Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi was in the United States last week, where he met with US President Donald Trump, members of Congress, businesspeople, along with other officials, seeking a new partnership with the US while portraying himself as a new young leader who could bring Iraq into the future and not allow the country to fall back to the failures of the past.
However, now that the prime minister is back in Baghdad, he has met with the Iranian ambassador to Iraq. This raises a major question about whether Iraq can really free itself from the old ways.
Over the last decade, Iraq has been weakened from within because of Iranian-backed militias which are part of an umbrella group known as Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Some of the militias have historical ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran. Those ties, in some cases, go back to the 1980s. In other cases, the militias are relatively new, but they are directly linked to the IRGC.
Iranian-backed Iraqi militias
There are tens of thousands, and possibly more than 100,000, fighters in the ranks of these militias, organized into dozens of brigades. They were mostly recruited to fight during the war against ISIS beginning in 2014.
However, once that war was largely finished in 2017, the militias refused to go away. Instead, they have continued to hijack Iraq and its government.
The militias have been responsible for numerous crises over the last few years: They have killed protesters, they have attacked American forces, and they have attacked the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq.
The Iraqi prime minister has vowed that all the arms held by the militias will be put under state control. However, the question of what “state control” means is unclear.
Lebanon and Gaza show the difficulties with disarming Iran-backed militias
One possibility is that it just means a bureaucratic shift, which won’t result in changes on the ground. Another possibility is that the militias will actually be disarmed.
The fact that it appears weapons are being smuggled by the militias to the Syrian border, intended for movement to Hezbollah via Syria, illustrates they still have arms. A recent shipment was busted by the Syrians at the Tanf border crossing between Iraq and Syria.
As has been seen in Lebanon and Gaza, disarming Iranian-backed terrorist groups is extremely difficult. Many of these militias are designated as terrorist organizations by the US, yet, despite these designations, they still have connections with the highest levels of power in Baghdad.
What will Iraq’s prime minister do now? Did he return from his visit to the US feeling empowered, with the wind at his back, and ready to pursue reforms? Or will he fall back into the old ways, meeting with the Iranian ambassador, possibly traveling to Iran this week, and trying to hedge his bets between Iran and the United States?
These are key questions that will need to be answered in the next weeks.