Iraq’s government and people are caught in the crossfire. Their country is formally committed to keeping out of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, but its airspace has been violated during the war.
By Vijay Prashad
Iraq’s government and people are caught in the crossfire. Their country is formally committed to keeping out of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, but its airspace has been violated during the war. Iraq between Iran, the Gulf monarchies, Türkiye and the main US military network in West Asia as well as US military bases in Erbil (in Iraq’s north). On 7 August, two of Iraq’s neighbours – Saudi Arabia and Türkiye – signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement with Pakistan that declares an armed attack on one signatory to be an attack on all and provides for closer defence planning and integrated capabilities. Iraq did not participate in this agreement nor was it mentioned by any of the high officials of the three participants as a potential member (although Egypt was mentioned). Silence on Iraq protects it from the pressures faced by its government, its resistance organisations, and the various social classes from the war.
The Mecca Agreement is not aimed at any state, as Türkiye’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said it targets no one and is open to countries that seek regional stability. Last year, Erdoğan signed an agreement with Iraq on a range of issues, including defense cooperation, and recently, the Saudi foreign minister Khalid bin Salman met with a senior Iraqi military official, First Lieutenant General Staff Abdul Amir Al-Shammari. Iraq is not isolated from this process but is in dialogue with all the major parties as it shepherds the departure of the US from most of its territory this year. Indeed, that withdrawal will be part of the formation of a new security architecture (rooted in the Mecca Agreement) that is designed for a post-US regional landscape. During talks between Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei it was clarified that the agreement is not designed against Iran but for precisely this near future. Amer al-Fayez, chair of the Iraqi parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee, has stressed precisely this point that the agreement does belong to the three states that negotiated it, but that does not mean Iraq will not be part of this post-US scenario.
Balance
Since the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country’s political class has struggled to maintain a balance between its political and social proximity to Iran and its occupation by the United States. Since the premiership of Ibrahim al-Jaafari in 2005, the prime ministers of Iraq have been largely pro-Iranian (with the exception of Mustafa al-Kadhimi from 2020 to 2022); the new leader, Ali al-Zaidi, took a large delegation to Washington and then Tehran in July 2026, but whose overtures for peace went nowhere. There are indispensable relations between Iran and Iraq, although the country maintains close military and financial ties with the United States and growing connections with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
But neutrality can be a policy only when the state possesses the capacity to enforce it. The United States’ 2003 invasion destroyed the old state apparatus; the 2014 collapse before ISIS deepened dependence on external assistance and popular mobilisation. Today the legacy of occupation is visible in a political order where sovereignty is continually negotiated among Washington, Tehran, Ankara, Gulf capitals and domestic forces. Iraq’s exclusion from integrated air defence and intelligence arrangements may preserve diplomatic flexibility, but it also leaves the country more exposed to violations by every side. Iraq’s air-defence weakness, divided institutions, and multiplicity of armed commands reduce its freedom of action.
Resistance
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is not a single army, but an umbrella for organisations with different chains of command, political relationships, and degrees of incorporation into the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF). The PMF is formally part of Iraq’s security system. Among the most influential organisations in the PMF are the Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada (whose leaders, respectively, Ahmad al-Hamidawi, Akram al-Kaabi, and Abu Alaa al-Walai, are designated by the US as terrorists). These groups command tens of thousands of fighters and their arsenal includes short- and medium-range rockets, attack and reconnaissance drones, artillery, anti-armour weapons and logistical networks extending toward the Syrian border. Thus far, these organisations have been largely quiet.
However, statements from these groups over the past months indicate that if Washington expands its assault on Iran, then they will attack US bases and interests in Iraq and in the region. Al-Nujaba figures described the confrontation with the US presence as continuing so long as foreign troops remain on Iraqi soil. Over the past months, the US and Saudis have struck PMF sites. Consequentially, the PMF has decentralised command and created mobile launch capacity. By all accounts, these groups are prepared to strike the US targets within Iraq and to create disruption near the Syrian border if called upon. An April 2026 mass rally in Baghdad shows the public sentiment that favours the views of the PMF.
There is an ongoing debate inside Iraq over the disarmament of these factions, which are legally part of the army. Some of the factions are open to dialogue, while others argue that they will continue to hold their ‘resistance arms’. Those who are interested in dialogue argue that they will only dissolve themselves into the armed forces if the United States withdraws its troops and if Iraq acquires effective air defences. The government’s September 30 timetable (both for the end of the US presence in Iraq and for advancing state control of weapons) has therefore become the hinge of the crisis. A delayed withdrawal would strengthen the factions’ argument for retaining arms and a coercive disarmament drive during a regional war could provoke internal confrontation. There is no appetite in Iraq for the dismantlement of these groups, which emerged out of the fight against the US occupation and have a genuine social base in Iraq (they cannot, therefore, be disparaged as ‘Iranian proxies’).
Options
Conversations with Iraqi officials makes it clear that the government wants to mediate between Washington and Tehran and would prefer not to be drawn into the conflict. The government of al-Zaidi has made it clear that it would not like to see the PMF attack US targets in Iraq or to use Iraqi territory to strike US positions in the Gulf Arab states. The threshold of action by the PMF, however, will not be determined by al-Zaidi’s government but by the scale of US escalation against Iran, attacks on Iraqi forces, and whether the foreign-troop withdrawal proceeds. Once that threshold is crossed, US bases and interests would be the most probable targets, followed by a cycle of retaliation inside Iraq.
Almost 90% of state revenue comes from oil exports, which pass through the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Exports of Iraqi oil fell from 3.5 million barrels a day before the conflict to about 200,000 barrels a day in early August. Some tanker movement has resumed, but as of 17 August, passage remains constrained and below normal levels. Iraq had arranged the export of 750,000 barrels of oil per day through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline through Türkiye, but this is far below what the state and society require. Airspace closure, restricted shipping, storage bottlenecks and interrupted imports threaten salaries, pensions, and welfare payments. On 5 August, hundreds of public employees demonstrated across six of Iraq’s nineteen provinces (from Baghdad to Basra to Babil). University and schoolteachers have begun small-scale agitations, with the threat that these protests could become ‘an open civil sit-in and a work stoppage’.
Clarity is not on the cards for Baghdad. There are far too many commitments across the social classes, with the workers eager for an end to this conflict so that they can get paid, and yet for the citizenry eager for their state not to once more bend to the wishes of the United States. Debates are active on social media and in the bazaars, where these different viewpoints are not necessarily rooted in sectarian or political affiliations. The country that was made a battlefield by the illegal US invasion in 2003 has a strong reason to refuse another imperialist war on its border and to be dragged into that war against is wishes. The immediate danger comes from the US-Israeli widening of the war, which would provoke the PMF to attack US bases in Iraq. But, if the US keeps to the 30 September deadline and removes these bases, then Iraq’s territory will be less of a target and Iraq’s political debates can advance beyond the question of the US withdrawal (which has been the core issue for the past twenty years).