The Shadow Militias of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units
The emergence of new splinter pro-Iran groups is part of a wider trend of fragmentation of the Popular Mobilization Units in Iraq.
The Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) were created by the Iraqi government in 2014 in response to the growing threat of ISIS. A development within them this past year lies behind the emergence of several small splinter groups affiliated with larger Iran-backed factions. Additionally, the PMU itself has witnessed a de facto partition of its three main factions: the pro-Iran groups, the pro-Sistani groups and the Sadrists. The result is that where once the PMU presented a holistic front of Iraqi forces united against a single cause, the politicisation of factions since the defeat of ISIS has rendered PMUs a highly fragmented collective with increasingly thuggish elements.
New Logo, Same Group?
Many of the smaller splinter groups have a dubious degree of autonomy. Whether these splinter militias are independent groups backed by the larger ‘parent’ militias or merely fronts for those larger militias is not clear. In favor of the latter theory, there exists the clear incentive of the larger groups to evade US sanctions through designations as foreign terrorist organizations. Additionally, many of the attacks carried out against US and foreign targets these days are claimed by one of these shadowy groups – take the December 12 IED attack on a Coalition convoy in Nasiriyah, claimed by Saraya Qassem al-Jabbarin. That any of these newly formed groups would have the capability to launch IED or projectile attacks without the support of pre-existing groups seems to lend support to the perspective that they are, in reality, only fronts for the more established Iran-backed militias.
Another rationale for the creation of these groups as fronts for the larger militias is that it gives the larger groups, and thus Iran, a means of ‘plausible deniability’ for involvement in the attacks, which instead appear to be carried out by loose groups of armed men sympathetic to the anti-American cause. This buys Iran and its larger Iraqi proxies leverage, whilst enabling them to inflict piecemeal damage and place pressure on the US and Iraqi governments. This devolutionary branding strategy has only partially worked, however, since both Iraqis and American diplomats think of the splinter militias as part of one larger entity, different tentacles of the same creature: the ‘Axis of Resistance’.
The Battle on the Streets
The new splinter groups formed in the past year come in two forms: armed militias capable of launching attacks on US assets in Iraq, and street gangs who have waged a social war on the roads of Baghdad. The former includes Usbat al-Thaireen and Ashab al-Kahf, who seem to come in fits and bursts, periodically claiming rocket or IED attacks on US targets.
The latter include Rab’allah, Jund Soleimani and Abu Jadahah, who together wield a thuggish assault on Baghdad life. Some of these smaller groups manifest themselves as little more than youth gangs, armed with batons rather than bombs. Strong religious sectarian elements compel these groups to police social mores and suppress Baghdad’s more liberal side, made clear through an attack on a massage parlour and the bombings of alcohol off-licences. The thuggish component to these groups in the attempt to police the behaviour of Iraqis, as opposed to the targeting of American assets, points to a more religious domestic agenda compared to the armed groups like Ashab al-Kahf.
What makes these pro-Iran gangs so shadowy is the unknowns surrounding their existence. Some of them seem to enjoy a relatively high public exposure for a short while before fading away into obscurity. Such is the case of Rab’allah, who thrust themselves into the public eye briefly in November when they shot an activist in the street and then raided a massage parlour, beating up its staff while broadcasting the incident on their social media. There has not been a squeak from them since. Others still, such as the mysterious Firqat al-Ghashiyah, seem to have no substance to them whatsoever other than a declarative statement announcing their formation — they have yet to issue a follow-up statement, let alone carry out an attack.
A Wider Splintering of the PMU
These shadow groups, whether autonomous or not, represent a splintering of the branding of the PMU and are part of a wider trend in the breaking away of factions. Where once the PMU were a fairly holistic umbrella organisation representative of Iraqi society, the relative power of Iran within the PMU has grown to the extent that the PMU itself can now be said to almost entirely be an Iranian proxy.
This wider fragmentation of the PMU can be attributed to many factors. Chief among them is the lack of a unifying cause, which had previously been defeating ISIS. Another catalyst was the death of Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, which deprived the PMU of a leader and deputy able to unite the factions.
That the pro-Iran faction now have even more power within the PMU is largely due to the detachment of two of the other largest factions in the PMUs: the Sadrists and the Atabat. The Sadrists, under the command of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, includes the Saraya al-Salam militia and its smaller affiliates. Saraya al-Salam, while technically still under the PMU umbrella, is in the process of integrating into the army, and Sadr anyhow has repeatedly called for the dissolution of the PMU. The Atabat, or ‘Shrine Units’, are those groups which are aligned with the Najaf-based Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani and not aligned with any political party. These groups, including the Abbas Combat Brigade, Liwa Ali al-Akbar and Liwa Ansar al-Mariyya, have already formally detached themselves from the PMU, no longer wanting to share the same grouping with the Iran-backed groups.
Conclusion
The PMU is arguably no longer a popular mobilization in any way but name. Two of its largest factions have either left it, or don’t have the heart to remain in it. The result is that the brand of the PMU itself has been subsumed by a powerful pro-Iran bloc. This has consequently allowed powerful militias, such as Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, to instigate the creation of smaller shadow groups capable of conducting field operations against Coalition forces and to launch a social pogrom on the streets of Baghdad. What comes of this devolution within the Iran-backed militia and whether the gang-like groups become empowered as entities capable of carrying out armed attacks or wind down into little more than a set of social media accounts with a logo remains to be seen.
References
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