MESOPOTMIA NEWS „ARGUMENT“:  The PMU Is Getting More Aggressive in Iraq

Since the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, Shiite militias like the PMU have taken on a new role in Iraq.

By Seth J. Frantzman  | April 7, 2020, 10:50 AM by FOREIGN POLICY

In January, Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of Iraq’s largest political party, traveled to Iran’s holy city of Qom to meet with representatives of several Iraq-based paramilitaries from the hugely influential Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). That visit was part of an attempt by Sadr to position himself as the face of public anger directed against the United States over the assassination of Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani.

Sadr is an important figure in Iraq not only because of his ties to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but also because members of his Saraya al-Salam militia turned out in significant numbers to protect anti-government protesters against Iraqi security forces, including the PMU, last year. The death of Suleimani caused pro-Iranian paramilitaries to flex their muscles by clashing more openly with U.S. troops, which could be a sign that the PMU is reimagining its future role in Iraq. Sadr’s intervention now makes the PMU’s ascendance undeniable. While he tried to navigate the wave of popular protest last year, he has hedged his influence with the PMU this year, illustrating that the organization cannot be sidelined.

The PMU’s engorged status is rooted in the war against the Islamic State. At the outset of the conflict, the powerful Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a fatwa that rallied more than 100,000 young men to join the organization. Most of the volunteers were Shiites, but groups of Sunnis, Christians, and Yazidis also formed their own units under the PMU umbrella. At its core, the PMU is a sectarian organization whose leaders see themselves as allies in Iran’s broader geopolitical ambitions.Sadr’s intervention now makes the PMU’s ascendance undeniable.

Many of the PMU militias have roots in older organizations, such as the Badr Organization, led by Hadi al-Amiri. Amiri had served alongside Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the 1980s fighting Saddam Hussein’s regime. Like Sadr, Amiri and his organization were seen as more moderate than other Shiite militias. For instance, the more radical Asaib Ahl al-Haq split from Sadr’s movement and targeted U.S. forces after 2006.

The PMU’s presence in Iraq ballooned during the war against the Islamic State, giving it large numbers of armed men and some 50 brigades that wanted to play a major role in the social, military, and economic life of the country. I saw this on the roads around Mosul in 2017. As the city’s environs were liberated from the Islamic State, the flags of various Shiite militia groups went up at checkpoints outside the city, a typical sight across Iraq. The groups had their own munitions warehouses as well and allegedly had their own prisons.

The PMU reached a turning point in 2017 and 2018, when it was integrated into the Iraqi security forces as an official paramilitary force. That could have meant standardizing its units and blurring the line between the various militias and the regular armed units, but instead the PMU solidified its status as a distinct organization within the country. The brigades preserved their sectarian and political links to various former militias. Then-Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi defended the role of the PMU in 2017 when U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged the militias to return home. He said they would become the hope for the future of Iraq.

As tensions between Iran and the United States escalated beginning in May 2019, so too did those between U.S. troops in Iraq and the PMU. Both sides traded attacks, including more than a dozen PMU rocket attacks targeting important bases such as Camp Taji, Ayn al-Assad, Q-West, and K-1 near Kirkuk, where a U.S. contractor was killed. The latter action sparked a U.S. airstrike on five Kataib Hezbollah positions in Iraq and Syria and the strike that killed Suleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy chief of the PMU. Further rocket attacks eventually led to an attack on March 11 that killed three members of the U.S.-led coalition and led directly to a U.S. retaliatory strike on a series of PMU-controlled warehouses on March 13. In late March, the United States withdrew from many of the bases targeted by rocket attacks, including Q-West and K-1, as various PMU group continued to make threats to remove the U.S. troop presence.The anti-government protests opened an opportunity for the PMU to test its own clout in the country.

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