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Militia attacks in Iraq are an attempt to further expand the Iran war and “cause as much chaos as possible”, the former Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has told The National.
Iraqi militants backed by Iran want to “drag the whole country into this conflict,” Mr Zebari said in an interview. “The aim is to undermine security, and to create as much chaos as possible. I think this is part of the strategy to extend, to escalate this conflict to include other countries, to regionalise this conflict.”
Pro-Iran armed groups in Iraq started drone and rocket attacks soon after the beginning of the US and Israeli military campaign in neighbouring Iran on February 28. They have attacked US interests, including military bases and diplomatic missions, as well as hotels, oilfields and refineries and residential areas. The US and Israel have also attacked their bases across Iraq, killing dozens of their members.
The cycle of attacks from both sides has drawn the country further into the conflict, while the Iraqi militias are inflicting harm on the country, regional officials have said. Iran supports militias in Iraq “which are attacking Iraq itself”, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan said on Thursday in a strong rebuke of Tehran's regional proxy networks.
The Iraqi groups are acting on orders from Iran to damage their own country’s stability, security and economy, said Mr Zebari. “They receive orders and they are instructed what to do and not to do,” he explained. “That's why, really, you cannot consider them even to be true Iraqis.”
A former Kurdish guerrilla fighter who took part in rebellions against Saddam Hussein and later became a long-serving politician, Mr Zebari said the attacks came amid an “existential threat to the very survival” of the Iranian regime. Tehran's senior officials and military infrastructure have taken a pummelling in thousands of US and Israeli strikes in nearly three weeks of war, but its institutions remain intact even as the conflict has engulfed the region.
former Iraqi foreign minister
Iran-backed militias have attacked embassies and consulates in Iraq more forcefully than anywhere else in the region during the continuing war, Mr Zebari said. He pointed to an absence of strikes by the Tehran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah – much weakened by Israel in recent years – on the US embassy in Beirut.
“Here in Iraq everything is a twisted logic – it's incomprehensible to be honest with you,” Mr Zebari added. “They [the militias] don't know how much damage they are inflicting on their own country.”
Some of the armed groups are part of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), an umbrella organisation that developed during the fight against ISIS, and has since become part of Iraq’s official military and security forces. But some units are more loyal to Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) than to Iraq: while they receive salaries from the Iraqi state, they operate independently of it, many Iraqi officials and analysts believe.
Their current attacks on targets they view as Western-aligned are also not new – for years, they have launched attacks on US interests and aimed to expel Western troops from the country.
Following an attack on Monday on a hotel hosting diplomatic missions in Baghdad, and Majnoon, one of the world’s largest oilfields in southern Basra province, the Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani vowed to track down the perpetrators. Kataib Hezbollah, one of the largest pro-Iran militant groups, on Wednesday announced it would pause attacks for five days, but with wide-ranging conditions, including a halt to Israeli attacks on the Lebanese capital Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Mr Zebari believes that the Iraqi government is unable to rein in the militias, whom human rights groups have also long held responsible for killing and kidnapping their critics.
“The Iraqi government is incapable of stopping these militias, although they are on their payroll,” he said, adding that the departure of diplomats amid strikes was a major blow to Iraq’s reputation. Multiple countries, including the US and the UK, say they have temporarily evacuated some embassy and consulate staff from Iraq due to the security situation.
Mr Zebari served as Iraq’s foreign minister from 2003 to 2014 following the US invasion and occupation, and as deputy prime minister. He is currently a senior official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two most powerful political parties in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.
The area, in northern Iraq, has been on the receiving end of around 300 drone and missile strikes in the past three weeks, according to a tally by Community Peacemaker Teams, a conflict monitor. Air defence systems at US bases have thwarted large numbers of drones and missile attacks, Mr Zebari said. But debris from interceptions has landed in residential areas.
The Kurdistan region, which hosts a concentration of US forces following their withdrawal earlier this year from the rest of the country, was already facing significant economic pressure due to disputes with Baghdad over budget allocations and collections of customs revenue. But the war has brought new dimensions to the challenges, Mr Zebari said, and a “huge impact” on security and the local economy.
“You see the security factor, the closure of the airspace, the lack of travel, movement, of foreign and internal trade and so on, all this has been affected,” clarified the former FM. An escalation of attacks on energy infrastructure would only worsen things, he added.
An official from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) did not respond to a request for an overall figure of the economic impact, but a shutdown of oil and gasfields, as well as an airspace closure, means the suspension of major sources of revenue.
Iran has also attacked Iranian Kurdish dissidents based in Iraq's Kurdistan region, leading to several deaths and concern among Iraqi Kurdish officials that they will be drawn even further into the conflict.
The officials have denied being part of any attempt by the Iranian Kurdish groups to carry out cross-border ground offensives against Iran, and have vehemently opposed the idea. The US President Donald Trump initially expressed support for such a move earlier this month, before walking back the idea.
No such operation has yet occurred, and the IRGC said last week that any attempt by Iranian Kurdish groups to carry out a ground invasion would result in a widening of strikes on Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
The Iranian Kurdish groups have been exiled for decades. Their presence in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where they have bases, families and residency permits, has complicated Iraq-Iran relations because Tehran sees them as terrorist organisations. In 2023 Iraq and Iran agreed to tighten security co-operation, including by preventing any cross-border activity by armed groups.
Iraqi Kurdish officials had been trying to reassure Iran that it was upholding commitments under the security agreement, and stay out of “any flare-up” in Kurdish majority regions of Iran, Mr Zebari said. But attacks on Iraq are continuing, and it is unclear how long they will persist. The calls of reassurance to Tehran are, “to no avail, to be honest with you”, he said.
