The armed factions operating under the umbrella of Iraq’s Al-Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), have functioned primarily as instruments for strengthening the power of Shia Islamism, fighting Sunni jihadis, opposing U.S. and Israeli regional interests, and advancing Iran’s agendas across the Middle East.
As a central pillar of the so-called Axis of Resistance, the PMF has closely coordinated operations with Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Yemen, and, until Bashar al-Assad’s downfall, Syria. Inside Iraq, it has hampered Iraqi initiatives to normalize or bolster relations with Western and Gulf Arab countries or to distance Iraq from Iranian influence. This has been demonstrated by the PMF’s frequent attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities or forces, as well as its obstruction of Gulf investments in central and southern Iraq. Indeed, by exploiting the PMF’s legal status as an official Iraqi government institution—the state pays its salaries and budget—its factions have created a political-military powerhouse that opposes any Iraqi developments that are deemed detrimental to Iran’s interests.
However, increasing American and Israeli pressure, along with explicit, mainly Israeli, threats of military action against those Iraqi factions, have reduced their coordination with other Iran-backed groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or Ansar Allah in Yemen. All military operations by the PMF were halted after Israel submitted an official request to the United Nations for greater international pressure on Iraq to end attacks launched from its territory. Even the daily public declarations by militia leaders, which were common in previous years, have ceased. This was particularly true after President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. This entails imposing sanctions on entities assisting Iranian oil smuggling or supporting affiliates of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with a specific focus on blocking Iranian efforts to circumvent sanctions through Iraq’s financial system. Trump’s presidential directives, accompanied by private messages delivered to Iraq’s prime minister by top U.S. officials, have impacted the PMF’s public presence.
Facing intensified military and economic threats affecting their survival, and influenced by the military defeat of Hezbollah and the collapse of the Assad regime, the PMF’s armed factions are changing their behavior. Their primary objective has shifted toward preserving the PMF’s existence and avoiding its dissolution and the forced integration of its forces into the Iraqi military. Practically, this has entailed not only discontinuing their military attacks against U.S. or Israeli targets, but also moderating their anti-American rhetoric and discretely forsaking the Axis of Resistance’s doctrine of the Unity of the Arenas.
Significantly, the resources available through the PMF considerably exceed those provided by Iran. The PMF’s budget in 2024 alone stood at approximately $3.4 billion, surpassing the total state revenues of Lebanon ($3.3 billion, according to the 2024 budget) and Yemen ($2.2 billion, based on Yemen’s latest published budget). Unlike other Iraqi government institutions, the PMF budget lacks effective auditing and oversight. Moreover, the Iraqi government possesses no accurate, verifiable records of PMF personnel, merely listing around 238,000 positions on paper. This absence of financial accountability has allowed the PMF’s armed factions to share resources and establish extensive patronage networks that have significantly influenced electoral outcomes and helped sustain their political power. This is a substantial prize that is difficult to relinquish, especially if pursuing attacks against U.S. forces and Israel may lead to a confrontation the PMF is likely to lose, given what happened to Hezbollah and the evident weakness of the Iranian position.
Therefore, for the PMF to maintain a low profile without surrendering its financial and military capabilities may represent a viable self-preservation strategy. This aligns with what the Axis of Resistance has referred to as “strategic patience,” grounded in the expectation that the United States may become preoccupied with other crises, or the knowledge that the Trump administration’s term will eventually come to an end.
As the PMF factions’ external regional role diminishes, their internal disputes over resource allocation and leadership have come to the surface. Traditionally, Iran would manage or mediate in such disputes. However, its capacity to do so today has been eroded because of its declining regional influence, but also because of the nature of growing factional interests inside Iraq. For example, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which is led by Qais al-Khazaali, recently supported legislation regulating PMF service terms and retirement conditions. This legislative initiative sought primarily to remove PMF chairman, Falih al-Fayyad, by pushing for his retirement, alongside that of approximately 400 PMF commanders, thereby facilitating a redistribution of power within the organization.
However, Fayyad successfully blocked the proposal, reportedly through an agreement through which he aligned himself politically with Prime Minister Mohammed Shiya al-Sudani’s electoral coalition. Consequently, the Prime Minister’s Office drafted an alternative bill, proposing ministerial rank for the PMF chairman and three deputy minister positions for PMF officials—roles carrying significant authority. By comparison, other Iraqi security bodies, such as the Counter-Terrorism Forces or the National Security Service, are not allocated deputy minister positions, with members of their senior ranks restricted to positions of directors general.
The prime minister’s proposed legislation provided Fayyad with a political lifeline, but was also a balancing act. By elevating Fayyad to ministerial rank, it exempted him from mandatory retirement. Furthermore, the new legislation also gave factions opposed to Fayyad an opportunity to share legal control over the PMF by filling the three newly-created deputy minister positions, thereby allowing them greater latitude to share influence with him. In this way, Sudani sought to indefinitely maintain Fayyad—a key electoral ally—as PMF chairman, while simultaneously granting influential posts to Fayyad’s political rivals, which was designed to appease them. These steps ensured broad parliamentary acceptance of his legislation.
Historically, Iraqi Shia Islamist militias justified their existence through ideological adherence to the concept of Wilayat al-Faqih (or Guardianship of the Jurist). This concept, revived by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran and embodied today in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, effectively grants supreme political power to a senior cleric, or jurist, thereby combining paramount political and religious power in one person. Through this interpretation, the Iraqi factions anchored themselves in the Iranian revolutionary project and cultivated anti-Western hostility.
However, these factions have recently begun replacing the rhetoric of the Axis of Resistance with a discourse centered on the rise to power in Syria of Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly Abou Mohammed al-Julani of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham). The changing Syrian political landscape has provided the factions with a convenient ideological alternative to distance themselves from Iran’s faltering regional ambitions and capitalize instead on Iraqi Shia anxieties with the emergence of a Sunni jihadi-linked political entity in Syria, with which Iraq shares an approximately 600-kilometer border. Through deliberate misinformation on the Syrian situation and public manipulation by these factions and their affiliated media outlets, along with the new Syrian administration’s perceived inability to adequately accommodate minorities, the PMF militias are now portraying themselves as Iraq’s only effective bulwark against Sunni jihadism.
This carefully crafted narrative seeks not only to legitimize the PMF’s continued presence but also the expansion of its political power, financial resources, and institutional influence. Such dynamics reflect the multifaceted nature of the PMF factions, whereby they can compensate for the abandonment, or the downplaying, of their affiliation with the Axis of Resistance by consolidating their power as sources of patronage and as protectors of the Shia community.
