Nr. 3 | August 2026 - Iraq's Armed Groups and the Limits of its Regional Diplomacy
Hamzeh Hadad
Led by the newly appointed Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, Iraq's government has promised that by 30 September 2026 every paramilitary force in the country will be disarmed or brought inside the state, and that no armed group will operate outside of state control. The pledge is not only about weapons, rather it is an attempt to establish the Iraqi government as the sole author of Iraq's foreign policy at a moment when armed groups have struck Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and drawn coordinated American and Saudi airstrikes onto Iraqi territory in response.
In the third paper of the Jordan and Its Neighbourhood series, Hamzeh Hadad argues that the militias are one chapter in a much longer story. Arab skepticism towards Iraq did not begin with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, or with the war between Iran and the United States and Israel. It runs back through the invasion of Kuwait, and the later fear that a democratic and Shia-majority Iraq would unsettle the region's monarchies.
The paper traces how difficult Iraq's return to the Arab fold has been in the first place - from the reopening of the Saudi embassy under Haider Al-Abadi to the Gulf investment and the Arab Gulf Cup in Basra that followed - and how much of that progress the war has put at risk. It sets out the spectrum of Iraq's armed groups, distinguishing those willing to hand over weapons from those whose loyalties make integration far more difficult, and asks what demobilisation would realistically achieve.
Hadad also identifies where cooperation remains viable, particularly in energy. Accelerating the Basra-Aqaba pipeline, opening export routes beyond the Strait of Hormuz, and Iraq's enlarged weight in OPEC following the departure of the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on field research in Iraq, the paper argues that meeting the September deadline matters less than the direction Baghdad sets after it.
