Even Iraq Wants to Leave Iran's Axis

The Atlantic

25-02-2025

The Iranian regime spent decades building the Axis of Resistance, a coalition of anti-Western militias that extended Tehran's influence deep into the Arab world. But what takes years to build can collapse seemingly overnight. Iraq is the latest country in which many leaders are attempting to move out of Iran's orbit.
Last year, the Axis rapidly slid from the seeming height of its power into terminal decline. Israel battered two key members, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell to its opponents. In Lebanon, the Parliament elected a new president and a new prime minister who are not on friendly terms with the Axis. Until recently, Tehran liked to boast that it controlled four Arab capitals: Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa, and Baghdad. The first two have slipped away. The third is still controlled by the Houthis, who remain loyal to Tehran. But what about the fourth?
Iran's influence in Baghdad runs through the country's Shiite militias and political parties. Iraq's prime minister can hardly govern without the support of Shiite groups. And yet, the degree of Tehran's control over Baghdad is always changing. Pro-Tehran parties can't form a government on their own; they have to form coalitions with other parties, including those dominated by Kurds and Sunnis, who have little ideological affinity with the Axis. And even among Iraq's Shia, the pro-Tehran position is heavily contested—all the more so, surely, now that the region's balance of power has shifted away from Iran.
In 2021, pro-Tehran parties were roundly defeated in Iraq's parliamentary elections. Muqtada al-Sadr, a charismatic Shia cleric and vociferous critic of Iran, looked set to form a government. But the pro-Iranian forces staged violent street clashes and, through clerical and parliamentary maneuvering, managed to stop this. Mohammed al-Sudani assumed the premiership in October 2022 in what was largely seen as an Iranian victory—not least because the prime minister he replaced, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, had been Iraq's first non-Islamist ruler since the fall of Saddam. Kadhimi had restored Iraqi ties with Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, even while keeping excellent relations with Iran and encouraging the restoration of Iranian-Saudi diplomatic relations.
Yet Tehran's hold over Baghdad is far from secure. Al-Sudani relies on the support of the pro-Tehran parties, but he has also continued to pursue much of Kadhimi's regional agenda of cementing ties with Arab states. And two of his major coalition partners, the Sunni-dominated Progress Party and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), had previously formed a pact with Sadr. Even Sudani's own small party, the Euphrates Movement (also known by its Arabic name, al-Furatayn), once explored a coalition with Sadr. Which is to say that Sadr has lost the intra-Shia battle for now, but his previous allies still hold a good deal of power in Iraq and share it with the pro-Tehran parties at their pleasure.
Many issues divide Iraqis, but one unites many of them: They don't want Iraq to be a battleground for Iran's conflicts with the United States and Israel. Nor, given the declining fortunes of Tehran's Axis, do they wish to be on the losing team in the region. When Assad fell, Tehran went into a panic. Iraqis, meanwhile, attempted to normalize relations with the new Syrian administration. On December 26, Iraq's intelligence chief visited Damascus and met with Syria's new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa. Iraqis have also taken part in Arab League engagements with Syria.
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Many in Iraq are now openly calling for disbanding the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella of mostly Iran-backed militias formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State. Explicitly modeled after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the PMF has been the main vehicle for Iranian meddling in Iraq. Members of the Iraqi government have begun arguing that with the Sunni terrorist group mostly defeated, the PMF is no longer necessary.
'I hope that we can convince the leaders of these groups to lay down their arms,' Fuad Hussein, Iraq's foreign minister and a KDP stalwart, said in an interview last month. 'Two or three years ago, it was impossible to discuss this topic in our society.'
Today Sadr, too, has called for only the state security forces, 'and not militias or outlaw groups,' to bear arms. More surprisingly, some figures from inside the Coalition Framework, an umbrella of mostly pro-Tehran parties, have endorsed this position—among them, Mohsen al-Mandalawi, a Shia Kurdish billionaire and the deputy speaker of the Parliament. Disbanding armed militias or incorporating them into security forces loyal to the state would effectively take away Iran's main source of leverage inside Iraq.
Such a move may also be calculated to head off trouble with Washington. The new Trump administration is reportedly considering fresh sanctions against Iraq unless the PMF is disarmed. During his first presidential term, President Donald Trump launched drone strikes into Baghdad that killed the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and the PMF's deputy commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. As a result, the Iraqi judiciary has an outstanding warrant for Trump's arrest. But now that the former president is back in power, the Iraqi government may be looking to smooth things over. Al-Sudani and Iraq's ceremonial president, Abdul Latif Rashid, have sent congratulatory messages to the U.S. president, upon his election in November and his inauguration last month. Speaking to Reuters last month, Hussein said he hoped Iraq would 'continue [its] good relationship with Washington' under Trump. And Ali Nima, an MP with the Coordination Framework, recently said that he expected Iraqi-American relations to improve and that the pro-Iranian group was 'not concerned about Trump.'
Relations with Tehran, meanwhile, seem more contentious than ever. Last month, Sudani visited Tehran and got an earful from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The elderly Iranian cleric called for Iraq to preserve and strengthen the PMF and to expel all American forces. He also called the recent change of power in Syria the work of 'alien governments.'
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Is all of this enough to suggest that Iraq, too, is leaving Iran's Axis? The Iraq experts I spoke with did not agree on the answer to this question.
'Iran continues to wield significant influence in Iraq,' Hamdi Malik, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute, told me. He pointed out that Sudani's government initially sent the new Syrian regime 'cautious yet positive signals,' but that 'the tone in Iraq's Shia circles shifted completely after Khamenei expressed a completely hostile view of developments there.' Moreover, the Sudani government relies heavily on the support of the Coordination Framework, many of whose parties derive their power and influence from Iran. 'Therefore,' Malik told me, 'any attempt by Sudani to curb Iran's influence will be merely cosmetic.'
Farhang Faraydoon Namdar, a Kurdish Iraqi analyst at Missouri State University, agreed. The PMF still has some 200,000 members and an almost $3 billion budget. That force is most likely not going anywhere, he observed, the calls for disbanding it notwithstanding. And 'almost all PMF groups are loyal to Iran,' Namdar told me. 'The PMF has been able to entrench itself in Iraq's economy and politics … they are the backbone of Sudani's government.'
But Iraq's position may be more complex than that of a simple vassal to a neighboring regime. Baghdad is uniquely situated to balance Iranian interests against those of the region's Sunni Arab states, and it is working hard to build partnerships with its non-Iranian neighbors. Arran Robert Walshe, an Iraq expert based in Amman, told me he believes that Sudani is 'cautiously disentangling Iraq from the Axis without fully severing ties to Tehran.' But Tehran and its Iraqi allies could spoil those efforts, Walshe cautions—for example, by attacking development projects in which Gulf states have invested.
Iraq will hold parliamentary elections in October. If enough Iraqis reject pro-Tehran parties at the polls, as most did in 2021, Sudani or a successor may have the opportunity to form a government that does more to assert Iraqi sovereignty. Parties currently in the Coordination Framework could even break away from Tehran and run on new platforms. By the unwritten sectarian power-sharing deal that has ruled the country since 2003, the Iraqi prime minister must always be an Arab Shiite. But he is not guaranteed to be pro-Axis.