Baghdad is trying to do the impossible again. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who squeezed into office last May after months of exhausting political paralysis, wants you to believe he can finally solve Iraq's biggest headache. He's trying to force Iraq's militias under state control, demanding a total monopoly on heavy weapons. It sounds beautiful on paper. It satisfies the heavy-handed demands coming from the Trump administration and nervous Gulf neighbors. But if you talk to anyone on the ground in Baghdad, the reality feels less like a new era of sovereignty and more like a high-stakes shell game.
The core problem isn't a lack of paperwork or committees. Zaidi even set up a flashy new joint committee on June 3 to oversee the disarmament. The real issue is that these armed groups have spent over a decade building deep economic empires, political parties, and autonomous command structures. They aren't going to vanish just because a compromise prime minister signs a decree. When we look at what's actually happening behind the scenes, the highly publicized announcements of groups turning over their weapons look deeply suspicious.
The Illusion of Voluntary Disarmament
In late May and early June, a flurry of surprising announcements made international headlines. First, the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr declared he was cutting ties with his Saraya al-Salam militia, ordering them to fold into the national military command structure. Days later, Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, announced his hardline group would also hand over weapons and disengage from the Popular Mobilization Forces, the massive state-funded umbrella organization for these paramilitaries. Kataib Imam Ali followed suit.
It looked like a massive victory for Zaidi. It wasn't.
Western observers often misinterpret these moves as genuine surrenders. They aren't. Take Khazali's Asaib Ahl al-Haq. His political wing, Sadiqoon, won a massive 28 seats in the November 2025 parliamentary elections. He doesn't need to brandish an AK-47 on the streets of Basra anymore because he already controls significant chunks of the state budget and legislative apparatus. Transitioning from a guerrilla commander into a suit-wearing statesman is a promotion, not a defeat. By nominally placing his fighters under state control, he protects his political gains, cleans up his image, and ensures his men keep drawing government salaries.
A militia fighter in Baghdad summed up this dynamic perfectly to an international researcher. He asked a simple question. What is integration? It's just moving the gun from my right hand to my left hand.
The institutional reality remains completely unchanged. The fighters keep their loyalties, their structures, and their hidden stockpiles. They just change the patch on their shoulders.
Why Hardliners Refuse to Play Along
While some groups choose to adapt and embed themselves deeper into the state bureaucracy, the true ideologues are openly defying the prime minister. Groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba have made their positions entirely clear. They aren't disarming. They aren't integrating.
These factions operate as direct nodes in Iran's regional axis. Since the outbreak of the regional war with Iran in February 2026, Iraqi territory has become a bloody battleground for proxy strikes. Kataib Hezbollah has continued launching drones and rockets at U.S. positions and Kurdish bases. In return, American and Israeli airstrikes have pounded militia headquarters from Kirkuk to the Nineveh Plains, killing dozens of fighters, including high-ranking commanders like Abu Hassan al-Fariji.
Zaidi is caught in an impossible vice. If he aggressively pushes to disarm these hardline factions, he risks triggering a full-scale civil war in the capital. These groups possess sophisticated drone technology and intelligence networks that rival the official state security apparatus. Just look at what happened when the government tried to flex its muscles recently. A drone strike struck a state intelligence building, killing a police officer. Iraq's own foreign minister admitted the attack came from factions inside the country. It was a blatant, bloody warning shot aimed directly at the prime minister's office.
A Broken Government Trying to Fight a Combined Force
It's hard to project absolute state authority when your own cabinet is missing its most important pieces. Zaidi's government is fundamentally weak. When parliament voted him in, he only managed to get 14 out of his 23 ministerial nominees approved. Crucially, the positions of Defense Minister and Interior Minister remain completely vacant due to endless bickering within the Coordination Framework, the ruling Shia coalition.
Zaidi is trying to run a security crackdown without a permanent defense minister. The administrative vacancy forces him to rely on fragile political appointments and security shuffles that often backfire.
Look at his recent decision to shuffle Qasim al-Araji, a veteran figure from the Badr Organization, out of his spot as National Security Adviser, replacing him with Qasim Hassan al-Aboudi. Zaidi's allies frame this as a bold move to clean out militia influence from top intelligence posts. But Araji wasn't cast out. He was simply moved to a new role as special security adviser. The Badr Organization has thousands of men integrated across the federal police and state ministries. You can change the names on the office doors all you want, but the deep systemic networks built over twenty years remain fully intact.
The Crushing Weight of External Pressures
Zaidi doesn't have the luxury of time to figure this out slowly. The international community is breathing down his neck, demanding immediate, measurable proof that he can control his own borders.
The pressure from Washington is intense. The current U.S. administration has lost all patience with Baghdad's double-dealing. Tom Barrack, the active U.S. special envoy for Iraq and Syria, has made it clear that American economic and military cooperation depends entirely on the complete disarmament of non-state actors. Washington is watching for actual results, not just theatrical flag-lowering ceremonies in Samarra. The U.S. Treasury holds immense leverage over Iraq's economy through its control over the auction of oil dollars, and they've already shown a willingness to sanction Iraqi companies accused of helping Iran smuggle oil.
It's not just Washington. Regional dynamics have changed radically. In May, pro-Iran militias using Iraqi soil launched drone attacks targeting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The responses were swift and unprecedented. Both Gulf nations conducted kinetic military strikes inside Iraq against those militia positions. For the Gulf states, an unstable Iraq that acts as a launchpad for Iranian drones is an existential threat. They are telling Zaidi quite plainly that if he doesn't clean up his house, they will continue to bomb it.
What Most People Get Wrong About the PMF
To understand why this is so difficult, you have to discard the outdated idea that the Popular Mobilization Forces are just a collection of rogue outlaws. They are an official branch of the Iraqi state security forces. They receive billions of dollars directly from the national budget.
This hybrid security model was created to fight ISIS, but it has mutated into something permanent. The state pays the salaries, provides the weapons, and grants legal immunity to these fighters. Yet, the chain of command leads back to political party headquarters and religious leaders, not the joint military command.
This means Zaidi is essentially trying to disarm a force that his own government funds. If he cuts their budget, he risks massive labor unrest and armed rebellion from over a hundred thousand armed men. If he keeps paying them, he remains complicit in their international regional attacks. It's a perfect trap.
The Immediate Steps Iraq Must Take Now
If the Zaidi government wants to move past empty rhetoric and cosmetic re-branding, it needs a radical shift in strategy. The current approach of celebrating superficial integration pledges while ignoring the underlying political networks isn't working.
- Fill the Security Cabinet Immediately: Stop the political horse-trading and appoint independent, professional leaders to the ministries of Defense and Interior. A government cannot project power when its security leadership is vacant.
- Enforce Fiscal Accountability on the PMF: Stop writing blank checks to the umbrella organization. Audit the payrolls directly. Force every single brigade to submit verified biometric data of its personnel to the central government before a single dinar is released.
- Isolate the Hardline Rejectionists: Focus enforcement actions exclusively on factions like Kataib Hezbollah that actively launch attacks against neighboring states. Treat them as distinct national security threats rather than grouping them in with factions willing to talk.
- Secure the Border Corridors: Deploy elite, non-aligned counter-terrorism units to control the border crossings with Syria, cutting off the illicit supply lines that keep these rogue factions supplied with advanced drone components.
Zaidi is scheduled to visit Washington in mid-July. If he shows up with nothing but empty promises and stories about fake disarmament ceremonies, he will find a cold reception. The regional war is escalating, and the room for strategic ambiguity in Baghdad has completely run out.
