iraqi Central Bank's account at the Federal Reserve in New York — giving Washington something close to a kill switch on the Iraqi economy. ### What role is Iran playing inside Iraq during the current war? Iran-aligned PMF factions launched a coordinated campaign from Iraqi territory against American and Iraqi government targets, striking Harir Air Base, the US consulate in Erbil, and Camp Victory near Baghdad. American and Israeli fire killed around 80 PMF fighters and wounded over 250. After a two-week ceasefire was announced on April 7th, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani appeared in Baghdad — his first public appearance since the war began — meeting pro-Tehran militias and political leaders. <!-- youtube:oYL-dj5AHvM -->