US pressure may break Iranian influence in Iraq

Over the past two years, Iran’s network of allies in the Middle East has taken painful blows. In Syria, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad collapsed. In Lebanon, Hezbollah was forced to lay down its arms under a United States-brokered ceasefire and now faces pressure to disarm. In Yemen, the Houthis were forced to stop disrupting maritime traffic through the Red Sea after massive bombardment of infrastructure and civilian areas by US forces. On Thursday, an Israeli attack killed their prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi, along with several other ministers.

Iran’s once-formidable deterrence has spectacularly shrunk. And now it seems it may diminish even further as its influence in Iraq hangs by a thread. The Iraqi government faces increasing pressure from the US to rein in Iranian allies in the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a formation of predominantly Shia paramilitary groups.

While absorbing the PMF into the Iraqi army – as the US demands – may be a formidable and risky undertaking, if it is achieved, it could strengthen the Iraqi state and sovereignty.

The PMF’s short history embodies Iraq’s broader predicament of struggling to achieve stability, security and sovereignty while balancing pressures from the US and Iran.

Its paramilitary groups were formed in response to the rise of ISIL (ISIS) in 2014, which was the direct result of the security vacuum in the country. The Iraqi army had been disbanded in 2003 after the US invasion and the reconstituted force lacked the morale and preparedness to secure the country.

The PMF was successful in stopping ISIL’s advance where the regular army had failed, but many of its members were co-opted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as tools of regional influence.

Today, the PMF still wields enormous influence within Iraq. It encompasses groups that genuinely seek integration with the Iraqi military and hardline factions that remain unapologetically loyal to Iran.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani faces growing US pressure to dissolve the paramilitary groups but also pushback from his own governing coalition, in which the PMF has solid support.

The proposed American solution to absorb compliant units into the regular army while purging militia leaders from positions of authority represents nothing less than a comprehensive restructuring of Iraq’s security architecture. In response, some Iraqi lawmakers have pushed in the opposite direction with legislation that would permanently enshrine the PMF as an independent military force.