In an inconvenient development for President Donald Trump’s second Iran war, Tehran’s proxy forces in Iraq have emerged as a potent threat.
These are the powerful Iraqi militias that helped to defeat the Islamic State in the mid-2010s after the group captured Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, in 2014. Today, those same militias have mounted sophisticated attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq and on civilian and energy infrastructure inside America’s closest allies in the war, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. According to The Wall Street Journal, the militias are responsible for drone attacks on the Kuwaiti consulate in Basra and the Emirati consulate in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
“Since the start of the conflict, the Kurdistan region has been consistently attacked externally by Iran and internally by the Iranian-backed militias,” Treefa Aziz, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Washington representative, told me in an interview earlier this month. Aziz said that the Kurdistan region has absorbed more than 700 attacks from drones, missiles, mortars, and rockets, resulting in the deaths of 16 people and over 90 serious injuries. “The militias are responsible for a lot of havoc, and the government in Baghdad is not doing enough to rein them in.”
