Iran-backed militias across the Middle East are stepping up attacks against Israel, the United States and their allies, in retaliation for the ongoing joint U.S.-Israeli offensive against Tehran as the war draws in new armed actors, threatening broader chaos and violence.
Israel and the United States have attacked Iran’s network of militant groups, and Iraq is emerging as a key front in this new and often clandestine confrontation.
Militias in Iraq have launched dozens of attacks since the war began on Saturday, targeting Israel and US bases in Jordan and Iraq itself.
In recent days, they have also attacked the infrastructure of Iranian-Kurdish opposition groups based in Kurdish-dominated autonomous northern Iraq.
Israel and the United States are trying to degrade the capabilities of pro-Iran militias in Iraq with airstrikes and special forces operations on the ground, according to well-informed analysts and former regional intelligence officials.
Since the US-led invasion in 2003, Iraq has been an indirect battleground between the United States, its allies and Iran, but the country’s current leaders have sought to avoid being drawn into this new conflict. The militias are recruited from Iraq’s majority Shiite community and follow orders from senior officers in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
On Tuesday, in a sign of an intensifying proxy war across the region, officials in Washington suggested they were considering mobilizing the Iranian Kurdish opposition, possibly for an invasion of Iran’s northwestern region.
Several Iranian-backed armed factions have claimed responsibility for attacks on the US base at Erbil airport in northern Iraq in recent days. Other drones and missiles have been launched from sites in Iran’s western desert against targets in Jordan; while southern militias fired a missile at Kuwait.
On Thursday, the militias issued a joint statement calling on European countries not to join the war and threatening their “forces and bases in Iraq and the region.”
The Iraqi state-run Iraqi News Agency reported that an attempt to launch missiles from an area in Basra province in southern Iraq “intended to target a neighboring country” had been thwarted and that security forces had seized a mobile launch platform carrying two missiles that were ready to be fired.
An Israeli military spokesman confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that drones had been launched against Israel from Iraq, although “not in significant numbers.”
Michael Knights, an Iraq expert at Horizon Engage, a New York-based strategic consultancy, said Iran-backed Iraqi groups were trying to figure out how to be relevant and how to respond to the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In what appears to be a clandestine counteroffensive, militia bases south of Baghdad, and near the southern cities of Nasariya and Basra, have been attacked by small “suicide drones” that have reportedly killed 15 fighters, mostly from Kataib Hezbollah, the most powerful among pro-Iran groups based in Iraq.
Knights said: “Short-range drone systems are being used in Iraq that cannot have been transported from Israel. We saw exactly this during the last war (between Iran and Israel last year) and it suggests some kind of covert action going on on the ground. There are a lot of proxy wars going on.”
On Thursday, Kataib Hezbollah said one of its commanders had been killed in an attack in southern Iraq the previous day. Two faction sources told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday that an attack had hit a vehicle near the group’s main base in southern Iraq, killing two fighters. The number of victims then increased to three, including the commander.
The group’s base in Jurf al-Nasr has been attacked repeatedly since the weekend. There are also reports of large explosions at militia bases in Iraq’s western Anbar province.
There have also been a series of unexplained explosions that have immobilized Iraqi government radar systems that monitor air traffic through Iraqi airspace.
Two former senior intelligence officials in Israel said they could not comment on the explosions, but that the suggestion that Israel’s intelligence services or special forces were responsible was “credible.” A third said US forces could be involved.
Iran has spent decades investing in a coalition of militant groups stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean intended both to deter an attack on Iran itself and to project influence across the region.
Israel has launched a wide-ranging offensive in Lebanon after Hezbollah, Lebanon’s main Islamist movement that also has very close relations with Iran, joined the conflict, attacking Israel but also launching a drone towards a UK base in Cyprus.
However, the so-called “axis of resistance” has been severely weakened by successive Israeli offensives since one of its members, Hamas, launched a surprise attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, triggering the series of recent wars.
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist militant movement and the Houthis in Yemen have close ties to Tehran but have so far stayed out of the current conflict.
Renad Mansour, a senior fellow focused on the Middle East at Chatham House, said: “It’s very much about survival… And survival for them is based on calculations that don’t necessarily have to do with Iran’s survival.”
Phillip Smyth, a US-based independent analyst on Iran’s allies and proxies, said Tehran may be keeping the Houthis “in reserve” but that the movement’s leaders may also be “hedging their bets in case the Iranian regime collapses.”
In a further sign of the United States’ possible use of proxies recruited among Iran’s ethnic minorities to weaken the Iranian regime, there are reports of attacks by an armed group affiliated with separatist movements among Iran’s Arab community against Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in southwestern Iran.
An apparently newly formed group calling itself the “Ahwaz Hawks” claimed responsibility for an attack on an IRGC base in Ahwaz, an Iranian city near the border with Iraq.
