Shafaq News
The American approach to Iraq’s Iran-aligned
armed factions has undergone a quiet but consequential transformation. The
appointment of Tom Barrack as special envoy for Iraq and Syria, replacing Mark
Savaya, signals a shift not in objectives but in the method of pursuing them.
The US still wants Iran’s military footprint in Iraq reduced, but it is now
trying to achieve that through structural pressure rather than visible
interference.
Read more: Trump’s new Iraq-Syria envoy faces an Iran test Syria never posed
The distinction matters because Savaya was
perceived across Baghdad’s political class as a figure who reached too deeply
into Iraqi internal arrangements. Barrack, according to analysts interviewed by
Shafaq news, represents a different profile: a businessman with direct ties to
President Donald Trump, a preference for strong central states over
consociational power-sharing, and a mandate that deliberately bundles Iraq with
Syria under a single envoy.
Dilshad Othman, a researcher in international
relations at the University of Tennessee, told Shafaq News that the United
States no longer treats Iraq as a file with its own internal logic; it treats
it as a node in a broader regional security order aimed at reconfiguring the
balance of power and curtailing Iranian influence.
The apparatus Barrack inherits is already
substantially built. Since early 2025, the Trump administration has operated on
multiple simultaneous tracks: diplomatic pressure on Baghdad to restrict
weapons to state authority; congressional conditions tying security cooperation
funding to verifiable reductions in Iran-aligned factions’ capacity; sanctions
on banks and businessmen, direct warnings that Washington would not recognize a
government that handed ministries to armed factions linked to Tehran; and,
beneath all of this, a military option kept deliberately visible.
Read more: Is Iraq closer to restricting weapons to the state?
The
Coordination Framework Moves
The Shiite Coordination Framework’s
authorization of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to take all necessary measures to
restrict weapons to state control was presented by the alliance as a sovereign
national position. Malik Francis, a Republican politician and political analyst,
told Shafaq News that Washington views these steps positively, stating that
“Iraq’s long-term stability requires the state to be the sole entity
authorized to carry and use weapons within legal frameworks.” The welcome
was not merely rhetorical: Francis situated US support within a broader effort
to strengthen Iraqi state institutions and the rule of law, and added that
consolidating the state’s monopoly on force would improve the investment
climate and enhance foreign business confidence in the Iraqi market, an
economic framing that signals Washington is offering something beyond
diplomatic approval.
The US Chargé d’Affaires Joshua Harris’s
welcome of the CF’s authorization, described as a “qualitative shift”
toward Iraqi sovereignty, arrived within a diplomatic framework designed to
make that shift the only viable path. Patrick Clawson, the Morningstar senior
fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assessed the CF’s
authorization as consolidating an existing reality rather than representing a
sudden rupture. The political groundwork, he argued, had been laid over many
months.
Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s announcement —forming a
central committee to inventory weapons, personnel, and equipment and transfer
them to state authority— was the first concrete institutional step any major
Iran-aligned faction had taken. AAH operates Brigades 41, 42, and 43 within the
Popular Mobilization Forces and maintains a parliamentary wing through the
Sadiqoon bloc. Kataib Imam Ali (Brigade 40 of the PMF), which also holds five
parliamentary seats through its Khadamat bloc, followed with a parallel
decision. That two factions moved in close succession, each with named
institutional mandates, signals something beyond individual calculation.
The process has since moved from political
authorization to physical implementation. Major General Saad Maan, head of the
Security Media Cell, announced the first practical steps in the merger process:
the handover of Saraya al-Salam headquarters and weapons in Samarra, following
Muqtada al-Sadr’s decision to place the force under state authority. Al-Sadr’s
move —primarily a domestic political maneuver by a figure who has long
maintained distance from Iran’s direct orbit— added momentum and removed one
argument for hesitation from CF-aligned factions.
Read more: Iraq after the regional ceasefire: US bases and unresolved political questions
Petraeus
in Baghdad
The visit by retired General David Petraeus
to Baghdad in mid-May 2026, formally as a private citizen providing independent
advisory services to the White House, added a further dimension to the US
pressure arrangement. After five days of meetings with senior Iraqi officials,
Petraeus wrote that his interlocutors “recognized the importance of
ensuring that the Iraqi Security Services have a monopoly on the use of force
in Iraq.” The visit was not publicly acknowledged as official; its
significance lay precisely in the fact that a channel allowed frank exchange
without the formality of a diplomatic confrontation.
What Petraeus found reflected a factional
landscape in transition. Several groups, including Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada,
Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, had signaled varying degrees of readiness to support
weapons restriction. The direction of travel among the pragmatic wing of the
resistance ecosystem was, for the first time in years, discernibly toward
accommodation. The choice to route that assessment through a retired general
operating outside official channels was not incidental; it reflects a
deliberate American preference for pressure that is felt without being formally
applied, credible precisely because it carries no diplomatic obligation to
follow through.
Read more: Najaf’s religious authority: A centuries-old voice for stability in Iraq
The
Holdouts
That direction of travel does not extend to
all factions, as Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Ashab al-Kahf have
rejected disarmament without preconditions, specifically, the complete
withdrawal of US and Turkish forces from Iraqi territory.
Kataib Hezbollah remains one of the most
operationally capable factions within the PMF; its Secretary-General Abu
Hussein al-Hamidawi survived a US strike in Baghdad’s Karrada district in March
2026 that killed three associates. The faction has publicly stated readiness to
respond to the United States across all fronts if PMF leaders are targeted.
The divergence within what was presented as a
unified resistance framework now exposes a structural fracture: CF-aligned
factions that contested the November 2025 elections and are seeking roles in
the next government have different incentive structures from Islamic Resistance
in Iraq groups that define their weapons as existential and their strategic
alignment with Tehran as non-negotiable. The former calculate that
accommodation buys political survival and economic legitimacy; the latter
calculate that disarmament eliminates their deterrence and exposes their
leadership to legal or physical targeting. Both calculations are rational
within their own framework.
Read more: Iraq’s armed factions and the disarmament debate: Why unity masks deep divisions
The
Transaction Behind the Pressure
Sources within the CF told Shafaq News of an
internal split over an American proposal that sharpens the transactional
character of the disarmament process: the US would facilitate service and
investment projects inside Iraq, implemented by American companies, in exchange
for progress on weapons restriction and factional handovers. The proposal has
divided CF member parties, with some viewing it as a legitimate economic
incentive and others resistant to what they read as a conditioned bargain.
The pattern fits a broader American operating
mode. In May 2025, Trump announced a ceasefire with the Houthis in Yemen, mediated
by Oman, under which the US halted its bombing campaign in exchange for the
group ceasing attacks on American ships. The deal bypassed Israel and left the
Houthis free to continue strikes on Israeli targets, exposing the transactional
rather than principled character of the arrangement. Trump’s subsequent public
claim of engagement with Hezbollah in Lebanon this June, occurring in the same
window as Washington’s welcome of the CF stance, follows the same logic:
bilateral deals on narrow US interests, coercive pressure maintained on the
broader Iranian influence design.
Ali al-Baydar, a Baghdad-based political
analyst, told Shafaq News that Barrack’s mandate reflects a US desire to manage
Iraq, Syria, Turkiye, and Iran as a single interconnected file, and that
“the weapons question is one instrument within that larger arrangement,
not an end in itself.”
Iraqi politician Mithal al-Alusi argued that
Iraq and the region need the “institutional United States” more than
they need a presidential envoy, warning that handling Iraq through the same
lens as Syria “risks misreading the country’s political complexity and
undermining the strategic partnership between Baghdad and Washington.”
Haitham Numan, professor of political science
at the University of Exeter, assessed Barrack as oriented toward strong central
states rather than consociational arrangements. This preference aligns with
al-Zaidi’s government program but sits uneasily with the federal and pluralist
structure Iraq has operated under since 2003.
Read more: Multiple actors, one battlefield: Iraq since the US-Israel-Iran war began
Washington
Cannot Answer This
Iraq’s weapons restriction process has
reached a threshold it has approached and retreated from before. The difference
this time is the accumulation of external pressurث —legislative, diplomatic, financial, and military— that has raised the cost of inaction to a level that several CF-aligned factions now judge unsustainable. The Samarra handover, the
CF’s authorization, the Harris-al-Araji meeting, the Petraeus visit, and the
economic incentive framework: these are the visible outputs of a sustained
pressure campaign Washington has been constructing for over a year.
Despite these developments, the campaign
cannot resolve the internal fracture it has helped produce. Kataib Hezbollah
and Harakat al-Nujaba’s refusal is strategic and rooted in a calculation that
their weapons are the only guarantee of their survival in any
post-accommodation environment. The CF split over the American investment
proposal signals that even among compliant factions, the terms of compliance
remain contested. If al-Zaidi’s government formation proceeds without resolving
that fracture, Iraq enters the final phase of the US withdrawal agreement with a
bifurcated security landscape: factions nominally integrated and others openly
defiant, and no unified position capable of holding both.
Read more: Ali Al-Zaidi’s incomplete cabinet faces Iraqi armed factions test
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
