As the war against the Islamic State enters the final stretch, with less than a quarter of Mosul left to liberate, the Iraqi government must decide whether to allow a residual U.S. military support mission to stay on in Iraq. Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias have already weighed in on the matter. In early May 2017, Jafar al-Hosseini, a spokesman and senior commander of the Kata’ib Hizballah militia, told Iranian state media: “If [the] Americans fail to leave Iraq [following the defeat of Islamic State] they will be in the crosshairs of the Iraqi Islamic resistance.” Statements such as these, delivered confidently with little fear of government reproach, raise the question: Who is really in charge in Iraq?
The future of Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi, or Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), and their constituent militias is one of the most consequential policy challenges facing the Iraqi government and its coalition partners, such as the United States. Raised by a religious fatwa and a political executive order, the PMF played a crucial role in stemming the advance of Islamic State in June 2014, eventually incorporating both Shiite and non-Shiite fighters. But the PMF consist of diverse elements. These include Iranian-backed Shiite militias, “shrine PMF” (whose leaders were selected by the quietist Shiite clergy in Najaf), and Sunni PMF. The latter two groups are assets for Iraq that will hopefully be incorporated into Iraqi Army, Counter-Terrorism Service and police forces. The Tehran-backed PMF, however, are a different matter and their future is a source of acute concern for Washington.
U.S. policymakers are particularly focused on the role that Tehran-backed PMF may play in Iranian efforts to remake parts of the region in its own image. One possibility is the Lebanese Hizballah model — entailing their transformation into political movements with military and social welfare wings, outside of state control but tolerated by the government. With the PMF formally incorporated as a temporary component of the Iraqi Security Forces there is also the possibility that the PMF could become a parallel official military institution akin to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran, to counterbalance U.S. and coalition-trained units in the Iraqi Security Forces.
What is the current and future relevance of these models to the Tehran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq? Our research indicates that some PMF elements with ties to Iran, such as Kata’ib Hizballah or Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, face an uncertain path and may continue their evolution towards the Hizballah model. Though presently at odds with Iran, the movement of Moqtada al-Sadr is, in many ways, probably the closest Iraqi equivalent to Hizballah. At the same time, the creation of an IRGC-like parallel military that answers to the country’s leadership is not very likely — at least at this time — in part because the Iran-backed Badr Organization is already determinedly converting elements of the Iraqi Security Forces into a parallel force not entirely under the control of the Iraqi prime minister. All of these eventualities present acute threats to shared U.S., Iraqi, and coalition interests and should be constrained through information operations, security force assistance, security sector reform, and political-economic assistance efforts, described in detail below...
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