Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are seeking to strike at Israel to help take the pressure off Hezbollah.
“The Islamic resistance in Iraq has launched an attack against a key target in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories using Al’Arqab cruise missiles,” according to IRNA.
The report came amid sirens sounding in the Golan due to a drone threat. It appears that the Iraqi militias have attempted to increase the number of attacks on Israel over the past week. They also launched an attack on September 18 using a drone.
According to the IRNA report, the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which is an umbrella group of various resistance movements in the Arab country, has vowed to continue its operations on Israeli positions until the Gaza war comes to an end.”
The militias are also backing Hezbollah and it seems that their increased activity is related to the Israeli strikes on the terror group. The Israel-Hezbollah conflict grew in the wake of exploding pagers that harmed thousands of Hezbollah members on September 17. Then the IDF eliminated 16 key Hezbollah commanders on September 20, and on September 23, it began a campaign of major airstrikes on Hezbollah rocket launchers and other Hezbollah sites.
The Iraqi militias have also sought to target other locations in Israel. They have sought to attack areas in the Jordan Valley and also apparently in the West Bank, according to an article at Maariv on September 23.
Iraqi militias intensify strikes on Israel
The Iraqi militias are part of several umbrella groups that are interrelated. For example, the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), called Al-Hashd Al-Sha’bi in Arabic, is a group of dozens of militias. Some are well known and closely connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, such as Kata’ib Hezbollah. Other militias are smaller and only operate from various towns or draw their recruits from small ethnic and religious groups.
The PMU also maintains close connections to Iraq’s Interior Ministry. These militias, who form various brigades and paramilitary organizations, have been paid by the Iraqi state since the end of the war on ISIS, when their role in Iraq was formalized. As such, they have overlapping roles, as both an official force in some cases and as a militia that is linked closely to Iran.
The “Islamic Resistance” in Iraq is a name given to a group of militias within the larger PMU that has sought to take part in the war on Israel. This group seeks to form a front, as one of the six fronts Iran has mobilized against Israel since October 7.
“The escalation of the Iraqi factions against Israeli targets comes as part of operations to support the fighting fronts in Lebanon and Gaza. And an attempt to exert military pressure on Israel to reduce its activities in Lebanon and Gaza,” Al-Arabiya’s military commentator recently said.
The desire by the Iraqi militias to participate in the fighting is clear. They have been targeting US forces and Israel since the Hamas attack on October 7. The PMU has helped affirm this stance via a statement on September 23.
“[We are] declaring our full solidarity with our brothers in Lebanon in the face of the Zionist arrogance and the daily killing machine that moves between Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria,” the statement said.
“We declare our full readiness and full mobilization to provide all possible types of relief, medical, and humanitarian assistance to our brothers in Lebanon in response to the call of the supreme religious authority and based on the humanitarian, fraternal, and religious duty.”
The statement also said that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most well-known Shi’ite cleric in Iraq, had put out a statement of support for Lebanon in the wake of the Israeli airstrikes on September 23.
Both the Sistani statement and the PMU statement are important. Recall that Sistani’s 2014 call for mobilization against ISIS sparked a popular movement in Iraq to join these militias. Clearly, there is a rising number of voices in Iraq seeking to push for intervention against Israel.