Iraq struggles to disarm militias amid US-Iran tug-of-war

Esmail Qaani has a habit of not announcing his visits to Baghdad. He simply appears, meets whoever needs meeting, and leaves before most Iraqis know he was there.

His trip on August 10 was no different. The commander of Iran’s Quds Force, the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for backing armed allies abroad, met with Iraqi militia commanders and officials from the Coordination Framework, the alliance of Iran-aligned Shia parties that dominate Iraq’s parliament and effectively chose the current prime minister.

Qaani reportedly pressed the militants to keep their weapons rather than hand them to the government. The Iraqi government, laboring under intense American pressure, has set a September 30 deadline for all militias operating outside state authority to disarm. On that same day, U.S. forces are scheduled to withdraw from their last bases in Iraq

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who has publicly aligned more closely with the U.S. than Iran, did not receive Qaani. According to one source close to the premier who spoke to MBN, al-Zaidi “wants a political relationship, not a military one.”

Two days after Qaani arrived, another story broke about Washington. Asharq al-Awsat reported that al-Zaidi’s cabinet, sworn in three months ago, still had nine ministries unfilled, including defense and interior. The reason? Tom Barrack, America’s ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Iraq and Syria, has been vetoing candidates for the posts, according to the report.

Barrack’s redlines are not limited to groups that command fighters directly. They reportedly extend to the political coalition of Nouri al-Maliki, the former prime minister whose bloc fields no militia of its own but has long governed in a coalition with the factions Washington wants disarmed. Notably, President Donald Trump had warned in January that the “United States will no longer help Iraq” if al-Maliki was reinstalled, blaming him for “total chaos” — a reference to the political purges and sectarian policies of the Maliki era that helped ISIS seize a third of the country in 2014.

Barrack’s veto, then, is reinforcing a line Trump already drew publicly, sending the message that proximity to the militias also disqualifies candidates.

While Washington and Tehran engage in a tug of war over Iraq’s weapons, al-Zaidi has asked parliament’s defence and security committee to draft legislation that would formally place all weapons under exclusive government control. Failure to disarm by the September 30 deadline could be met with terrorism charges.

The bill would remove a legal grey zone that has let the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella of mostly Shia militias that Iraq formally absorbed into its security apparatus in 2016, operate for decades as simultaneously part of the state, but answerable to no one in it. Whether the bill can pass a parliament stocked with the very factions it targets is another matter entirely.

All of this is unfolding amid the ongoing war between the U.S. and Iran. On February 28, Israel and the U.S. struck Iran, opening a war whose aftershocks continue to reverberate. Iran’s supreme leader was killed in the opening strikes; his body was carried through the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala last month in processions that drew crowds shouting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” a stark reminder of how thoroughly Iraq remains bound to Iran, even as its new premier tries to distance his country from the Islamic Republic.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which Iraq once shipped the vast majority of its oil, remains largely closed. Oil revenue (accounting for roughly 90% of the state budget) has collapsed by roughly two-thirds since the war began, and Baghdad has struggled to pay public-sector salaries.

To keep crude moving, Iraq has reportedly been selling oil at a steep discount (as much as $30 a barrel below benchmark) to Abu Dhabi’s state oil firm, ADNOC, which ferries the crude out of the strait by going “dark” — turning off transponders to evade detection by Iran’s navy.

It was against that backdrop of economic and geopolitical tension that al-Zaidi flew on July 14 to Washington, where he secured a warm Oval Office reception. Trump called him “young and handsome” and touted their “tremendous chemistry.” Al-Zaidi also secured a raft of energy deals and pledged that all weapons would come under state control, an unrealistic claim that was nevertheless music to Trump’s ears.

So far, progress on this front has been halting.Two factions, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Imam Ali, announced they would sever ties to the Popular Mobilization Forces and place their weapons under state authority. However, Mohammed A. Salih, writing for The New Region, notes that Iraqi media reporting has found the handover ceremonies involved mostly scrap weapons, and that no independent mechanism exists to verify that heavier weapons — drones, missiles and the like — have actually changed hands.

Tehran appears intent on formalizing that loophole: sources that spoke to Asharq al-Awsat relayed that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — one of Iran’s chief negotiators with the U.S. — visited Baghdad Wednesday and pitched a plan to conceal the factions’ heavier weapons or relocate them to Iran.

Three other, more powerful factions have not bothered with the theater at all. Kataib Hezbollah’s leader, Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, has said flatly his group will not disarm, calling the recent U.S.-Saudi strikes on Iraq “a serious precedent that may establish a new phase in the region.” Washington, by the way, has a $10 million bounty on his head.

Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada have taken similar hardlines, the former arguing that weapons are needed to “defend the holy sites of Iraq and its people.”

Indeed, since February 28, Iran-aligned factions have been blamed for repeated drone and missile strikes on Iraqi Kurdistan, which has long been a magnet for targets because of its close ties to the U.S. More consequentially, Saudi Arabia accused militias operating from Iraqi soil of launching drones at its oil infrastructure in late July, prompting joint Saudi-American strikes on Popular Mobilization Forces sites that killed roughly 20 fighters, including Iranian advisers.

Al-Zaidi cancelled a planned trip to Riyadh in protest. Then, in a smaller and more telling gesture, he received Riyadh’s intelligence chief in Baghdad instead and pledged that Iraqi territory would not be used to launch attacks on anyone.

Meanwhile, U.S. policy in Iraq, steered and articulated most clearly by Tom Barrack, does not view Iraq as a discrete problem so much as one node in an American project spanning Barrack’s three portfolios. He is ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria and Iraq, and he treats the Gulf states as an extension of the same brief, using them as a financing arm for reconstruction projects and loans for Damascus and Baghdad.

Iraq, as Barrack said after al-Zaidi’s visit to Washington, is “uniquely positioned to connect the region through deeper integration with the GCC, Türkiye, Syria, Jordan, Central Asia, the Balkans, and the Caucuses.” Iran is pointedly excluded from that list.

Barrack has spoken of wanting to make the Strait of Hormuz “an afterthought” within two years. He is betting on overland pipelines, such as the revived pipeline from Northern Iraq’s Kirkuk to Syria’s Baniyas port, and new capacity feeding Turkey’s Ceyhan terminal, which binds Iraqi crude to Ankara and Damascus and distances it from the Gulf.

While this vision is coherent, it requires Iraq’s own house to be in order first. But neither Tehran nor Baghdad’s most powerful political coalition seem prepared to allow that just yet.

The reality is that Iraq’s September 30 deadline is not really Iraq’s to keep. Whether Iran-backed militias disarm, freeze, or fight depends less on al-Zaidi’s pledges and legislative proposals than on decisions being made in Washington and Tehran regarding the ongoing war.

A war that drags on keeps Baghdad in financial distress and the militias’ argument for “resistance” alive. A deal that returns the U.S. and Iran to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding they signed in June, which suspended hostilities between them, could give al-Zaidi some room, but easing the pressure is not the same as solving the underlying problem.

Complete disarmament of the hardline factions requires two things not currently on offer: Iran deciding the militias are no longer worth protecting, and the Iraqi state actually using force against members of its own governing coalition. The former is unlikely, and the latter could be disastrous, risking precisely the civil war scenario analysts and even armed faction leaders have warned about.