Renewed Iraq attacks test Zaidi’s push to disarm Iran-backed militias

BAGHDAD — Iraqi troops arrived at the gates of the Special Missions Regiment headquarters of Harakat al-Nujaba in Baghdad’s Jurf al-Naddaf district on July 24 with orders to search the compound for drones and missiles. They never made it inside.

Commanders loyal to the Iran-backed militia warned officers that they are not allowed to enter and search the facility, according to two Iraqi security officials who described the operation to Al-Monitor. Within minutes, armed Nujaba fighters had surrounded the troops and fired warning shots into the air above the government vehicles.

The raid, involving the Baghdad Operations Command, the federal police and the Popular Mobilization Force’s Security Directorate, collapsed on the spot. The PMF leadership ordered its own personnel to pull back, saying they had not been told the mission targeted a Nujaba facility, and army units soon got the same order.

Small in scale, the standoff is significant in timing. It is the first real test of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s public pledge from the White House to bring all weapons in Iraq under state control by Sept. 30, when the mission of the US-led coalition is due to wind down.

Different method, same outcome

The failed raid previews the narrow path Zaidi is trying to walk — asserting state authority over armed factions without provoking a fight he cannot control — and exposes the gap between the government’s timeline and what it can enforce on the ground.

Unlike past standoffs, this one played out quietly, without casualties or public statements from the militia, only surfacing after the fact through security officials. That discretion is telling: Neither side wants to be seen as forcing the other’s hand before Sept. 30.

“It is not very different in outcome, but it is different in method,” said Haider al-Shakeri, a research fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program. Rather than public ultimatums, Baghdad is now leaning on security-sector restructuring and quieter pressure on the factions’ logistics, financing and command networks, and the real measure of success lies less in whether individual raids succeed than in whether the state can erode the political cover shielding these groups.

By that standard, the Jurf al-Naddaf raid was a public test the government failed. Commanders were turned away, warned they would be detained and forced to stand down at gunpoint, all without consequence for Harakat al-Nujaba. 

“If the government cannot enforce decisions against one resistance faction, or fails to follow up legally and politically, it shows that armed groups still possess an effective veto over some state actions,” Shakeri told Al-Monitor. No arrests followed, no public accounting was given — and that silence is what will register with the factions watching how far Baghdad is willing to go.

Since taking office in May, Zaidi has revived the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Iraqi Armed Forces, reshuffled the military command and installed Mohammed al-Mousawi atop the Counter Terrorism Service, a sign that this US trained force will conduct other missions.

But not all factions are equally invested in resisting that push. Groups like Asaib Ahl al-Haq have burrowed into politics and business, giving them less appetite for a fight. Others, like Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, still reject any move to bring their arsenals under state control.

“These factions connect their weapons to an ideological framework that makes surrendering them almost impossible from their point of view,” Iraqi political analyst Muhannad al-Ghazi told Al-Monitor, warning against mistaking headline-grabbing busts for real disarmament. “It’s similar to chasing the vehicles used in bombings while leaving the factories that produce them untouched.” Many camps and drone workshops sit inside territory the factions still control, and it's as much a political problem as a security one.

Widening circle of pressure

The failed raid landed amid rising friction between Zaidi and the Iran-backed factions following his trip to Washington earlier this month. Groups under the Islamic Resistance in Iraq umbrella had already warned against trading “military occupation” for “economic occupation” through expanded US investment — criticism that grew once Zaidi met President Donald Trump and pitched Iraq as a destination for American capital, particularly in energy.

The trip made plain how little control Baghdad has over its own soil while its prime minister negotiates abroad. On the evening of July 15, while Zaidi was still in Washington, Iranian drones struck the Dana Gas facility in the Kurdistan Region, forcing it to suspend operations. Zaidi condemned the strike but stopped short of naming Iran.

The government thus absorbed a strike it didn’t order and couldn’t prevent, during the trip meant to show it was taking charge of its own security.

At the White House, Trump brought up the January 2020 strike that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani and PMF deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near Baghdad. Zaidi sidestepped it, saying he had not been in politics at the time and had come “to talk about the future.” Iran-backed factions accused him of abandoning men they consider symbols of the resistance. Nujaba leader Akram al-Kaabi rejected the visit’s outcome outright, while Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly questioned Zaidi’s judgment.

The sequencing appears to be a coordinated squeeze rather than coincidence: Factional statements before the trip set red lines, the drone strike during the visit showed Iran could act on Iraqi soil regardless and the rhetoric afterward kept up the pressure. Shakeri reads the timing the same way, arguing it was meant to cast disarmament as something Washington is imposing and not something Baghdad chose.

That pressure isn’t coming only from one direction. On Monday, the Saudi Defense Ministry said its air defenses had shot down drones launched from Iraqi territory toward oil facilities in the Eastern Province and Riyadh, blaming Iran-backed militias and warning it reserved the right to respond “at the appropriate time and place.”

By midweek, US-Saudi airstrikes struck militia targets across eastern Iraq leaving at least 20 killed. Saudi Arabia said the strikes targeted an Iranian proxy group responsible for assaults on oil facilities in the Eastern Province and Riyadh region. Zaidi, who was scheduled to travel to Saudi Arabia this week, rescheduled his visit. 

Paired with the July 15 strike, the pattern is hard to spin: Whether the source is Iran or factions operating with its blessing, Iraqi territory is being used as a launchpad against a Gulf neighbor — and against Iraq’s own claim to sovereignty.

Deadline deemed unrealistic

Sept. 30 was never a realistic date for full disarmament, and the past two weeks make that idea harder to dispute. A government that cannot search a single Harakat al-Nujaba compound without being turned away at gunpoint is not six weeks from dismantling factions that field drones and missiles.

What’s achievable looks modest: transferring some weapons, closing a facility or two — enough to claim momentum without a fight the state isn’t equipped to win. “This will probably fall short of full disarmament because the most powerful factions still retain political influence, institutional protection and independent military capabilities,” Shakeri said.

Genuine disarmament would mean dismantling entire organizations and seizing weapons-production sites — a level of force that risks internal conflict and could draw Iran in to protect its allies. Baghdad’s actual strategy looks more incremental: absorbing cooperative factions gradually while squeezing holdouts through political and financial pressure, and watching whether it can alter faction footprints in places like Tarmiyah, north of Baghdad, and Jurf al-Sakhar, a Kataib Hezbollah stronghold south of the capital. Underneath it all sits a variable Baghdad doesn’t control. The file’s fate may hinge less on Iraqi enforcement than on the trajectory between Washington and Tehran.

Given that reality, full disarmament is probably the wrong yardstick. A more realistic one is narrower: whether Baghdad can steadily limit the factions’ ability to launch attacks, move weapons, threaten neighboring states or act outside the chain of command. Zaidi’s government has pushed further institutionally than its predecessors. But armed men forcing state troops to stand down at gunpoint, days after Iranian drones struck Iraqi soil unopposed, showed that Baghdad still does not fully control its own territory.