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In the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Iraq’s fledgling security apparatus has fragmented into groups under, parallel to, and apart from the state. The largest organization outside direct government control is the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)—over 60,000 fighters who stepped in to secure Iraq after state forces collapsed in 2014. Yet this organization remains divisive, poorly understood, and plagued by internal divisions, as it is both recognized by the state and at the behest of nonstate leadership figures. Key challenges involving the PMF will shape Iraq’s political and security future.

Setting the Record Straight About the PMF

• The PMF contains three distinct factions, based on various subgroups’ respective allegiances to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and Muqtada al-Sadr.
• The PMF was central to early efforts to roll back the Islamic State; however, the state’s security apparatus has since regrouped, reducing the PMF’s role in subsequent battles, including the ongoing campaign in Mosul.
• Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government is in a struggle to control the PMF. Rather than integrate it into existing state military forces, he has thus far recognized the PMF as a legitimate, state-affiliated entity.
• The PMF has become part of a growing intra-Shia power contest. This pits Nouri al-Maliki, considered the “godfather” of the PMF, against Sadr, who calls for disbanding the “imprudent militias,” and Abadi, who advocates reducing and controlling the PMF. 
• Some PMF subgroups have assumed political roles and will seek to leverage their roles in combatting the Islamic State to win votes in Iraq’s 2018 elections. They will focus on key battles in Tel Afar and Hawija, where the PMF is on the front line.

Policy Implications for Like-Minded Allies

• Understanding subgroups is pivotal. The PMF is not a monolithic Shia militia. Policy recommendations must separately address Iranian proxy; right-wing, pro-Khamenei Iraqi; pro-Sistani; and pro-Sadr subgroups.
• Supporting the Iraqi government’s move to reduce the authority of pro-Maliki, right-wing PMF subgroups will better facilitate eventual integration. Sadr and Sistani claim to be willing to be integrated.
• Integrating fighters on an individual, not a group, basis will better address the problem of multiple affiliations.  Rather than assigning entire groups to new divisions, any integration of the PMF and Iraq’s security forces should be based on individual admission, so as to avoid divided loyalties between the government and new members’ former paramilitary affiliations.
• Continuing to provide needed support for the Iraqi government’s attempt to separate security and political institutions and its decision to deny the PMF’s bid to become an electoral entity. Attempts by any party to leverage the PMF’s popularity and symbolism to win electoral votes should be discouraged.

Introduction

In 2014, the so-called Islamic State took over about one-third of Iraq’s territory, including Mosul, the country’s second-largest city. At the time, there was a genuine fear that the predominantly Sunni fighters of the Islamic State were close to capturing Baghdad. Since then, the Iraqi government—backed by a diverse cast of allies, including Iran and the United States, as well as Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish fighters—has worked to win back the territory. To accomplish this, tens of thousands of Iraqis have volunteered for military service.

When the war against the Islamic State began in 2014, Iraq’s security apparatus collapsed, leading many volunteer fighters to join paramilitaries rather than the weakened military or police forces. These substate forces were grouped under an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), or al-Hashd al-Shaabi in Arabic. Although the PMF’s size is heavily contested, the group includes over 60,000 fighters.¹ Others estimate that the number ranges from 60,000 to 140,000. According to a PMF spokesman, for instance, as of the end of 2016, the organization includes around 142,000 fighters in fifty or so groups.² Despite the confusion over numbers, in the absence of a strong state security apparatus, the group has helped successfully liberate most of Iraq’s towns and cities since it was formed.

Yet the PMF remains divisive. For many Iraqis, particularly Shia Muslims (but other groups as well), the PMF is a set of religiously sanctioned paramilitaries—some refer to it as al-Hashd al-muqadis (the Sacred Mobilization Units). As one fighter from the city of Amarah stated, “You can criticize any politician or even religious cleric, but you cannot speak against the Hashd and its martyrs.”³ To many, these martyrs have given up their lives in defense of their country. Iraqi society is now full of popular songs, commercials, and banners that honor the leaders and martyrs of various PMF military groups.

For other Iraqis, however, the PMF is a group of problematic militias neither accountable to the state nor under the rule of law. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports, for example, have accused it of committing war crimes.⁴ Moreover, to many critics, the PMF symbolizes Iranian and Shia efforts to exercise supremacy over Iraq. Tehran has had a clear hand in coordinating with the PMF leadership, which frequently meets and consults with Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Even Muqtada al-Sadr, whose paramilitary unit falls under the PMF, has referred to the PMF as al-militiat al-waqiha (the Imprudent Militias).⁵ Clerics from the Najaf Hawza (the Najaf Seminary), including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is Iraq’s leading Shia religious leader, also criticize the monopolistic conduct of certain PMF leaders, particularly Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis.

The PMF is now as much part of the problem as part of the solution. Many who perceived the PMF to be a security asset and a savior in the struggle against the Islamic State in 2014, when the Iraqi army was in shambles, now view it as more of a liability and menace to the country’s political and security status quo moving forward. Following the battle to retake Mosul, Iraq faces key challenges involving the PMF that will profoundly shape the country’s future.

Following the battle to retake Mosul, Iraq faces key challenges involving the PMF that will profoundly shape the country’s future.

Iraq is in the midst of an internal Shia political struggle over control of the state between former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who wants to return to power; current Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is trying to maintain the power of the state; and cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is bent on ensuring that the Maliki faction does not return to power. A crucial factor that will help determine who gains an advantage in this struggle will be whether the PMF paramilitaries are integrated into the state’s existing security apparatus and used to reinforce the country’s political status quo, or if instead these paramilitary groups are retained as a separate parallel and independent military force that can be used to reshape Iraq’s current political and security landscape. 

The PMF remains divisive and reinforces the uncertainty surrounding Iraq’s future after the battle for Mosul, sparking a debate fueled by misunderstanding and even sectarianism. Part of this confusion, however, is because observers have yet to sufficiently address the PMF as an organization and as a movement.⁶ One way to analyze the complex umbrella organization is by describing the three distinct factions that compose it, each of which pledges allegiance to a different figure: the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; the leader (marjaa) of the Shia in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani; and the Iraqi populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This analysis also addresses how ordinary Iraqis and the PMF’s different leadership factions perceive the organization and what disagreements divide its competing groups.

It remains possible that the PMF’s fractious makeup—its sundry groups with sundry objectives—may serve as a safety valve to ensure that the organization is not used to take over the state. The groups under Sistani and under Sadr will work to make sure that the PMF’s Maliki-allied leadership does not use the sacredness of the PMF brand to retake the state. These factions’ differences inform the ongoing struggle for the Iraqi state, as Prime Minister Abadi seeks to make the PMF a formal part of the existing state security apparatus, while former prime minister Maliki attempts to use the PMF as an independent vehicle to revive his faction’s political power.

The implications of the PMF on the country’s internal politics and institutional checks and balances are profound. Analyzing the divisive and uncertain nature of the organization is fundamental not only to understanding the group and its place in Iraqi society but also to understanding the future viability of governance in Iraq. In 2018, citizens will go to the polls to vote for a new national parliament. The results of this election will indicate the direction the country is moving in, and by extension, what the future holds for the PMF.

Baghdad’s Policy Shift on Paramilitaries

Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein used to boast that the Iraqi army was the fourth-strongest military force in the world.⁷ By 2014, many Iraqis had begun claiming that it is lucky if it can be considered the fourth-strongest army in Iraq—behind the PMF, Kurdistan’s peshmerga forces, and Iraqi tribal fighters. Since 2003, the Iraqi government has faced ups and downs in its attempt to rebuild the security apparatus following the near collapse of Iraq as a unitary state and the disbandment of the army—this has affected the government’s ability to claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Since then, a fundamental theme has been the relationship between Iraq’s central government and substate or nonstate military actors.

Dawa’s Historical Stance on Militias

At times, Baghdad has been hostile to paramilitaries, and at other times it has worked alongside armed groups. The Dawa Party, the only political party to govern post-2003 Iraq, traditionally viewed nonstate militias as problematic. Historically, it was the only major Shia political party not to employ a military wing—unlike counterparts such as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which had the Badr Corps as a military wing until 2012, and the Sadrist movement after 2003. The Dawa Party’s lack of a military wing stems from the ideology of Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, its founder, who believed that such militias were problematic. In the 1970s, a senior Dawa member was about to assassinate Iraq’s then vice president Saddam Hussein, but could not because Sadr had not approved the killing.⁸ Despite periodic clandestine violence, in general, the Dawa’s party line was against nonstate violence for decades.

The Iraqi government has faced ups and downs in its attempt to rebuild the security apparatus following the near collapse of Iraq as a unitary state and the disbandment of the army.

Similarly, Nouri al-Maliki, who took over the Dawa Party and held the Iraqi premiership from 2006 to 2014, was initially against nonstate militias. During this time, the state still perceived paramilitaries as problematic and illegitimate. In his first term (2006–2010), Maliki championed the phrase “State of Law” (Dawlat al-Qanoon) as the name of his electoral bloc. Against Iran’s will, he began targeting paramilitaries, including the Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi or JAM), a Shia militia affiliated with Muqtada al-Sadr, as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni militia affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With the support of the U.S. military in Iraq, Maliki also oversaw attempts to integrate paramilitaries, such as the Badr Organization,⁹ into Iraq’s Ministry of Interior (MOI).

Maliki’s Change of Mind

By early 2014, this stance had shifted 180 degrees. By then, prime minister Maliki had begun working with and supporting seven paramilitaries, allowing them to officially operate in Iraq. At that time, they were primarily focused on supporting the fledgling Iraqi state’s efforts to resist the Islamic State in the vicinity of Baghdad, including Jurf al-Sakhar and Abu Ghraib. These original seven groups included the Badr Organization, Asaib ahl al-Haq (AAH), Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH), Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, Kata’ib al-Imam Ali, and Kata’ib Jund al-Imam. Maliki used these predominantly Shia forces, referred to loosely as the PMF as early as 2013, to combat the emergence of Islamic State fighters and maintain his influence in predominantly Sunni areas.

What accounts for this fundamental shift in policy? Several domestic and international factors informed Maliki and some of his Dawa Party colleagues’ decision to gradually move away from the party’s traditional opposition to paramilitaries.

Several domestic and international factors informed Maliki and some of his Dawa Party colleagues’ decision to gradually move away from the party’s traditional opposition to paramilitaries.

One domestic political factor that led to the emergence of paramilitaries in Iraq was the failure of state building in the security sector amid the rise of the Islamic State. The fall of Mosul in the summer of 2014 very dramatically created additional pressure to allow paramilitaries to develop. Maliki and his inner circle seemed to have lost faith in the Iraqi military following its defeat at the hands of the Islamic State in Mosul in early June. Former intelligence minister Mohammad Ghabban confided in an interview that “the Hashd [PMF] was born out of necessity. One-third of Iraq was occupied at the time.”¹⁰ Maliki found the state’s large bureaucracy inefficient, given its mandate under a sectarian quota system (muhasasa ta’ifiya), which included members from all major Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni political parties. Having loyal Shia militias, rather than the shaky cross-ethnic makeup of the Iraqi army, seemed a much more reliable way to secure a tighter command and control structure.

Immediately after the Iraqi army’s collapse in June 2014, Maliki signed an official decree to form the Commission for the Popular Mobilization Forces (Hay’at al-Hashd al-Shaabi). This decree was in direct violation of Article 9 Paragraph B of the Iraqi constitution, which states that “the formation of military militia outside the framework of the armed forces is prohibited.”¹¹ Nevertheless, Maliki was able to pursue this unconstitutional move due to his increasing control over the judiciary and the weakness of the country’s constitutional adherence. The decree brought the different paramilitaries, which he had been relying on for some time, together under one body separate from the collapsed state security apparatus. The state’s inability to cope with the Islamic State threat led many to rely on the paramilitaries without questioning Maliki’s move.

Another domestic factor that legitimized the paramilitaries was Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s wajib al-kifai fatwa, which his most senior clerical representative, Abdul Mehdi el-Karbalai, conveyed in June 2014. Paradoxically, the legitimization this fatwa furnished was an unintended consequence of Sistani’s order, which had called on all Iraqi citizens to volunteer to join the “security forces,” a reference to the army and federal police, rather than the seven militias that had been operating alongside Maliki’s government.¹² The fatwa was in fact bereft of any communal exclusivity; it was an appeal to Iraqis as a national community rather than to particular sectarian subcommunities. It steered clear of invoking sectarianism by not mentioning Shiism. The problem, however, was Sistani’s inability and apparent unwillingness, as expressed by his representatives, to effectively enforce the fatwa’s clearly worded caveat.  

Despite Sistani’s intentions, Maliki and his allies—including Hadi al-Ameri and Qais Khazali—took the fatwa as a ruling for all to join their paramilitary allies, which included the seven groups that had been active for the past few years. It soon became apparent that the PMF Commission allowed Maliki to work around Sistani’s carefully worded fatwa. Using the fatwa’s message, Maliki and his allies pursued a wide-ranging campaign to recruit volunteers through hundreds of centers and offices. This recruitment was predicated on a smear campaign against the very Iraqi army that they had created—the same army that the fatwa had supposedly demanded the volunteers join.¹³ For Maliki and his supporters, the fatwa allowed the original seven paramilitaries, along with other groups created thereafter, to emerge from clandestine or semi-clandestine anonymity. It gave them legitimacy, which gave them access to the public through their own radio and television networks, as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts; these groups now had their own legitimate names, logos, and publically displayed photographs. In short, Maliki used Sistani’s fatwa to give official sanction to these groups for the first time and allowed them to operate out in the open with full state funding.

Sistani’s office felt compelled to issue a clarification and elaborated on the fatwa by claiming it carefully restricted recruitment to only as many fighters would be needed to combat the Islamic State. His office claimed subsequently that “we called on those who are able to take up arms to volunteer, provided that they do so under the auspices of security agencies, and only in a legal way . . . volunteering should be legally and meticulously governed to avoid chaos and illegal acts, such as granting militias a role.”¹⁴ Several sources in Sistani’s office have corroborated the claim that the fatwa was not meant to send fighters to militias, but rather to encourage fighters to join the state’s security apparatus.¹⁵ Sistani’s office has since refused to mention the PMF by name, instead referring to them as “volunteers.”

Maliki’s Reliance on Iran

Meanwhile, the influence of Iran also contributed to Maliki’s reversal of the traditional Dawa party line. Long before Mosul fell and Sistani announced his fatwa, Maliki, in his second term as prime minister, already had slowly begun reversing his previous opposition to paramilitaries. Working with paramilitaries was a key demand Iran made of Maliki.¹⁶

Given their converging interests, Maliki had already relied on Iranian support to fight off Sadr’s JAM. Tehran began funding small splinter groups that could be more loyal to Tehran, such as KH and AAH. To ensure the survival of his government against all opponents—including an influential Sadr and the JAM (the single largest Shia militia)—Maliki accepted Iranian aid, particularly after the U.S. troop withdrawal in December 2011. Essentially, circumstances forced him to allow Iran to groom militiamen like Qais Khazali and Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis, who would later become influential figures in Iraqi politics and Maliki allies. For Maliki, these groups could ensure that the JAM did not become the single most powerful Shia military and political force in Iraq and that the Sadrists, increasingly a foe of Iran’s regional ambitions, did not grow too strong. He thus began tacitly recognizing these splinter militiamen as allies so as to counter the JAM.

Maliki, who had lost the 2010 elections to a rival political coalition called al-Iraqiyya, was further indebted to Iranian brinkmanship for supporting the post-election government formation process that allowed him to keep the premiership. Prior to this, Maliki had gone against Iranian wishes and had formed the State of Law Coalition in the lead-up to provincial elections in 2009 and national ones in 2010. The loss humbled Maliki, who began to increasingly rely on Iran for external support—particularly after U.S. forces departed.

The influence of Iran also contributed to Maliki’s reversal of the traditional Dawa party line.

It soon became clear that the Iraqi prime minister was focused on pursuing Iranian policies in the region—much more so than in his first term. After 2011, it was critical for Iran that Iraqi Shia paramilitaries support the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria’s emerging civil war, which also helped reshape the structure of Iraq’s military. Maliki became Iran’s point man who could execute this policy. This involved both establishing militias that could go fight in Syria and sending Iraqi fighters to join Syrian militia groups, such as Liwa Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas.

According to one parliamentarian, billions of dollars were unaccounted for in Iraq’s 2012 budget.¹⁷ There was not a single receipt or explanation given as to where this purported intelligence budget was actually spent. Several lawmakers believe these funds were spent on the paramilitaries.

This policy reversal was even more shocking, as many had been accusing Assad of sending Salafi-jihadi militants into Iraq to destabilize Maliki’s government during the 2006–2008 civil war. Overnight, however, Assad and Maliki became defenders of Shiism. Under Iranian military command but with Iraqi money, Maliki began assembling or supporting militant groups. Maliki’s pretext for this decision was to protect the holy mosque of Sayyidah Zaynab, an important figure in Shiism, located in Damascus. When asked about the policy reversal, many Dawa members confided to the author that they could not control Iraqi jihadists who felt the urge to defend their faith and their landmarks from Sunni Salafists who were looking to exterminate the Shia.¹⁸

Furthermore, the PMF paramilitaries also proved vital to Maliki’s efforts to acquire and maintain domestic legitimacy. Long before the fall of Mosul or the Sistani fatwa, Maliki had begun relying on paramilitaries to stop protesters from rising up in Sunni townships. In effect, he used the unofficial military outfits to do “the dirty work,” as one insider confided, of working against political rivals at home or even attacking civilian protesters.¹⁹ From 2011 onward, Maliki used unofficial armed groups to weaken his opponents and interrogate opposition movements, particularly the Sunni harak al-shaabi protesters.

Maliki’s Resignation

Paramilitaries become even more important for Maliki after he was ousted from the premiership in August 2014.²⁰ Originally, he had intended for these groups to not fall directly under the ministries of defense or interior. As long as he remained prime minister and represented the state himself, he wanted them to fall under his purview. That is why the PMF Commission was directly attached to the prime minister’s office (PMO).

But a few months after Sistani had legitimized the PMF, and after the Islamic State had captured major Iraqi cities, Sistani asked Iran to stop backing Maliki as prime minister. Iran complied, and Maliki had to step down. Although the 2014 election was the only time that Maliki had won outright, he was still indebted to Iran and had to follow orders and resign. The 2010 elections had already shown Maliki that Iraq’s Shia electoral majority was not as certain as he had initially believed. Al-Iraqiyya’s victory symbolized the influence of Gulf state financing and the emergence of the Sunnis, who he had thought would forever be a minority. Given these considerations, Maliki needed Iranian support to ensure that the Shia remained in power.

Maliki wanted the strongest groups within the PMF—notably the original seven paramilitaries that he had been working with for several years—to stay close to him. As such, he successfully granted the PMF an autonomous structure and jurisdiction. Working with Iran, he maintained his influence over the militias by providing funds, military hardware, and other equipment to the groups. He also echoed the pro-Shia ideology that governed many of these militias. This new arrangement created an additional power base for Maliki to potentially help organize pressure to remove his successor, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, when the time was right. Maliki’s aim was restoration of his own rule.²¹ At a minimum, these groups would serve as a way for him to maintain a stake in the political system.

Abadi and the PMF

When Abadi took office as prime minister in August 2014, he faced an important decision: what to do about the PMF. Back in 2013, he had expressed to the author his unhappiness with the emergence of paramilitaries in Iraq—toeing the traditional Dawa line against his party’s leader, Maliki.²² For Abadi, the trouble was that Maliki remained influential and maintained control over the PMF. Maliki was also unhappy about being deposed, and he looked to delegitimize Abadi by consistently portraying the new prime minister as a weak leader. In short, he served as a direct challenge to Abadi’s fledgling rule.

Abadi could not simply get rid of the powerful paramilitaries or integrate them into Iraq’s existing military forces.

Abadi could not simply get rid of the powerful paramilitaries or integrate them into Iraq’s existing military forces. The same internal considerations that led Maliki to change the Dawa policy line on paramilitaries were still present—namely, the power of Iran and the weakness of the Iraqi state security apparatus. The state was unable to handle the Islamic State, which was seeking control of the entire country, including Babylon, Baghdad, and the holy Shia city of Karbala. As such, the weak Prime Minister Abadi was inclined to accept the status quo concerning the PMF, as dictated by his predecessor, rather than compromising Iraq’s security. Moreover, Sistani’s interference had made the PMF a sacred institution in the eyes of the Iraqi population. As such, the new prime minister had no choice but to endorse Maliki’s decree and continue the policy of legitimizing the PMF—despite his distaste of militias.

Nonetheless, he wanted to gain control of the nonstate actors. At this point, Maliki’s original decree to legitimize the PMF had changed after he had left office—making the groups nonstate actors again. After a difficult process, in February 2016, Abadi finally managed to pass Executive Order 91, which states that “the PMF will be an independent military formation and a part of the Iraqi armed forces, and attached to the general commander of the armed forces.”²³ This was an attempt to bring the PMF groups back under the state’s institutional jurisdiction. Paradoxically, the decree was not released until July, which indicates the behind-the-scenes power struggles that took place between the state represented by Abadi and the powerful paramilitaries over limits on and the jurisdiction of the PMF.

The Popularity of the PMF

A major reason why neither Abadi nor any other leader is able to challenge the PMF groups is because of their broad popularity among Iraqi society. The paramilitary outfits are particularly popular among the country’s Shia population. An August 2015 poll claims that 99 percent of Shia respondents support the use of the PMF to fight the Islamic State.²⁴ Abadi’s chief intelligence officer has stated that up to 75 percent of men between eighteen and thirty years old living in Shia-majority provinces had signed up to enlist in the PMF by the spring of 2016.²⁵ Since there are more volunteers than the state needs or can fund, most of these recruits remain inactive and not on the official list of active fighters.²⁶ As volunteers flocked from all of Iraq’s Shia provinces to enlist, the PMF recruited roughly ten times more volunteers than the Iraqi security forces.²⁷

Why did the masses decide to join these paramilitaries rather than the Iraqi army or the police forces?

Part of the reason is the poor legacy of the Iraqi army, particularly after it collapsed and lost face in Mosul in June 2014. Throughout that year, many did not trust that Iraq’s security apparatus could protect the country’s Shia towns. Some recruits cited the June 2014 Camp Speicher massacre, when Islamic State militants killed over 1,700 (mainly Shia) air cadets linked to the Ministry of Defense (MOD), a tragedy that was seen as further evidence of the faulty nature of the state security apparatus.²⁸ Stories of corruption also tarnished the state’s image. For instance, a case of some 50,000 ghost soldiers listed on the army’s payroll revealed the extent of corruption, leading many to lose trust and to seek alternative ways to combat the Islamic State.²⁹ In contrast, an official in the Interior Ministry (and a senior Badr figure) told the author that “the Hashd [PMF] was able to fight in the first months following June 2014 better than the military with less equipment.”³⁰ This effectiveness drew Iraqis to the groups.

For the emerging volunteers, it was also easier to sign up via political party structures than through the PMF Commission, which was still part of a fledgling state and lacked recruitment offices. In contrast, almost all Shia Islamist parties and even individual clerics or members of parliament had established registration centers. Because the state itself did not have enough offices to register volunteers for the Iraqi army and police forces, volunteers joined paramilitary groups, many of which, including the original seven, enjoyed preexisting r