Background: Past to Present External Intervention and Proxy Legacies

External intervention has long been a critical dynamic in Iraq, with indirect or proxy intervention influencing Iraq’s internal and external relations since the creation of the Iraqi state. Historical or current proxy ‘patrons’ in Iraq have included the United States, Iran, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia, as well as other Gulf countries.¹ Many of the Iraqi forces or actors that are framed as proxies of external powers emerged out of past cycles of external intervention. Since the 1960s, the two main Kurdish parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), have been willing to work with both Iran and the United States in their efforts to undermine the government in Baghdad—a pattern that continues to the present.² During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iran and Iraq cultivated proxy forces against each other, including Iran’s support to the then-exiled Iraqi Shi’a group, the Badr Brigades, now known as the Badr Organization and one of the most significant political forces and potential proxies in Iraq.³

The proxies and relationships of influence that emerged after the 2003 U.S. invasion are even more salient for current political dynamics. After the U.S. invasion, Iran supported a number of Shi’a parties and militia groups in Iraq,⁴ including the Badr Organization, the Mahdi Army under Moqtada al-Sadr,⁵ Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq (AAH), or “League of the Righteous,”⁶ and Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH).⁷ These groups waged a bloody campaign against U.S. forces in Iraq, and both then and now, have been at the center of allegations of proxy warfare.⁸

Beyond backing Shi’a militia groups, Iran also invested heavily in developing a network of political proxies and partners, supporting Shi’a political parties and leaders to advance to senior positions in the Iraqi government.⁹ It was the strategy of both Iran and the United States after 2003 to turn the re-emerging Iraqi institutions, particularly the security apparatus, to their side.¹⁰ In the initial period following the U.S. invasion, the United States was considered to be strongly in control of the Ministry of Defense, the intelligence service, and their associated security forces, while from 2005, pro-Iran politicians and parties (notably Badr and its political affiliates) gained and held control of the Ministry of Interior (MoI).¹¹ Members of the Shi’a militia forces noted above then intermingled with and became virtually indistinguishable from MoI-controlled Iraqi security forces.¹²

Pro-Iran parties and militias became even more ascendant under Nouri al-Maliki’s second term (2010 to 2014). Maliki was initially selected with full U.S. buy-in—even characterized as a U.S. proxy by some.¹³ But it was Iranian pressure and backroom deals that enabled him to succeed to his second term after his coalition did not win enough votes in the 2010 parliamentary elections.¹⁴ After that point, he relied even more strongly on pro-Iranian militias and Shi’a political networks to maintain his hold on power.¹⁵

The United States of course also built its own partners and surrogate forces in the post-2003 period, which have their own legacy effects for current proxy dynamics. Much of the U.S. influence over Iraqi security and political institutions, which it rebuilt from 2003 on, was systematically eroded under Maliki’s second term, and especially after the U.S. withdrawal in 2011.¹⁶ However, the United States has maintained significant influence with the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), the elite security forces that U.S. Special Forces have closely mentored for a decade and a half.¹⁷ The U.S. invasion and rebuilding of the Iraqi state also enabled much greater autonomy and political weight for the Kurds, who still retain a special relationship with the United States and other Western states.¹⁸ From 2006 to 2008, the United States was the architect behind the Sunni sahwa (“Awakening”) or Sons of Iraq initiative, with nearly 100,000 predominantly Sunni tribal fighters on the U.S. payroll by 2008.¹⁹ These past associations have created a lingering perception of the Kurds and Sunnis as U.S. proxies within Iraq (a claim that will be analyzed in subsequent sections).

Regional actors like Turkey and Saudi Arabia also cultivated partners in Iraq in the post-2003 period, particularly in the lead-up to the U.S. withdrawal in 2011.²⁰ Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries provided intermittent funding to some Sunni Arab leaders,²¹ while Turkey developed warmer relations and economic ties with the KDP.²² These more limited strategies of influence never really achieved the degree of control or coercion that Iran enjoyed with its Iraqi partners. Nonetheless, they help illustrate the range of regional proxy intervention in Iraq and the way that particular geographic areas within Iraq can feature as a “playground” for competition between regional powers.²³

Nearly all of these same domestic forces and external relationships of influence continue to exist, and to raise allegations of proxy warfare. In particular, the Iraqi Shi’a militias that Iran had supported for more than a decade were at the center of escalating tensions and tit-for-tat attacks or threats between the United States and Iran over the course of 2018 and 2019.²⁴ A series of attacks allegedly by and against Kata’ib Hezbollah in December 2019 were the immediate precursor²⁵ to the targeting of Soleimani, as well as of the Iraqi military leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was travelling with Soleimani and killed in the same drone strike.²⁶ The founder of Kata’ib Hezbollah, al-Muhandis, had been designated as a U.S. global terrorist since 2009 and long regarded by the United States as an Iranian proxy, despite his official leadership position within the Iraqi National Security Council and prominent role in the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).²⁷ Proxy warfare allegations were at the heart of the U.S. strikes that killed Soleimani and Muhandis – the U.S. justification for the strike was that Iran-directed groups had attacked a U.S. base and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in December 2019, and that Soleimani was preparing further attacks on U.S. personnel or interests in Iraq and in the region, potentially executed by these Iraqi proxy forces.²⁸

To understand how the escalation began, it is important to first fix the status of these forces within the post-2014 security landscape in Iraq. When the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of ISIS advances in mid-2014, Iran and the Iraqi militia forces it had long supported were among the first to respond and hold them off.²⁹ This popular and militia resistance was quickly baptized the Hashd as-Shaabi, the Popular Mobilization Force (PMF or Hashd is used interchangeably hereinafter).³⁰ As the name would suggest, the Hashd is a distinct security force that is comprised not of regular Iraqi security force units but of a collection of popular or militia-mobilized units, many of which pre-existed the 2014 crisis. It was created by prime ministerial decree in June 2014, and then legalized by the Iraqi Parliament as an official Iraqi force in late 2016.³¹

Although the PMF incorporated members and groups from across the sectarian, ethnic, and political spectrum in Iraq (as detailed further below), the Shi’a militias that the United States has long viewed as Iranian proxies—groups like the Badr Organization, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, and the Hezbollah Brigades—hold the reins of the PMF, and an estimated 60 percent of the PMF’s more than 125,000 forces draw from Iranian-associated militias.³² As a result, the United States has tended to view the PMF’s expanding political influence, force strength, strategic positioning, and territorial control since 2014 as a growing Iranian proxy threat, and almost since the PMF’s inception, has pressured the Iraqi government to disband or otherwise reign it in.³³

U.S. apprehension over the PMF and Iran’s influence in Iraq came to a head over the summer of 2019. In March and April 2019, the United States designated the IRGC and one of the Iraqi PMF groups, the al-Nujaba force, as terrorist groups.³⁴ This plus U.S. threats to strangle Iranian oil exports sparked increased tensions in the region,³⁵ and in early May 2019, the White House announced that it was deploying aircraft carriers and additional Air Force bombers to the region to be in position to counter a potential threat by Iran or its proxy forces.³⁶ A few days later, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an emergency trip to Baghdad to explicitly warn Iraqi officials that the U.S. had a right to respond to attacks “by Iran or its proxies in Iraq or anywhere else.”³⁷ Shortly thereafter, all non-essential personnel were evacuated from Iraq, on the grounds that Iranian-backed Iraqi armed groups (implicitly some of the PMF) posed an “imminent threat.”³⁸ U.S.-Iranian tensions and proxy warfare continued to escalate across the region over the summer of 2019, ultimately resulting in attacks on half a dozen oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, a cyber-attack on an Iranian intelligence group, the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, crippling attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and nearly a direct U.S. missile strike on Iranian territory.³⁹

Across these escalating tensions and tit-for-tat attacks, a core question has been whether these Iranian-affiliated PMF groups (as well as other Iranian-affiliated groups in other countries) were acting as proxies of Iran, such that any acts of aggression or threats by them might be attributed to Iran, and responded to accordingly. A second issue is whether some of the U.S. efforts to influence Iraq or to subvert Iranian interests in Iraq might themselves have been interpreted as proxy intervention, in essence a two-sided proxy war. To consider these questions, the subsequent sections will explore how the post-2014 environment in Iraq shaped the potential for proxy warfare and for external patron control.