Tiny militias threaten to draw Middle East into forever war
The ghost ofQassim Soleimaniis still haunting Donald Trump. A network of Shia militias that Soleimani spent his career building across Iraq – the Hashd al-Shaabi, aka the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) –. . .
The ghost ofQassim Soleimaniis still haunting Donald Trump. A network of Shia militias that Soleimani spent his career building across Iraq – the Hashd al-Shaabi, aka the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) – has become one of the sharpest instruments that Iran has to drag the US and other Arab countries into a longer, costlier fight. Six years after an American drone – on Mr Trump's orders –killed the man who forged them, the PMF returned to the fore this week when Iran launched asurprise barrageof ballistic missiles at US positions in Jordan. Blaming the PMF for the Wednesday attacks, the US and Saudi Arabia jointly struck the group's bases in Iraq, with Riyadh joining an American attack on what the two called "Iran-aligned terrorists". The PMF said thestrikeshad hit several of its sites and killed at least 20 fighters, with dozens wounded. The toll is expected to rise. The militias are a product of Soleimani's plotting. They are built to fight Iran's enemies beyond its borders and drag conflict away from the Islamic Republic itself. With the US and Saudi Arabia striking Iraq instead of Iran, Soleimani's plan appears to be working. The Shia groups sprang up as Tehran steadily entrenched itself in Iraqi politics and security matters after the US-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. The militias, with Iranian financial and military support, have become formidable forces that can rival the national army in firepower: their arsenals include long-range missiles and anti-aircraft weapons. They are also deeply enmeshed in Iraq's political, economic and social fabric, building business networks and taking seats in parliament and the government. The aftermath of a US-Saudi strike in the northern Iraqi Nineveh province on Wednesday - Zaid al-Obeidi/AFP via Getty ImagesIranian officials and analysts who spoke to The Telegraph offered different assessments of how much power they hold today and whatTehranexpects of them now. One Iranian analyst in Tehran said: "They are good assets but very difficult to control, and Iran needs them to project power too. "They are always useful for Iran – first to push Isis away from Iran's borders, and now the system is using them to put pressure on the Americans and broaden the war. "But he warned that Tehran was asking more of the militias than they could deliver. "Our system is expecting way more than what they are able to do," he said. "These small militia groups are not easy targets, or easy to destroy, because they are mainly people-based and that is their advantage. "You can easily gather a few Shia boys as resistance groups within the bigger flag. "Credit: Operations Room of the AlliesAnother Tehran-based analyst was blunt about their limits and clearer about their purpose. He said: "They are nothing and have no power, but they have the potential to expand the war to Iraq and add more actors into it. "Their main job is to move the war from Iran to Iraq, and that itself is an expansion of the war. "If America wants to destroy them, it is a matter of one week. But that would officially bring the war to Iraq, and this is what Iran wants. More actors and fronts will make it expensive and hard for Trump to carry on. "'Backbone' of resistance forcesAn Iranian official framed the militias as indispensable, and signalled that Iran would defend them as it hadHezbollah. "They are the backbone of the resistance forces in the region, and their nature of multiple groups and closeness to Iran are their biggest strengths," the official said. He added that "some of them were in Iran during the war to help our armed forces control the streets" to prevent anti-government protests. He revealed that some of the fighters are returning to Iraq from Iran after the recent developments. "We will defend them the same as Hezbollah – help is already on the way to Iraq with those leaving Iran, so they can defend themselves," he said. That hints at how deeply the militias are woven into Iran's war machine and how far their story runs from their official founding. Members of the PMF stand guard at a military base near the Iraqi-Syrian border in Al-Qaim - Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP via Getty ImagesThe PMF was formally born in June 2014, when Ali Sistani, the former grand ayatollah and the most revered Shia cleric in Iraq, issued a fatwa calling on Iraqis to take up arms against Islamic State as it overran the country's north. Tens of thousands of mostly young volunteers rushed to the front, and dozens of new Shia militias sprang up alongside older ones. Iraq's parliament later brought the PMF into the state as an official military body, funded by the national budget and formally under the prime minister's command as commander in chief. But behind the single name lies more than one Hashd al-Shaabi. The different strands within the militiaAnalysts broadly divide the roughly 110,000 to 130,000 fighters, spread across some 68 groups, into distinct camps. The largest bloc, the so-called "atabat" units tied to Sistani and the Najaf seminary, present themselves as loyal to the Iraqi state and steer clear of Iran's regional agenda. A second strand, the "waliyi" factions – the name derives from their allegiance to Iran's supreme leader as the guardian jurist – were built by the Revolutionary Guard and its Quds Force, and answer to Tehran. Many predate the 2014 fatwa by years. Some, such as the Badr Organisation, were formed by the Guard during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, their fighters effectively part of Iran's own forces. A third strand traces to Muqtada al-Sadr, the powerful and unpredictable cleric whose Mahdi army fought the US occupation after 2003 and spawned many of today's groups. It is the pro-Iran waliyi factions – Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Harakat al-Nujaba and others – that form Iran's most important lever in Iraq, and that Washington has designated as terrorist organisations. They have fiercely resisted full absorption into Iraq's armed forces, insisting that they belong to the "axis of resistance" under the guardian jurist. Rights groups and Iraqi activists have accused their commanders of a campaign of assassinations and abductions targeting journalists, protest leaders and critics of Iran. Their entanglement with the Iraqi state is precisely what makes them so hard to dislodge. The Trump administration has pressured Iraqi leaders to rein in these armed groups. But Iraqi military experts say that the PMF cannot be dissolved by the prime minister, or even by a clerical ruling, because the militias and their allied Shia parties hold decisive weight in the Iraqi parliament and are not about to vote themselves out. Nor, the experts argue, do the US and its allies want Iraq to collapse into another Syria. That leaves the PMF exactly where Iran wants them: embedded in the Iraqi state, impossible to remove cleanly and capable of turning Iraq into a new theatre at a moment's notice. Soleimani has been dead for more than six years, but his legacy still has the ability to shape today's war in the Middle East.