Executive Summary

Over the course of 2019 and into 2020, the United States and Iran came perilously close to full out war, with increasing economic and political tensions, escalating threat postures, and a series of tit-for-tat proxy attacks fueling a geopolitical standoff. Iraq found itself at the center of this emerging proxy war, with Iraqi forces, militia groups, and Iraqi territory both the target and provocation for escalating U.S.-Iranian tensions. Iraq has frequently been the situs for such international and regional competition—so much so that it has been framed as a “playground” for regional players and as a country “caught between two giants [the U.S. and Iran].”¹

However, while external intervention has long been an important dynamic in Iraq, the assumption that domestic events are driven primarily by proxy meddling can overstate the degree of external influence and control, and underestimate the role of Iraqi actors and interests. If given too wide a breadth, this narrative of proxy war can lead to serious misinterpretation and conflict escalation in an already volatile environment.

This report draws upon extensive research and interviews conducted in Iraq and Washington, D.C.,² to illustrate changing proxy dynamics in Iraq and their implications for the larger U.S.-Iranian tensions. To do so, it examines the U.S. and Iranian partnerships in Iraq that are most frequently framed as proxy relationships, and how they have been affected by the political and conflict dynamics that emerged in Iraq after the 2014 ISIS crisis. While the research found ample evidence of external influence, external machinations were not always the best explanation for how domestic stand-offs, clashes, or incidents emerged or were resolved. Instead, a lens of “convergence of interests” between Iraqi actors and their external partners better explains external influence in Iraq than the framework of proxy manipulation.

Key Findings:

• The post-2014 environment incentivized proxy intervention, but also made it more difficult to manage. The 2014 ISIS crisis and its fallout sparked mass mobilization and the proliferation of armed groups, creating a range of potential proxies and partners. However, the multiplicity of armed actors, and the complex and constantly fluctuating relationships between them, made proxy partnerships more unreliable and more difficult to predict and control.
• Such dynamics set off a heated, zero-sum domestic competition between Iraqi parties and forces that dominated Iraqi stakeholders’ interactions and calculations, above those of external interests. For Iraqi stakeholders, the need to focus on immediate short-term gains or political or group survival tended to crowd out attention to external interests.
• The clearest manifestations of proxy competition and proxy relationships occur at the sub-state level. Larger Iraqi and Kurdish stakeholders cultivated subsidiary relationships and partnerships with smaller, localized groups and forces, and used them to advance their interests domestically, a form of sub-state proxy warfare. Such sub-state proxy relationships were intermixed with external support, creating a layered proxy competition that further complicated external control.
• External interests are not absent, but nor are they the driver behind most expansive or aggressive moves by Iraqi forces and actors. Even those groups at the center of the proxy debate — some of the pro-Iran forces within the Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) — are mostly driven by their own interests, threat perceptions, and ideologies. Even if some PMF behavior can be linked to Iran, a greater share of their activities are not. Assuming that any given hostile act or threat by a PMF group has been directed by Iran can be a dangerous over-assumption.
• Given the significant Iraqi interests at play, a better way to explain external influence on Iraqi dynamics is as the result of a “convergence of interests” between domestic and external parties. This convergence of interests theory not only explains the relationship between more steadfast partners and ideological soulmates, like the Shi’a PMF and Iran, or even the United States and the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service, but also the variations in less fixed relationships, as with the Kurdish parties or the Iraqi government.
• These dynamics are not limited to Iraq, but may represent a new genre of proxy warfare. Similar trends in other parts of the Middle East suggest the future of proxy warfare may be more likely to manifest in the more ambiguous, and sub-state-dominated competition in Iraq than the modes of proxy warfare that have gone before it. These trends suggest that while full control and cultivation of ‘hard proxies’ may not be realistic, it may also not be necessary. A more nuanced approach, more focused on long-term partner cultivation and attentive to local-to-regional risk factors and side effects, may be a better strategy for engagement in the future.