Pressure Without Pause: Iraq’s Role in the Postwar Iran Settlement

On April 20, U.S. officials confirmed that Washington had suspended security cooperation and funding for Iraq’s security services and that the Treasury Department had blocked an approximately $500 million scheduled shipment of U.S. banknotes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to Iraq’s central bank. The proceeds, drawn from Iraqi oil revenues held at the New York Fed under the post-2003 arrangement, are functionally the operating capital of the Iraqi state. The suspension was the second such block since Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28, and it reached Baghdad at a moment of maximum political vulnerability. Iraq’s postelection government formation is deadlocked, the constitutional deadline to nominate a prime minister falls on April 28, and the Iran-aligned Coordination Framework bloc—the umbrella of Shiite parties that now functions as the political vehicle of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)-aligned factions and dominates Iraq’s current government—cannot agree on a candidate acceptable to both Washington and Tehran.

The suspension was the fourth measure in a compressed pressure sequence by U.S. officials. On April 9, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau summoned Iraq’s ambassador in Washington, Nazar Al Khirullah, to condemn the previous day’s multi-drone attack near U.S. diplomatic personnel inside Baghdad International Airport. On April 17, the Treasury Department designated seven senior commanders of four Iran-backed Iraqi militia groups—Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada—for their roles in attacks on U.S. personnel. The Iranian response was immediate and public. On April 18, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Esmail Ghaani arrived in Baghdad on his first foreign visit since the war began, meeting first with militia leaders and then with the Shiite Coordination Framework. On April 20, in a public statement, Ghaani declared that the selection of Iraq’s next prime minister would be made “solely based on an Iraqi decision” and warned that outsiders, “especially criminals against humanity,” a phrase Iranian state media clarified as a reference to the United States, should not interfere.

On May 15, the Department of Justice unsealed a six-count terrorism complaint in the Southern District of New York against Mohammad Baqer al-Saadi, identified as a senior Kata’ib Hezbollah commander, charging him with directing nearly 20 attacks across Europe and Canada—including the March 9 explosives attack on a synagogue in Liège, the March bombing of a Bank of New York Mellon building in Amsterdam, an April arson against a synagogue in Skopje, and the April 29 stabbing of two Jewish men in north London’s Golders Green—and with attempting to coordinate attacks against Jewish institutions in New York, Los Angeles, and Scottsdale. Al-Saadi was apprehended in Turkey and transferred to U.S. custody. The complaint identifies the European and Canadian operations as the work of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, a Kata’ib Hezbollah component, formally tying a previously opaque attack-claim brand to the parent organization, and cites al-Saadi’s direct ties to Quds Force commander Esmail Ghaani.

This is the current Iraqi front of the Iran war, conducted in public. The war itself, in its kinetic phase, is substantially concluded. What remains is the settlement, and the settlement runs through Iraq.

What the War Has and Has Not Ended

Operation Epic Fury accomplished most of what the White House announced as its objectives. According to Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine’s public statements, more than 85 percent of Iran’s defense industrial base has been destroyed, including the majority of its ballistic missiles, launcher vehicles, and long-range attack drones. The Iranian navy has been obliterated. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes. Independent reporting has since challenged the most expansive damage assessments—the New York Times reported on May 12 that U.S. intelligence analysts believe a substantial portion of Iran’s prewar ballistic missile stockpile may have survived intact—but the operation’s core declared objectives, the collapse of the IRGC command structure and the destruction of long-range strike capacity, were achieved. The ceasefire that followed is described even by administration officials as fragile—and that fragility is precisely the point. The kinetic operation ended Iran’s most exposed capabilities; it did not end its embedded ones.

What the war did not end is the Iran-aligned militia infrastructure inside Iraq. That infrastructure is the asset of Tehran’s foreign-operations apparatus that the campaign deliberately left in place. U.S. and Israeli targeting was concentrated on Iran proper and on assets clearly identifiable as IRGC-Quds Force, both to avoid striking elements legally embedded in the Iraqi state and to preserve Baghdad’s nominal neutrality in the war. The militias were therefore the instrument with the most intact capacity to reconstitute Iranian regional leverage in the postwar period. Reporting during the war also revealed clandestine Israeli operational infrastructure on Iraqi soil—a development that complicates the sovereignty framing but does not alter the underlying dynamic. Iraq’s territory has been a contested arena of regional war precisely because the Iraqi state does not control the armed actors operating from it.

In the regional axis Iran built over two decades, Hezbollah in Lebanon was the most capable single proxy, the Houthis the most operationally independent, and Hamas the most exposed. The Iraqi militia network is the most institutionally integrated: Alone among Iran’s regional partners, it draws state salaries, holds ministry portfolios, and contests parliamentary elections. The war reduced Hezbollah’s senior leadership and degraded the Houthis’ missile and drone stockpiles; it left the Iraqi network’s state-embedded financial and political base substantially untouched.

The Associated Press reporting on April 21—that Iranian advisers have granted Iraqi militia field commanders “the authority to operate according to their own field assessments without referring back to a central command”—is the operational expression of this reality. The architecture has not been dismantled; it has been decentralized.

 Of Iran’s regional partners, the Iraqi militias were the most operationally active in support of Tehran during the war itself. Hezbollah, having absorbed losses in senior leadership the past 18 months, remained largely defensive. The Houthis continued maritime harassment in the Red Sea but did not escalate against U.S. or Israeli targets in the Gulf. The Iraqi factions, by contrast, launched the war’s most sustained campaign of attacks on U.S. forces and regional neighbors. During the war itself, Iraqi militias launched attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, against hotels suspected to house U.S. personnel in Baghdad, against U.S.-operated energy infrastructure, and against similar targets in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf. On April 12, Saudi Arabia summoned Iraq’s ambassador to Riyadh over drone attacks originating from Iraqi territory.

On April 13, the Iraqi chargé d’affaires in Bahrain was summoned to receive a formal complaint over drone attacks originating from Iraqi territory. U.S. and Israeli retaliatory strikes hit Popular Mobilization Forces headquarters inside Iraq. Kata’ib Hezbollah kidnapped the American journalist Shelly Kittleson in Baghdad on March 31. She was released on April 7, after the U.S.-Iran ceasefire and the Iraqi militias’ public announcement that they were suspending operations. The next day, three drones struck the diplomatic support zone of Baghdad International Airport while a U.S. Embassy team was escorting Kittleson out of the country—an attack conducted during the ceasefire, and during the militias’ own declared pause. The pattern is not wartime opportunism. It is the operating posture of a set of Iran-aligned armed formations that remain embedded in the Iraqi state’s security apparatus, drawing state salaries and resources, while functioning as instruments of Iranian foreign policy.

The PMF (or, in Arabic, al-Hashd al-Shaabi) is a paramilitary umbrella created by Iraqi government decree on June 15, 2014. Although nominally an organ of the Iraqi state—drawing state salaries and folded into the security apparatus by Iraqi Law No. 40 of 2016—its dominant brigades are commanded by, and ideologically aligned with, Iran’s IRGC. The PMF’s most powerful constituent groups, including the Badr Organization, Kata’ib Hezbollah, and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, predate the 2014 formalization and were Iranian proxy formations before they were absorbed into the Iraqi state. A pending amendment to the PMF law—currently before the Iraqi parliament—would make the PMF an autonomous, ministry-level institution outside the Defense Ministry’s command, with its own military academy and protected budget line. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s July 2025 message to Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani warned the amendment would “institutionalize Iranian influence” inside the Iraqi state.

The Maliki Inheritance

The institutional arrangement that allows this was not an accident of the 2014 Islamic State crisis. It was engineered during four years of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s deliberate hollowing out of the Iraqi state.

I was in Mosul on June 10, 2014, when the Iraqi Security Forces collapsed and the city fell to the Islamic State. The Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani—Iraq’s senior Shiite religious authority, based in Najaf, and for two decades the most influential clerical figure in the Arab Shiite world—issued his fatwa three days later—the foundational reference point in the English-language literature on Iraq’s PMF. By the time the fatwa was issued, the vacuum that the PMF was formed to fill had already been created.

On Dec. 19, 2011, one day after U.S. forces departed at the expiration of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, Maliki’s government issued an arrest warrant for Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, the highest-ranking Sunni in the government, on terrorism charges derived from the testimony of bodyguards who had been beaten into their accusations. Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq was placed on indefinite leave days later after calling Maliki a dictator. Finance Minister Rafi al-Essawi’s bodyguards were arrested on identical charges the following year; Essawi fled to Ramadi. The Sons of Iraq—the Sunni tribal forces whose defection from al-Qaeda in 2007-2008 had made the U.S. surge work—were systematically abandoned on pay, enrollment, and integration into the regular services. PBS Frontline’s documentation, informed by interviews with former U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey, identified the Hashemi moment in December 2011 as the first major indication of Maliki’s sectarian turn. By 2013, the pattern was undisguised, and peaceful Sunni protests were met with lethal force.

The Iraqi Security Forces that collapsed at Mosul—roughly 30,000 soldiers routed by an estimated 1,500 ISIS fighters—disintegrated because Maliki had spent four years replacing Sunni officers with sectarian loyalists, looting defense budgets through patronage networks, and rebuilding the Iraqi Special Forces into a personal political instrument. The vacuum the PMF was formed to fill on June 15, 2014, by Maliki’s own decree, was the vacuum his governance had created.

Maliki’s possible return to the prime ministry is now the live question in Baghdad. In January 2026, President Trump warned publicly that a Maliki return would cost Iraq its U.S. support. Ghaani’s April visit was reportedly aimed at bridging the rift between Maliki and incumbent Prime Minister Sudani inside the Shia Coordination Framework, to produce a compromise candidate before the April 28 deadline. The U.S. designation of seven militia commanders on April 17 functions, in this context, as a financial veto over the political wings of the same factions currently negotiating the government’s formation. The pressure architecture is working in real time to constrain the political outcome.

The Fatwa and the Factions That Preceded It

The text of Sistani’s June 13, 2014, fatwa invoked the classical juristic category of wajib kifa’i—collective defense obligation—and called on able-bodied Iraqis to volunteer for the formal Iraqi security services. It did not call for the formation of autonomous armed groups outside the state’s framework, a category prohibited by Article 9(B) of the Iraqi constitution. Sistani’s office has refused, for more than a decade, to use the word Hashd, which is the Arabic term for “mobilization” or “popular crowd” that became the militias’ self-designation. Before 2014, he repeatedly denounced the formation of “special armies” as a threat to the Iraqi national army.

In March 2020, the shrine units — aligned with the marja'iyya, the apex of Shia clerical authority in Najaf, the office held by Sistani, formally withdrew from the PMF in protest of its Iranian ties. In a November 2024 meeting with the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, Sistani again called for a state monopoly on arms and preventing foreign interference. The significance is that Sistani—whose 2014 fatwa is invariably cited by Iran-axis politicians as the founding legitimation of the PMF—has, for more than a decade and as recently as November 2024, publicly insisted that all arms in Iraq must belong to the state. Sistani does not endorse the militias’ claim of religious sanction.

Whatever the fatwa provided, in practice, Sistani himself has no formal legal authority in the Iraqi state; the marja’iyya operates outside the constitutional order. But the 2014 fatwa carried the weight it did because the Iraqi state was in extremis—Mosul had just fallen, the army had disintegrated, and Baghdad faced encirclement. Maliki’s government accepted, and the Abadi government later codified, an institutional structure that the fatwa’s own text neither requested nor sanctioned. The PMF’s existence as an autonomous armed bloc inside the state is the product of political choices made under wartime pressure, not of religious authority.

What the fatwa provided, in practice, was institutional cover for five Iran-axis formations that predated Sistani's call and subsequently absorbed themselves into the PMF structure.

Kata’ib Hezbollah was founded in 2007 as an IRGC-Quds Force creation led by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The U.S. designated the organization as both a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO) and a “specially designated global terrorist” (SDGT) in 2009. The Badr Organization, Iran’s oldest Iraqi proxy, founded in 1982 as the IRGC-officered military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, predates the 2003 U.S. invasion and now controls Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior through Hadi al-Amiri, the Badr Organization’s longtime leader, a former IRGC commander during the war and current head of the Iran-aligned Fatah parliamentary coalition. Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq split from the Sadrist Mahdi Army in 2006 and was designated an FTO in January 2020. Another Iran-backed militia, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, was founded in 2013 by Akram al-Kaabi, an Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq co-founder, to fight for Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada was founded in May 2013, also for Syria. All five predate Sistani’s call. They used the fatwa’s institutional opportunity to rebrand as Iraq’s national defenders while retaining their prior loyalties and command structures. The June 2014 moment did not create Iraq’s Iran-axis militia problem. It gave that problem a legal address inside the Iraqi state.

The Obama Template and the Failed Engagement Frame

U.S. policy toward the 2014 crisis and the broader proxy architecture surrounding it set a pattern that every subsequent nonkinetic administration inherited. In the 2011 residual-force negotiation, the proposed U.S. troop level inside Obama administration deliberations cascaded from roughly 16,000 to under 3,000 before Maliki’s parliamentary-immunity demand became the formal stopping point. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) released substantial frozen Iranian assets—figures varied in estimates between $50 billion and $150 billion—without corresponding constraint on the regional proxy architecture that those resources helped sustain. Iraqi Law No. 40 of 2016—the statute that folded the PMF into the Iraqi security apparatus with salaries and benefits equal to the regular military—passed the Iraqi parliament in November 2016 at the moment when U.S. leverage over Iraqi institutional design was at its post-2011 maximum.

That maximum reflected the convergence of three conditions: U.S. forces had been redeployed to Iraq for the anti-ISIS campaign and were providing decisive air support; the Iraqi government depended on coalition logistical and intelligence cooperation for the ongoing Mosul operation; and the JCPOA had not yet released Iranian resources in sufficient volume to offset U.S. economic conditionality. That leverage was not used.

A consistent U.S. analysis emerged over those years: The factions are heterogeneous; integration will moderate them; full confrontation risks state collapse; and prudent management is the only feasible course. Each claim was testable. The 2018 parliamentary elections produced not moderation but political capture: The PMF ran as the Fatah coalition—the political vehicle assembled by Hadi al-Amiri to convert PMF battlefield legitimacy into parliamentary seats—and emerged second, converting battlefield legitimacy into parliamentary leverage and state ministry control. An assessment by the Brookings Institution in February 2024 concluded that the PMF indirectly controls several Iraqi ministries and portions of the Supreme Court, that Badr runs the Interior Ministry, and that the Iraqi state allocates approximately $3.5 billion annually to the PMF’s payroll and operations. Integration did not moderate the factions. It financed them.

Between Oct. 17, 2023, and Feb. 4, 2024, the Iran-backed militias in Iraq launched 165 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. The Biden administration’s response consisted of nine limited airstrikes. On Jan. 28, 2024, a drone attack with Kata’ib Hezbollah’s operational footprint struck Tower 22, a U.S. Army installation at the Jordan-Syria border, killing Sgts. William Jerome Rivers, Kennedy Ladon Sanders, and Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, and wounding 47 others. The U.S. response after Tower 22—85 targets struck across seven sites on Feb. 2, and the Feb. 7 drone killing of senior Kata’ib Hezbollah commander Abu Baqir al-Saadi in Baghdad—produced a 75-day pause in attacks on U.S. forces. The 165 attacks that preceded Tower 22 tracked the graduated-response posture that invited them; the pause tracked the serious response that followed. The empirical record supports the latter pattern, not the former.

The Recycled Frame

The same argument is making the rounds now, almost unchanged. In recent reporting, the New York Times summarized the view as follows: Baghdad lacks the institutional coherence to act as a single state against armed factions inside its own security apparatus, so U.S. attempts to coerce the Iraqi government are misdirected. The case is elegant. It is also the same case that produced the 2011 force-size cascade, the 2015 JCPOA without constraints on Iran’s proxies, the uncontested 2016 passage of Law No. 40, the uncontested 2018 Fatah consolidation, and the 2023-2024 attack campaign answered with nine limited airstrikes. Each empirical test has weakened it. The frame’s deeper defect is that it treats the blurring of state and non-state armed authority in Iraq as a permanent feature of the place, rather than as the outcome of specific decisions that pressure could have prevented, and that pressure, applied now, can still constrain.

What this argument leaves out matters as much as what it includes. Human Rights Watch documented Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq’s killings of Sunni civilians in Muqdadiya in January 2016, including the destruction of homes and mosques and the killing of two Iraqi journalists. The 2014 depopulation of Jurf al-Sakhr—characterized by the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project as an act of sectarian cleansing by Kata’ib Hezbollah and allied PMF units—left roughly 140,000 displaced Sunni residents who have not been permitted to return in the decade since. The town became a closed Kata’ib Hezbollah military base from which strikes on U.S. personnel have been launched.(It was among the sites hit by U.S. precision strikes in January 2024 after Tower 22.) The Iraqi United Sunni Leadership Coalition, formed in January 2025, made the return of Jurf al-Sakhr’s residents one of its nine foundational demands. a demand the Iraqi government has neither met nor formally rejected in the year since. The oral histories my colleagues and I recorded during the Islamic State’s occupation of Mosul, and the documentation assembled with the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh, have not generated a comparable body of sustained English-language academic treatment of PMF conduct in Sunni and minority areas. The absence is part of the pattern the engagement frame sustains.

The Current Architecture

Against this pattern, the pressure architecture assembled since February 2025 represents a sustained correction. National Security Presidential Memorandum-2 established the maximum-pressure posture on Iran and its proxies. The Sept. 17, 2025, FTO designations of four Iran-aligned Iraqi militias—Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, and Kata’ib al-Imam Ali—converted prior SDGT listings into FTO listings, triggering the material-support statute. Under Section 2339B, the intentional provision of material support to a designated organization by U.S. persons becomes a federal criminal offense with extraterritorial reach, capturing the financial facilitators and logistical networks on which Iran-axis militias depend for non-state revenue. The first major prosecution to flow from this architecture was unsealed May 15, when the Justice Department charged Kata’ib Hezbollah commander Mohammad Baqer al-Saadi in the Southern District of New York with directing nearly 20 attacks across Europe and Canada and conspiring to bomb Jewish institutions in three U.S. cities. Secretary of State Rubio communicated to Prime Minister Sudani that the pending amended PMF law would “institutionalize Iranian influence and armed terrorist groups undermining Iraq’s sovereignty.”

The April 17 Department of Treasury designations of seven militia commanders, and the April 20 suspension of security cooperation and dollar shipments, operate inside this architecture. This is the first U.S. pressure architecture since 2003 that targets the political wings of armed factions in real time, conditions on Iraq’s institutional decisions, and uses financial leverage at the scale that actually constrains Baghdad’s choices. Previous administrations possessed each of these tools individually. None deployed them in sequence and specifically against the militia question.

The pressure was legally tiered, targeted specific Iraqi political decision points, and is calibrated to reshape the Coordination Framework’s options before the April 28 constitutional deadline. It is not improvisation. It is policy.

The Counterargument

The case against sustained pressure should be stated plainly. Continued U.S. action carries risks: Iraqi state fragmentation, civilian harm from any kinetic escalation, and the potential collapse of the bilateral relationship under the weight of the economic measures. The dollar suspension alone could collapse the Iraqi dinar and interrupt salary payments across the public sector. These are real costs, borne substantially by ordinary Iraqis who have no role in militia operations and no influence over the political bargain the pressure is meant to force.

They are also smaller risks than the alternative. Iraqi state fragmentation is not the consequence of U.S. pressure on Iran-axis factions; it is the consequence of those factions’ capture of state institutions, which pressure is attempting to arrest. Civilian harm from targeted designations and commander-level strikes is substantially smaller than the civilian cost documented in the factions’ own operational record, from Muqdadiya in 2016 through Jurf al-Sakhr’s continuing depopulation. A U.S. withdrawal under present conditions would not preserve the bilateral relationship; it would surrender it to the command structure the April 17 designations targeted. The postwar settlement window is narrow. The pressure applied now is the leverage that exists; withdrawing it removes the only instrument capable of shaping the outcome in favor of an Iraqi state that functions for Iraqis.

Sovereignty, Correctly Understood

The claim that sustained U.S. pressure violates Iraqi sovereignty inverts the constitutional posture. Article 9(B) of the Iraqi constitution prohibits the formation of military militias outside the armed-forces framework. Article 121 recognizes the Peshmerga, the armed forces of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq as regional guard forces within Iraq’s federal system, which is the constitutional recognition the PMF lacks. Sistani’s position, from before 2014 through his November 2024 meeting with UN representatives, is that all weapons in Iraq must remain under state authority and that foreign interference must be prevented. The PMF’s parallel armed status, its Iranian command relationships, its multibillion-dollar allocation within the Iraqi state budget outside ordinary civil-military oversight, and the proposed legal architecture that would give it a dedicated ministry-level agency and military academy are a constitutional anomaly. U.S. pressure on the militia question is congruent with the Iraqi constitutional text, with the senior Shiite religious authority’s explicit position, and with the political demands of the 2019 Tishreen uprising, whose more than 600 dead and 20,000 wounded were predominantly Iraqi Shiite civilians targeted by the same Iran-aligned factions that now attack U.S. forces and regional neighbors.

The postwar period will be won or lost in the decisions made over the next several weeks. The frame that treats pressure as destabilization has had its decade. The current architecture is the first serious correction. The analytical case for sustaining it runs in both directions: toward Washington, and toward the Iraqis whose state sovereignty it serves.