Baghdad plays unwilling host to Iran’s axis of evil

In a further move toward making Iraq a front-line state in Iran’s “axis of resistance,” Baghdad’s militia-dominated administration recently gave permission for both Hamas and the Houthis to set up permanent offices in the capital. Even Iraqi officials horrified by the development have been unable to speak out, such is the mafia-like stranglehold of Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi militias on the country — particularly as Hamas’ office is located in a region of Baghdad controlled by Kata’ib Hezbollah, which also provides security for office personnel.

With the entirety of Lebanon threatened by destruction in regionalized war and daily escalations across the Lebanon-Israel border, Tehran has increasingly been looking to develop Baghdad into the beating heart of its regionwide “resistance” franchise; raising fears that this places Iraq in the direct line of fire next time Israel and America stage retaliatory strikes. Although Iraq’s government has denied their presence, meetings between Hamas’ Mohammed Al-Hafi and the Houthis’ Abu Idris Al-Sharafi and paramilitary leaders like Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haq’s Qais Al-Khazali have been conspicuously circulated on social media.

This paramilitary supremacy in Baghdad has spawned incessant scandals, armed rivalries and a pervasive stench of corruption. No less than the head of the country’s anti-corruption body, Judge Haider Hanoun, was recently apparently caught on tape boasting of receiving large sums of money. Meanwhile, arrest warrants have been issued over the theft of $2.5 billion in public funds. Senior personnel from the office of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani have been arrested for the Watergate-style wiretapping of the entire political and judicial class, including Supreme Judicial Council chief judge Faiq Zaidan and former prime ministers Haider Abadi and Nouri Al-Maliki.

Tehran has increasingly been looking to develop Baghdad into the beating heart of its regionwide ‘resistance’ franchise

Baria Alamuddin

The wiretapping scandal is symptomatic of the bitter factional power struggles within Al-Hashd al-Sha’abi. While figures like Al-Maliki and Badr commander Hadi Al-Amiri seem to have been victims, allies of the prime minister like Al-Khazali were notably absent from the list of those spied upon, fueling speculation that this espionage was a case of rival militia factions spying on and attempting to discredit one another.

The scandal highlights how Iraq’s intelligence and security agencies have been politicized and thoroughly infiltrated by Tehran-backed, gangster-like militias. As an investigation by the Washington Institute highlighted this month, Iraq’s National Intelligence Service had been seen as relatively professional and independent. But since 2022, Al-Sudani’s government has purged the department, filling key posts with Hashd appointees. The service’s counterintelligence director, Faisal Al-Lami, is a nephew of Hashd chairman Faleh Al-Fayyad. Top posts in the National Security Service were in 2023 likewise handed to senior figures from Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haq.

Paramilitary patron Al-Maliki has been capitalizing on the wiretapping scandal to demand the ousting of Prime Minister Al-Sudani, who himself heads a Hashd-dominated administration. This illustrates how today’s struggles for political supremacy are not Sunni-Shiite in nature, or even between rival Shiite ideological camps, but are rather rivalries between power-hungry politicians and factions beholden to the pro-Iran Hashd agenda.

A large proportion of the civil tensions are due to paramilitaries facing off against each other in squabbles for supremacy. There has been fierce competition for control of provincial council seats between factions like Badr and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haq in provinces like Diyala. Meanwhile, Badr and Kata’ib Hezbollah have been exerting their influence via rival proxy militias in Nineveh and Kirkuk.

Sunni forces, meanwhile, remain divided and marginalized. Any influence they can occasionally wield is usually rooted in shotgun marriages of convenience with nakedly sectarian Shiite factions. Symbolic of this is the long-standing failure to select a parliament speaker — the preeminent political role for the Sunni sect.

In one symptom of how retrogressive factional and sectarian dynamics are dragging Iraq backwards, a law is currently in process through parliament that could allow girls to be married from age nine. Iraq already has one of the highest rates of underage marriage in the world, with 28 percent of girls married below the current legal age of 18. The proposed law would make this far worse, excluding women from education, careers and meaningful social roles.

Iraq’s paramilitary warlords and kleptocratic politicians are a parasitic caste weighing intolerably on the backs of ordinary Iraqis

Baria Alamuddin

While paramilitary warlords cream off Iraq’s vast oil wealth, Shiite, Sunni and Kurd citizens exist in a state of harsh impoverishment, living with chronic power cuts, unemployment, nonexistent public services and the crippling impact of the Hashd’s gangster-like extortion of all manifestations of economic activity. Iraq’s paramilitary warlords and kleptocratic politicians are a parasitic caste weighing intolerably on the backs of ordinary Iraqis, who only expect next year’s elections to bring new permutations of servitude, insatiable greed and periodic violence.

Post-election clashes between armed Shiite rivals and a resurgent Daesh resulting from the premature withdrawal of US forces are both terrifying scenarios. Indeed, 2024 has seen a net increase in Daesh activity, notably in eastern Syria, which shares a highly permeable border with Iraq.

I first started researching my book, “Militia State,” in 2017, examining how predatory paramilitaries were becoming dominant across Iraq. In the years since, these militias have only become more of a fundamental threat, while the Gaza conflict has encouraged these forces to flex their muscles across the regional stage.

Many of us have been arguing for years that the Hashd not only poses an existential threat to Iraq, but that Tehran sees these fighters as a transnational force to be deployed at will against its many enemies — rival Arab states, Sunni demographics, Israel or the West. As its force size and military budget relentlessly expanded and militias monopolized the entire governing system, the world steadfastly looked the other way.

Now, with hundreds of thousands of militia fighters in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Palestine and Yemen increasingly acting as a seamless whole, while loudly boasting of the threat they pose to the regional and global order, it is well past time for the world to start paying attention. The international community must properly get its head around the complex and multipronged threat that the Hashd and Iran’s wider axis of evil poses.

• Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state.