1.

Close to midnight on Tuesday, April 7, a loud explosion rattled my family’s house in a suburb of Baghdad. A column of white smoke shadowed the alleys nearby. Men murmured, milling about in the street. Policemen drove past, unsure what had landed where. Downstairs, two days before her eleventh birthday, my niece shivered in her mother’s arms.

Soon we learned that militiamen had fired a barrage of rockets and suicide drones across the city. One pierced the concrete reinforcement of a neighbor’s house, smashing into a vacant bedroom. Another killed eight-year-old Siraj Qadouri and his father, Mohammed, on their doorstep in nearby al-Amiriyah—the same neighborhood where, in 1991, American “smart” bombs incinerated some 408 civilians, including my great aunt Rajiha and her children, in a bomb shelter. Iraqis remember that inferno as al-Fajr al-Hazin—the mournful dawn.

The next morning Mohammed’s nephew, a survivor of the night’s attack, roamed the atlal—the ruins—of the crime scene, a blue nylon bag in his hand, gathering splinters from Siraj’s small cranium and bits of his brain. The image invited another from a day more than twenty years ago. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, my second cousin’s father, a security official in the new regime, was assassinated by unidentified gunmen on a highway in al-Seleikh, in the city’s north. During the funeral I looked on as the young boy picked up fragments of his father’s brain, which were strewn on the trunk mat of his red Peugeot.

No party dared or bothered to claim responsibility for the attack on April 7, which was aimed at the US-run Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center and its surrounding structures near the city’s international airport. Known collectively as Victory Camp, these installations served Washington’s embassy and facilitated movement to and from NATO coalition bases elsewhere in the country before the US and its allies shrank their footprint in Iraq earlier this year. (As in colonial times, US and NATO advisers stationed in these bases had often emerged from their barracks to conduct training drills and instruct their disgruntled native peers.) The camp in Baghdad sits on a highway that also leads to a prison, where Islamic State detainees are held after their transfer from Syria by the US, as well as several other security bases, including one for Iraq’s elite force, the Counter-Terrorism Service.

Whoever launched it, the attack was emblematic of the violence always lurking underneath Iraq’s illusory peace. After the start of the US–Israeli war on Iran and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the constellation of Shi‘a paramilitary groups known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) opened a new front in Baghdad. They have carried out hundreds of missile and drone strikes against NATO positions, Washington’s diplomatic mission, and Abu Dhabi’s consulate, as well as against Kurdish Iranian oppositionists and targets in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and beyond. They have threatened to lash out against Syria in the event that its new president, the former jihadi Ahmed al-Shara‘, dares move across the border against the Lebanese Hezbollah, with whom Iraqi militias had once allied to defend the Ba‘ath regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Most Shi‘a armed groups in the country, including the larger of the IRI’s members, belong to al-Hashd al-Shaabi (the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF). The PMF came together after Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest Shi‘a authority in Iraq, issued a 2014 fatwa calling on “able-bodied citizens” to defend their country against the Islamic State. It incorporated existing Shi‘a militias—such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah—and organized volunteers into dozens of brigades, eventually reaching over 200,000 members in total. Some are Sunni; others are Yazidi, a non-Muslim ethnoreligious group stationed around Sinjar, their ancestral home in the north of the country; but the PMF is mostly known as a Shi‘a force in a multi-religious country with a large Sunni community.

Institutionalized by a 2016 law under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi (2014–2018), the PMF was then designed to be independent of existing security structures, tied directly to the prime minister and commander-in-chief. It later started receiving some $3 billion from the annual budget. But the network became increasingly involved in politics and the economy over the past four years under Mohammed al-Sudani, who served as the country’s prime minister until ceding the job in May to a young tycoon and political neophyte named Ali al-Zaidi. It was al-Sudani, for instance, who enabled the PMF to establish al-Muhandis General Company, an ambitious conglomerate—now under sanction by the US—that works across construction, agriculture, and other industries.

When, in February of this year, the US and Israel started bombing camps and checkpoints manned by PMF brigades in northern and western Iraq, they seemed to be going after this loosely state-controlled network. In late March, a regional leader and over a dozen PMF members were killed in a strike against a PMF headquarters in al-Anbar, and the coalition went so far as to bomb the PMF chairman Falih al-Fayyadh’s residence in Mosul. Between February 28 and April 8, the PMF has said, eighty fighters were killed and more than 270 were wounded in the “Zionist-American” aggression.

In fact, what Washington had done was resume an undeclared war on the country it had supposedly “liberated” twenty-three years ago. The Americans have hardly been discriminating in their targets. The bombs have fallen both on Washington’s supposed partners in the Iraqi military and on civilians, including Imad Abdul-Dayim, a sixty-three-year-old killed on the Iranian side of the al-Shalamcheh border point with Basra during a trip to secure medicine for his wife.

Al-Sudani spent the early phase of the war making overtures to Trump, promising to rein in rogue militias. He fired intelligence officers in Nineveh governorate, which has been used as a launchpad for attacks on Harir Air Base and Washington’s consulate in Erbil; in late March his forces apprehended four suspects behind an attack that targeted a US base in Syrian territory. In a call with Emmanuel Macron on April 8, he reassured the French president that the militants behind the drone attacks the previous month that killed a French soldier, Arnaud Frion, had been arrested.

Al-Zaidi wanted to transcend al-Sudani’s limitations. In his first months in office he has presented himself as an uncompromising strongman: on July 29 he seemed adamant that he wanted to disarm the paramilitary groups, telling the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat that he “will not accept the existence of a state within a state.” The need for resistance “no longer exists,” he said. Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council has doubled down on al-Zaidi’s efforts, saying that anyone who illegally “manufactures, uses, or possesses” a drone shall be charged as a terrorist. So far, however, the masterminds behind the attacks have seemed untouchable.

Ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, spent the past three months in a no-man’s-land between two wars, and the Western press seemed alarmed more by the fate of Iraq’s oil than by that of its people. Weeks after Iraq’s airspace was finally reopened to civilian traffic, US and Israeli warplanes could still be heard over Baghdad, making it clear that any neighborhood, back street, or building in the former “city of peace” could be struck at any moment.

2.

Understanding the nature of the relationship between Iraq’s state and its paramilitary groups requires taking the measure of the long power struggle that, over the centuries, Baghdad’s rulers have had with Shi‘a Islamism. In the late Ottoman Empire Baghdad withered while the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala to its south grew in prominence, thanks to their commercial, social, and religious ties with Shi‘a Persians. The Qajars’ legitimacy, like that of their Pahlavi successors, rested on the blessing of Iraq’s Shi‘a scholars, the ‘ulama. After 1803 the state finished constructing al-Hindiyah canal on the Euphrates river, diverting its waters closer to the twin cities and creating new cultivated lands to which tribes relocated from other settlements downstream.

By the end of the Mamluk period (1749–1831), with the Ottoman reconquest of Iraq, Baghdad had fallen under the full control of the central government. Under Sultan Mahmud II (1808–1839), the Ottomans sought to consolidate Istanbul’s authority, implementing a resettlement policy in Iraq that was designed to break up established tribal confederations in the country’s south, subordinate nomadic communities, boost agriculture, and increase tax revenues.¹ The indirect effect, however, was to enable the ‘ulama to proselytize these relocated Sunni tribespeople—some of whom had fled Wahhabi raids from Arabia—into their faith and, eventually, encourage the rise of a new Shi‘a elite.²

The Ottomans, who had fought the Persians, were taken aback by these conversions. As early as 1822 they started prohibiting marriage to Persian subjects, though many Iraqis would still acquire Persian citizenship to avoid conscription in the sultan’s wars. The Ottomans restricted Shi‘a mourning rituals and sent Sunni missionaries to guide converts back to their faith. Nonetheless, by the time the Ottoman Empire crumbled after World War I, opening a path to independence, the future state held a Shi‘a majority that was mostly ambivalent toward Baghdad if not resentful of its authority.

But the Shi‘a were never a monolith, and no grand sectarian narrative explains Iraq’s politics. Writing under the fire of his own country’s civil war, Mahdi Amel, the Lebanese communist assassinated by Islamists in May 1987, stressed that sectarianism was not primordial but a modern system of domination, shaped by material forces and struggles for power—there is an “organic link between sectarianism and imperialism,” without which the former cannot be understood.³ The founding fathers of the Iraqi state were mostly Sunni former officers who had abandoned the Ottomans to fight for freedom alongside the Hashemite emir and future Iraqi king Faisal and his British backers. According to the historian Peter Sluglett, these men were Arab nationalists who envisioned a secular, not Sunni, state.⁴ But they were still anxious about the anti-imperialist Shi‘a religious leadership, the marja‘iyya, whose ‘ulama had challenged the British in myriad ways: they had encouraged the 1920 revolution against British rule, petitioned Woodrow Wilson to stand against the British mandate that ruled Iraq until its nominal independence in 1932, opposed the Anglo-Iraqi treaty of 1922, and issued fatwas forbidding the faithful from participating in the Iraqi Constituent Assembly elections and the first constitution.

The British shared this anxiety about the influence of the marja‘iyya, whose scholars they saw, in Sluglett’s words, as “reactionaries irrevocably opposed to progress.” In 1924 the colonial regime imposed a nationality law that slotted Iraqis into different legal categories based on the citizenship (Ottoman or Persian) they or their fathers held under the Sublime Porte, with the goal of limiting Iran’s influence in Iraq by severing Iraqis with Persian nationality from Iran. As Zainab Saleh writes in Political Undesirables, her recent study of Iraqi alienation policies, the law reflected an “imperial struggle over power,” assimilating many Persian subjects but forcing others to leave for Iran. (Decades later, before the eruption of the eight-year Iran–Iraq War, this same law would enable Saddam Hussein’s regime to denaturalize and deport thousands of what were deemed taba‘iyyah, Iraqis of Iranian descent, based on their ancestral designation in the 1924 documentation.)

In monarchical Iraq, however, communism soon replaced Shi‘a Islam as the main threat to the pro-British puppet regime. As early as the 1940s, the leading religious authorities were also starting to feel threatened by the pull that the Iraqi Communist Party—the largest in the region—exerted on the urbanite Shi‘a. Trading anti-imperialism for anticommunism, the ‘ulama urged the British to crack down on the ICP’s clandestine cells. After the 1958 revolution that overthrew the monarchy, the secular divide in republican Iraq was between communists, Nasserists, and Ba‘ath nationalists. To counter communism, some ‘ulama founded the Association for Najaf Scholars, planting the seeds for what a decade later would emerge as hizb al-Da‘wa al-Islamiyya, or the Da‘wa Party, whose cofounder Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr became a leading figure of Shi‘a opposition to the Ba‘athist state.

The marja‘iyya scholars themselves did not encourage an overt political stance. With the exception of al-Sadr, the most influential ayatollahs explicitly rejected the messianic politics of Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, who had been inciting dissent from his Najafi exile against the US-allied regime in Tehran, before his expulsion at the behest of the Pahlavi Shah in 1978. Still, by the late 1970s the Iraqi state had purged a number of militant ‘ulama amid its rivalry with Iran, including al-Sadr, who was murdered in 1980, and several members of the al-Hakim family. Threatened at home, many found refuge in Iran.

After the Iranian Revolution militant Shi‘ism showed a pulse of vitality in Iraq. Da‘wa operatives attacked Ba‘ath and security branches in the south, and Munazamat al-‘Amal al-Islami, another underground Islamic militant group, made an attempt on the life of Hussein’s deputy Tariq ‘Aziz at al-Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, killing several innocent students before returning to attack the public funeral. During the Iran–Iraq war, the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), an organization led by the exiled members of the al-Hakim family from Tehran, financed its own guerrilla force, the Badr Brigades, which recruited exiled Iraqis and POWs in Iran’s defense.

In the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq, many of the exiled secular and Shi‘a Iraqis collaborated with Washington and beseeched “liberation.” After the toppling of Hussein in 2003 they returned to the country, and some pandered to the coalition authority. They opened husseiniyat (Shi’a community and prayer centers) and charity institutions, extending networks of social services with the aim both of caring for their coreligionists and of entrenching their own patronage. Among the returnees were the leaders of SAIRI (later the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, ISCI) as well as Nouri al-Maliki, who has led the Da‘wa for nearly two decades and served between 2006 and 2014 as Iraq’s authoritarian prime minister. His army was widely seen as sectarian, and it included legions of ghost soldiers who existed only on paper; as officers pocketed the phantom troops’ wages, the city of Mosul fell to ISIS, whose militants committed heinous atrocities against Iraqi civilians, including a genocide against the Yazidis.

Conflict was bound to arise. Some Shi‘a leaders—like Ayatollah Sayid Ali al-Sistani, the marja‘ who spent the 1990s under house arrest—criticized the US-led occupation but urged the Shi‘a faithful to participate in the new order. The opposing view was taken by the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Son of the “White Lion” Mohammed Sadiq, Mohammed Baqir’s cousin, who was also assassinated by the Ba‘ath in 1999, al-Sadr already had a devout following among lower-caste Shi‘a who were suspicious of exiled Shi‘a parties and opposed to the occupation authority. He lacked the credentials of the two martyred Sadrs but carried their mantle of dissent. Before long he had emerged as a cult figure, speaking the language of the wretched.

Unlike his rivals, al-Sadr seemed to share Iraqis’ sense of abandonment. “The people who deserve to rule are the ones who stayed here,” he once told the Arab-American journalist Anthony Shadid.⁵ Soon his Jayish al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army), a militia named after the redeemer Twelfth Shi‘a Imam who disappeared in the ninth century, was fighting vicious battles against US troops in the labyrinthine alleys of Najaf and Baghdad’s eastern Sadr City. They also fought against their Shi‘a rivals—including the Badr Brigades, whose militants the US was attempting to use early into the occupation to stifle the Sunni insurgency—before full-scale sectarian mayhem pitted Sunni groups against the Shi‘a.

These militias, especially al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and al-Qa‘ida, would fight in the urban sectarian battles that devastated the country after the invasion. Some made their way into the new army and Ministry of Interior without forgoing their allegiances to their own movements.⁶ In his memoirs the viceroy of occupied Iraq, Paul Bremer, recalls assuring ISCI’s Abdul Aziz Hakim that “the commander of the first battalion [of the new army] will be a Shi‘ite.”

This new sectarianism, not unlike the one that the British had engineered, was inscribed within the Iraqi political order when the Governing Council divided the country’s leadership along ethnosectarian lines. Its twenty-five seats were occupied by a Shi‘a majority and a minority of Sunni Arabs and Kurds, and one seat each for a Christian and Turkman. Ironically, even the Iraqi Communist Party’s representative was grouped with the Shi‘a. Met with derision from the public, the advisory body had little but a veneer of legitimacy or independence. Its divisive nature devastated Iraq, tearing the country’s society apart and rendering functional governance impossible, especially after the February 2006 bombing of al-Askari Shrine, the resting place for the Tenth and Eleventh Shi‘a Imams in the former Abbasid city of Samarra’.

The country became a death world, its cities haunted by suicide bombings and masked marauders, cantonized behind endless concrete blast walls. No Iraqi was left untouched. On my walks to school I encountered GIs, insurgents, and lifeless bodies. My father was held at gunpoint by a Shi‘a death squad, while al-Qa‘ida kidnapped his brother. The two were released, but another Sunni group placed a death threat on our doorstep, demanding that we leave or have our blood spilled. Today’s militias are a consequence of this failure, which culminated in 2014, when Mosul, and later a third of Iraq, fell to ISIS.

3.

In 2008 the journalist Patrick Cockburn observed that the US occupiers, echoing some of their Iraqi interlocutors, had a “habit of seeing the sinister hand of Iranian intelligence behind everything that happened in Iraq.”⁷ This habit persists among politicians and commentators, who tend to treat the PMF as merely an Iranian “proxy” and to understate—or indeed ignore—the domestic interests of its different brigades. But the PMF fought the ensuant terror of Washington’s War on Terror, and some of its groups, like Hashd al-Atabat, were tied to the marja‘iyya; their volunteer members were tasked with protecting Shi‘a shrines. Like al-Sadr’s Saraya al-Salam, they had political and ideological disagreements with the Iran affiliates of the PMF, with whom they eventually fell out.

Some Shi‘a militias, meanwhile, have grown heavily involved in Iraq’s domestic politics and economy. Thanks to the unspoken laws of the country’s muhasasa ta‘ifiyah system, the ministries, like spoils of war, are divided among the victors, including Sunnis, who then seed the bureaucracy with their affiliates. As one Sunni diplomat once told me of his own employment: “It is our share.” Now the armed groups have their own, such as the powerful Asaib Ahl al-Haq, whose political wing won the Ministry of Higher Education in al-Sudani’s cabinet. Its leader, Sheikh Qais al-Khazali, has become a key figure alongside al-Maliki and Ammar al-Hakim in the Coordination Framework, the country’s ruling Shi‘a alliance.

Other sectors of the state have long been captured by Shi‘a groups. The border crossings with Iran—Mandili and al-Munthiriyah in Dyala governorate and al-Shalamcheh in Basra—have for some years been associated with Shi‘a militiamen, who, like Kurdistan’s authorities in the north, control a source of revenue and a vital artery to their patrons in Iran. In Basra, journalists and researchers have pointed to the history of both militias and tribesmen in oil smuggling and narcotics. Groups like ISCI and al-Fadhila Party competed over official posts in the local government and the oil industry. Shi‘a militias are known to operate security companies and monopolize employment with oil internationals and subcontractors, recruiting guards and drivers from their own constituencies. With the economy in their hands, the streets often erupt in protests, which change little but leave trails of blood behind. (Since 2003, these groups have often denied such reports as politically motivated defamation.)

Over time other rackets proliferated, including protection extortions and a hand in the metal waste business in the scrapyards of post-ISIS Nineveh, where militias are notorious for collecting levies at roadblocks and maintaining “business offices.” After the Tishreen Uprising of 2019, when hundreds of young protesters were killed for demonstrating against corruption and the influence of Washington and Tehran, the state needed spectacles of progress: malls, bridges, football tournaments. The ensuing construction frenzy allowed militias and Sunni and Shi‘a elites to launder their wealth in real estate projects. After the Sadrists won the elections of 2021 but failed to form a parliamentary majority against their Shi‘a rivals, clashes ensued in Baghdad. The Coordination Framework eventually prevailed, and the Sadrists withdrew from politics, leaving the Green Zone in the hands of Iran’s paramilitary and political allies. Neither the Twelve-Day War nor the genocide in Gaza convinced them to risk their comfort by escalating attacks on US or Israeli positions, and the current war has elicited little more than showmanship from the Shi‘a elites.

The factions fighting under the banner of the IRI are something of an exception. Many militias have links to the IRGC, but the IRI’s are more overt, and the network’s survival is tied to Iran’s. Kata’ib Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organization by the US as early as 2009, speaks openly about belonging to an “axis of resistance” of Iran-aligned groups that act independently, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, while Harakat al-Nujaba’ makes no secret of their allegiance to Iran’s new supreme leader. In a symbolic act, some groups, anticipating the US–Israeli war, invited volunteers to sign up for the fight even before February 28. After the outbreak of hostilities, others collected donations and opened mawakib (impromptu kitchens, among other functions) to provide aid inside Iranian cities. In his inaugural address, Mojtaba Khamenei praised them for their solidarity, and in early July leading paramilitary figures traveled to Tehran for his father’s funeral.

But even these IRI-aligned forces have footholds in the state and the PMF. Among dozens of members representing armed groups in the Council of Representatives, Kata’ib Hezbollah’s Harakat Huqouq (Rights Movement) has six seats in parliament; Abu Alaa’al-Wala’i, the leader of Kata’ib Sayid al-Shuhada’, sits in the Coordination Framework’s meetings. These ties help explain why, for all the incendiary rhetoric of the IRI leaders, it was obscure factions like Ashab Ahl al-Kahaf, Rijal al-Ba’as al-Shadid, and Saraya Awliya’ al-Dam that claimed responsibility for recent attacks.

Despite the antagonism with the IRI, al-Sudani’s government expectedly made no effort to forcibly disarm groups like al-Nujaba’ and Kata’ib Hezbollah. Instead, on March 19 al-Sudani made an appearance at the PMF headquarters, which is situated in the bourgeois neighborhood of al-Jadriyah, where inaccessible side streets lead to fortified enclaves housing Shi‘a elites. (One of these was hit by an airstrike—an attack that remains shrouded in ambiguity.) Afterward he appeared to exonerate the PMF for the IRI’s attacks, defending the PMF against “misleading narratives,” vowing to strengthen its ranks, and promising to care for the families of its martyrs. This was a matter not of weakness but of conviction. Helping rout ISIS sanctified the PMF, and al-Sudani is a product of post-invasion Shi‘a politics, a former Da‘wa member whose father was executed by the Ba‘ath for the same affiliation. No matter the unvoiced disputes over the IRI and the fate of the other armed groups, for the state and its Shi‘a elites the PMF remains an indispensable parallel force, a shield for this status quo that needs to be maintained at all costs.

By the time al-Sudani visited the PMF’s headquarters, the US–Israeli aerial campaign had already turned Iraq into a bombing range. In early March the US assassinated the Kata’ib Hezbollah commander Abu Hasan al-Freiji south of Baghdad; days later it struck the heart of the capital, where it killed another Kata’ib operative, Abu Ali al-Ameri, near the affluent neighborhood of Arasat al-Hindiyah. Strikes by the US and Israel have hit paramilitary members who may have had no part in any of the recent attacks as well as members of the Iraqi army who were caught unawares. On March 25 an A-10 Thunderbolt leveled a military clinic in al-Habbaniyah, killing seven Iraqi soldiers and wounding thirteen.

In a statement to the US-funded news network al-Hurra, the US “categorically” denied that it had targeted the base, prompting an outcry from Baghdad, which summoned Washington’s chargé d’affaires in protest. The armed forces of the “new Iraq” lack air defenses, both because corruption has siphoned away funds and because the country’s military was designed during the US occupation to maintain internal security. Its fleet of F-16s depends on contractors from Lockheed Martin and other defense firms who operate from Martyr Brigadier General Ali Flaiyh airbase, which has been hit over the years by the same militiamen. The attacks often force these US contractors to evacuate and leave the fleet grounded or operating at a significantly curtailed capacity—conditions that the Iraqi air force recently downplayed.

Amid repeated US–Israeli strikes and timid attempts to restrain the IRI, the militias did not relent. On March 21 a daring drone attack hit the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in the upscale neighborhood of al-Mansour, killing an officer. Kata’ib Hezbollah at once insisted that it saw “no interest” in the attack and accused the mukhabarat’s Sunni recruits, without proof, of being agents of Emirati and Jordanian intelligence. Kata’ib Hezbollah often makes similar statements against the Kurds, whose leaders have indeed long collaborated with the CIA against their Ba‘athist tormentors. (A statue of Lindsey Graham is planned in the Kurdish city of Erbil.) On March 28 a drone attack targeted the residence of Kurdish president Nechirvan Barzani, and over the course of the war several Kurdish civilians and Peshmerga security members have been killed in Iranian and Iraqi militia attacks.

In this “existential” war, Kata’ib’s secretary-general Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi has warned, his group will never give up the gun. At the end of March the militia abducted the American journalist Shelly Kittleson and held her captive for a week, less for her reporting than for her citizenship, which made her an asset in the negotiations the group was presumed to have begun with al-Sudani’s embattled government over the release of their detained comrades. Local journalists, meanwhile, fear kidnapping less than summary execution: in 2020 Ahmed Abdul Samad and Safaa Ghali were murdered for covering protests in Basra; most recently Yanar Mohammed, a renowned women’s rights campaigner, was assassinated in early March outside her residence in Baghdad. Her monochrome portrait was plastered on the city’s walls, smiling.

Despite the extent to which successive regimes and militiamen have monopolized the solidarity discourse, anticolonial sentiment in Iraq remains strong; almost every Iraqi sees the latest US–Israeli war as another crusade to crush the region’s rightful resistance to imperial hegemony. Iraq has a long, if conflicted, history of fighting for the Palestinian cause, which has been a rallying cry against colonialism for generations of leftists, Arab nationalists, and conservatives. In 1948 Baghdad sent thousands of infantrymen to join the war with Israel. (Having been weakened after a failed coup d’état in 1941 and restructured by the British to fight internal revolts, the military proved mostly unfit for the task but still secured Jenin from Israeli forces.) In October 1973 the Ba‘athist regime in Baghdad was not made privy to the secret Egyptian war plans, but after the war broke out it still dispatched 60,000 troops to the Syrian frontline, helping defend Damascus against Israel’s advance.

Through the end of the twentieth century the state remained committed to fighting Israel, even if mostly rhetorically, housing Palestinian militants like Abu Nidal, providing aid to Palestinian guerrillas, and attempting to develop a nuclear weapon to counter Israel’s might.⁸ In 1991 Saddam lobbed Scud rockets into Haifa and Tel Aviv as a distractive tactic during Operation Desert Storm, which humiliated his army and encouraged a Shi‘a and Kurdish revolt that was ruthlessly put down by his Republican Guards. For some Arabs, these efforts ensconced a murderous dictator in the pantheon of Arab heroes—a reputation that endured even when Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait upended the lives of the emirate’s Palestinian population.

In Baghdad, the Palestinian refugee population was eclipsed after the city fell to the US-led coalition in 2003. Palestinian intellectuals like Jabra Ibrahim Jabra had thrived there, teaching literature at the University of Baghdad and helping establish the Baghdad Group for Modern Art.⁹ After 2003, testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch showed, Shi‘a militias and the Ministry of Interior’s “Wolf Brigade,” spurred by the belief that the Sunni Palestinians had received a favorable treatment by the toppled dictator, threatened and tortured the city’s Palestinians, forcing them to flee to desert camps on Iraq’s western borders. An Institute for Palestinian Studies report later said that Palestinians had endured “a total war,” and even Jabra’s house was bombed in a terrorist attack targeting the Egyptian embassy in al-Mansour. This undesirable history has since been forgotten.

Among some Shi‘a an outpouring of grief and anger followed the American assassination of Ali Khamenei, for whom a funeral ceremony just took place in Iraq’s holy cities. The US–Israeli attacks that followed have the potential to bring the paramilitaries more popularity. Many Shi‘a Iraqis have tribal, familial, and neighborly ties with the PMF’s volunteers—who often come from tightly knit warrens in the capital and the country’s largely marginalized south—and blame Shi‘a parties and the militias’ top brass for their myriad indignities. At the funerals of the fallen, whose caskets are at times draped in the yellow Kata’ib flag and taken to Imam Hussein’s shrine in Karbala, mourners denounce “the great Satan” that is the United States; men weep aloud, as did visitors to the shrines when news of Khamenei’s death first reached Iraq. In Baghdad’s run-down alleys, portraits of new martyrs compete for a place on the city’s billboards and power poles. On Telegram, the militias’ channels show portraits of dead men in their thirties, but many look so young. “Among the believers are men who have fulfilled their oath to Allah,” the accompanying Qur’anic verse says. “Some have perished and some await their turn.” 

Yet even if Iraq’s Shi‘a oppose US–Israeli imperialism, they have also voiced concerns over the factions’ decisions to fight for Iran. Iraq remains a troubled place, with poor services and thousands of people still internally displaced years after the American withdrawal. Hardly anyone has forgotten that Tehran and its allies have had a part in those troubles, most recently in 2019, when the Iraqi state and the militias massacred anti-establishment demonstrators during that fall’s Tisheen Uprising. As I was doing late revisions on this essay, in the last days of June, young Shi‘a Iraqis in the marginalized south were politicizing the mourning rituals of Muharram, the holy Shi‘a month during which Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed, was murdered in a 680 battle by the Umayyad army in Karbala. In al-Kut they protested corruption and chronic blackouts, drawing a straight line from Hussein’s suffering to their own. Riot police soon arrived; protesters were rounded up and then released.

For their own part, the groups that make up the IRI lack the history, combat credentials, and social base of their Lebanese peers, who have been fighting Israel for decades and acting as a de facto state for those the state abandons. The IRI belong to a political order empowered by a foreign invader and are irredeemably associated with its failure. Many Iraqis accuse them of doing little in practice to harm Israel, let alone to set the Palestinians free. It is also beyond their reach to reverse Washington’s decades-long abuses of Iraq’s sovereignty. (The US maintains a chokehold on Iraq’s oil proceeds, which get deposited at an account at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and recently blocked cash transfers for several months as a means of pressuring the country to crack down on the militias.) That impression was only reinforced when, in March, Iraq and the US established a counterterrorism High Joint Coordination Committee.

It is no wonder, then, that al-Sadr’s antiwar marches in early April garnered a considerable number of supporters. He accuses Tehran’s allies of corruption, and his devout followers—including members of his militia, Saraya al-Salam—have stayed out of the war and displayed the flags of Arab nations alongside Iran’s during nationwide protests on April 4, less out of solidarity than to mock the servitude of their rivals.

In Baghdad, the abiding mood is one of exhaustion, the public long ago having tired of war and obfuscation. As early as April 6 the Ministry of Interior insisted that the situation was “stable.” The official line urged Iraqis to protect “national unity.” Journalists were warned not to sow discord or abuse “the democratic atmosphere.” The most basic question—who is carrying out the violence?—was the one al-Sudani’s spokesmen were reluctant to answer.

4.

When a cease-fire quieted the Gulf front on April 8, the IRI claimed victory, sending their supporters to throng the capital’s al-Tahrir Square that night, honking and waving the Iranian flag. In another “victory” march on Friday, April 17, Kata’ib Hezbollah’s Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi seemed defiant, walking the streets of Karbala three days after Washington had put a $10 million bounty on his head. Akram al-Ka‘abi, the leader of Harakat al-Nujaba’, received a personal letter from Mojtaba Khamenei, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of his rising prominence as a resistance figure.

The same day as that second victory parade, the US Treasury Department announced that it was sanctioning commanders from four paramilitary groups, including al-Nujaba’, for, inter alia, “undermining Iraq’s sovereignty and democratic processes”—a curious way of describing the ostensibly benign project the US had initiated in 2003. In the days that followed, the US announced more $10 million rewards for information about al-Ka‘abi and Abu Alaa al-Wala’i. Then, on May 15, Mohammed al-Sa‘di, an upstart militiaman who seems to have once had a remarkable access to the exclusive milieu of the IRGC’s Qasim Soleimani and the PMF’s Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (both assassinated by the US in January 2020), was spirited away from Turkey to a detention center in Brooklyn, reportedly for planning attacks on Jews across Europe and a less plausible threat to assassinate Ivanka Trump. Kata’ib Hezbollah seemed blasé, its spokesman saying merely that al-Sa‘adi “does not belong” to the group.

All this left the Iraqi state striving to save face. In a Newsweek column on April 17, al-Sudani wrote that he sought to “protect Iraq’s stability and prevent the country from being drawn into a broader regional confrontation.” The implication was that the country has a normal order of things to return to when the war stops, rather than the hyper-securitized, corrupt disorder in which Iraqis live. If a full-scale Shi‘a implosion seems unlikely, it is at least in part because the interests of most of the country’s political forces, including the Sunnis and the paramilitaries, lie in maintaining this lucrative status quo and using a state of latent emergency as a bulwark against threats both spectral and real.

Under al-Zaidi, the state appears to be fighting corruption and bringing the circulation of arms under its control. Amid mounting public discontent over unemployment and poor services and ahead of a trip to Washington, on June 28, backed by the judicial authority, al-Zaidi sent his security forces to storm the Green Zone at dawn. They captured dozens of little fish—including parliamentarians and officials in the state’s oil sector—accused of growing too fat on stolen funds. Waking up to blocked roads and unprecedented scenes on TV, most Iraqis were in disbelief. Deep inside they knew that what they call hitan al-fasad, or the whales of corrupt Sunni and Shi‘a politics, are likely to remain unimpeachable. Still, the raid earned al-Zaidi wide public support, and forces across the political spectrum, including the Sadrists and the communists, encouraged him to see the campaign to the end.

When al-Zaidi took office, the US evidently hoped that the young premier would turn against the Shi‘a deep state and the paramilitaries who approved his ascent from obscurity. Tom Barrack, Trump’s Syria and Iraq envoy as well as his ambassador to Turkey, said he found al-Zaidi’s “fresh leadership” encouraging. Telling reporters about his first call to al-Zaidi, Trump himself seemed contented. “The United States is with him all the way,” he said.

Al-Zaidi’s early days seem to be satisfying these expectations. On May 27, the first day of Eid, al-Sadr announced that Saraya al-Salam would split from his political wing, the National Shi‘a Movement, and come under the state’s control. Al-Zaidi invited the rest of the militias to follow suit—a call that Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib al-Imam Ali were both quick to answer affirmatively. Barrack expressed satisfaction, but some Iraqis were skeptical that much would come of these voluntary concessions, fearing they’d instead help the militias colonize the rest of the state apparatus. The novelist Ahmed Sa‘adawi called them a “charade.” In an interview with the state television network, al-Fayyadh, the PMF chairman, described this splitting-off of factions merely as a way to unify the chain of command under an empowered PMF.

Nonetheless the IRI were uninterested in disarming. Saraya Awlya’ al-Dam conditioned their compliance on an end to Iraq’s financial subjugation; Ashab Ahl al-Kahaf wanted captive IRI men freed by al-Zaidi, saying they would not disarm until a fatwa from the marja‘iyya bid them to do so and hinting at rejoining the war in defense of Lebanon. Kata’ib Hezbollah wrote a cynical public message offering to oversee disarmament and store the relinquished arsenal themselves. Harakat al-Nujaba’ issued a brief, dismissive statement reiterating that their stance was “unchanging regarding the sacred, disciplined weapons.” A few days later, on June 9, al-Nujaba’ praised Tehran and Yemen’s Ansar Allah for “disciplining” Tel Aviv for its strikes on Lebanon, threatening, as Kata’ib Hezbollah did before them, to renew their attacks on US interests in the region if Washington decided to side with Israel and open fire against Iran.

Back on April 8, al-Ka‘abi had assured his followers that “we are indeed victorious.” It is hardly surprising that the IRI would claim victory in the aftermath of a cease-fire that dealt a clear blow to the US’s regional hegemony and Israel’s aspirations, however energetically Trump—or “that buffoon,” as al-Ka‘abi called him—tries to fabricate his own account of triumph over Iran and its allies. But revisiting these statements after news broke that Israeli forces had set up illegal outposts in the desert of western Iraq, it was difficult not think of a poem by the Lebanese playwright Issam Mahfouz. “Drunken on rhetoric/We are the noise of a crushed world,” he wrote in Beirut’s Shi‘r magazine after the Naksa of 1967—Egypt’s defeat and Israel’s occupation of the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

Arabs recall the defeat of Nasser’s dream in the Six-Day War as their definitive “setback.” Afterward the Syrian Marxist Sadiq Jalal al-Azm wrote a searing anatomy of military defeat and intellectual bankruptcy. The Arabs were an intellectually stagnating nation stuck in the past, he said. Deceived by leaders who had fed the masses promises of a monumental victory, they needed not only to embrace revolutionary politics and bring about a socialist society but also to free their own minds.¹⁰ A similar kind of popular, unifying, emancipatory project seems needed in Iraq and elsewhere in the region today, however far-fetched it might be. As my friend the Egyptian writer Iman Mersal once told me, apart from the Palestinian Nakba, the region’s greatest disaster was in fact not Egypt’s moral abdication after 1967: “For me it was Iraq.”

Shortly after the cease-fire was announced, I decided to go for a drive in Baghdad. The city seemed quiet. Children sent their kites soaring above the bullet-strewn towers of Haifa Street, a 1980s project evoking ancient Babylon’s processional way and named after the colonized Palestinian city. Across the Tigris the paramilitaries pitched their tents underneath Jewad Selim’s Monument to Freedom. Its bronze relief sculptures evoke the struggle for a secular socialist future after the 1958 Revolution. The twenty-five pieces appear like the signs of a cylindrical seal traversing a travertine platform designed in the shape of a protest banner by the architect Rifat al-Chadirji. Further down al-Sa‘doun Street, obscuring a high-rise, was giant billboard showing an AI-generated image of a US warplane burning in mid-flight—an allusion to the KC-135 refueling aircraft that the militias claimed to have downed on March 12, killing its six crew members in the desert of al-Anbar. The children and delivery boys priced out of the city’s newly gentrified avenues wiped windshields or crisscrossed the traffic below.