On July 14, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi met U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House. The visit was a triumph. Trump personally welcomed his Iraqi guest and lavished him with praise. The new government in Baghdad, which welcomed the strong and unequivocal backing from Washington, had every right to treat the moment as a political breakthrough.
Now, just a few weeks later, matters look rather different. Pro-Iranian forces in Iran saw Trump’s embrace of al-Zaidi as a concern, and quickly moved to make their displeasure known. Their efforts culminated last week in a series of drone attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia, which they knew would provoke the Americans. U.S. forces, accompanied by the Saudis, responded with air strikes on pro-Iranian militias in eastern Iraq.
The honeymoon is over. Al-Zaidi’s predecessors in office over the past two decades all had to find ways to manage the contradictory demands of Tehran and Washington. Now the new prime minister finds himself in an especially dire version of the same dilemma. In office for just 11 weeks, he finds himself confronting serious discontent within the same ruling coalition, the Shiite-dominated Shiite Coordination Framework, that brough him to power.
Al-Zaidi cannot change Iran’s strategic calculations, but he can reshape Iraq’s
Washington’s political investment in al-Zaidi predated his visit. Without White House backing, he would not have become prime minister in the first place; Trump personally championed his appointment. Yet this remarkable American support for a figure who was virtually unknown politically just a few months ago is neither unconditional nor open-ended. Rather, it rests on a strategy developed and overseen by U.S. presidential envoy Tom Barrack. His policy aims to integrate Iraq economically and strategically with Syria and Turkey over the short term, and ultimately with the Gulf states, as a means of pulling Iraq out of Iran’s orbit – ultimately transforming it into a stable state and a genuine Western ally.
Difficult as it may be to implement, this vision cannot succeed without dismantling the pro-Iranian armed factions. In Washington, al-Zaidi committed himself to setting a timetable for dissolving these groups, linking the process to the withdrawal of the small remaining U.S. military presence in Iraq – currently fewer than 200 personnel – by Sept. 30. By choosing this timeline, al-Zaidi appears to be attempting a compromise between Washington’s demands and those of the pro-Iranian militias by allowing the latter to claim they have “completed” the mission that justified their continued possession of weapons, namely the end of the American “occupation” of Iraq. It is a narrative that belies the factions’ insistence on portraying the U.S. forces, which were invited back into Iraq by the Iraqi government in 2014, as a foreign occupying force.
It was clear that al-Zaidi’s commitment to dismantling the factions deeply unsettled them, and they wasted little time in increasing the pressure on him, bringing his brief honeymoon to an abrupt end. No sooner had he returned to Baghdad from Washington than he was confronted by a media campaign orchestrated by the factions most ideologically committed to and closely aligned with Tehran. The confrontation soon escalated from rhetoric to action. Fighters from one such faction, Harakat al-Nujaba, prevented government forces from raiding one of the group’s command posts in Jurf al-Naddaf, on the outskirts of Baghdad, where authorities intended to seize drones and missiles.
The failed raid appears to be linked to Syria’s interception of a truck from Iraq carrying drones and missiles allegedly destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to a confidential source, and based on Syrian investigations whose findings were conveyed to Baghdad, the shipment originated from the very compound government forces had attempted to raid, where a workshop suspected of manufacturing drones is believed to operate.
The armed factions’ attack on the Saudi oil facilities took place one day after the failed raid, and just before al-Zaidi was due to begin a visit to the Kingdom. (He postponed the trip.) The attacks subsequently escalated to around 30 drone strikes, prompting a joint Saudi-American military response targeting faction positions. The United States accused these groups of responsibility for the attacks against the Saudis. The developments greatly complicated al-Zaidi’s position. In addition to delaying his visit, he issued a statement condemning the Saudi-American strikes, which killed members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the umbrella term for pro-Iranian militias incorporated into the armed forces even though they operate outside of the state.
The continued attacks by the factions suggest that al-Zaidi’s visit to Tehran on July 23, which followed immediately after his Washington trip, failed to persuade Iran’s leadership to allow the disarming of the militias. Indeed, the Islamic Republic now appears to regard these factions as more indispensable than ever amid its escalating military confrontation with the United States.
Iran derives considerable benefits from the proxy war waged by the armed factions. By targeting the oil infrastructure of Gulf states, these groups seek to reduce global oil supplies and drive up prices – particularly fuel prices in the United States, a political vulnerability for President Trump as the next U.S. midterm elections approach. A second benefit lies in the political leverage Iran gains over America’s Gulf allies, encouraging them to pressure the Trump administration to end the war and lift the naval blockade imposed on Iran.
Al-Zaidi cannot change Iran’s strategic calculations, but he can reshape Iraq’s –provided he uses his limited yet consequential political assets wisely. For years, the Coordination Framework based its strategy on maintaining the appearance of balancing American and Iranian interests inside Iraq. In reality, however, this “balance” served Iranian interests at the expense of both Iraqi and American ones –for example, by turning Iraq into a hub for circumventing U.S. sanctions on Iran, enabling the creation of Iranian-backed armed factions, and allowing Tehran to dominate Iraqi politics and state institutions.
Although successive U.S. administrations recognized that Baghdad had fallen into Iran’s regional sphere of influence, Washington made no sustained or serious effort to alter this equation. That changed with the arrival of the second Trump administration and the sharp escalation in U.S.-Iran tensions into the current war. Iraq’s importance to Iran’s war effort – both as a base for attacks on the United States and its Gulf allies inside Iraq and beyond – became increasingly apparent, accelerating American efforts, strongly backed by Gulf states, to dismantle Iran’s influence in Iraq, beginning with the armed factions.
Al-Zaidi’s premiership now stands at a critical crossroads. It can either become yet another disappointing experiment in accommodating failure, or it can mark a genuine transformation in the meaning of statehood in Iraq.
Despite the Iraqi government’s public condemnation of the recent Saudi-American strikes inside Iraq, those strikes may actually provide al-Zaidi with a rare opportunity to begin dismantling the armed factions. Their increasingly defiant actions against the Iraqi state’s declared policies risk turning Iraq into a permanent target for U.S.-Gulf military operations and exposing it to severe American sanctions at a time when the country’s fragile financial and economic situation already threatens state stability. This risk is compounded by Iran’s refusal to allow Iraqi oil exports to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
What al-Zaidi now needs is the courage and organizational ability to transform the damaging realities created by Iran and its militia allies in Iraq into a genuine, public, and official demand to dismantle the armed factions – one that he himself leads. Achieving this would require drawing on a combination of American, regional, and Iraqi judicial support, together with growing concern within the Coordination Framework that the factions’ behavior could push Iraq into an even more dangerous crisis, as well as widespread public anger toward these groups.
Al-Zaidi’s premiership now stands at a critical crossroads. It can either become yet another disappointing experiment in accommodating failure, or it can mark a genuine transformation in the meaning of statehood in Iraq: a state that truly monopolizes the use of force and exercises unified, effective political authority. Over the coming months, it will become clear which of these two paths al-Zaidi’s government ultimately chooses.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
