The international foreign policy establishment is trapped in a loop of terminal wishful thinking. Every time a political figure in Baghdad mutters a vague promise about reigning in the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), Western think tanks churn out the same tired analysis. They ask the same navel-gazing question: Will Iraq’s paramilitary groups finally disarm?
It is a fundamentally flawed premise. The question assumes the PMF is a temporary glitch in the Iraqi state apparatus. It treats them like a rogue militia that can be paid off, integrated, or coerced into handing over their weapons. If you enjoyed this piece, you might want to read: this related article.
They won't. They never will. And honestly, under the current constitutional architecture of Iraq, they cannot.
The lazy consensus view treats the PMF—known locally as the Hashd al-Shaabi—as an external parasite feeding on the Iraqi state. This view is not just wrong; it is dangerously obsolete. I have spent years tracking the financial and legislative flows within the green zone of Baghdad, watching well-meaning Western diplomats try to apply textbook "Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration" (DDR) frameworks to a state that has fundamentally redefined what a state even is. For another look on this development, check out the recent coverage from BBC News.
You cannot disarm a group that has successfully codified itself into the very DNA of the government. The PMF is not a militia holding the state hostage. The PMF is the state.
The Legal Fiction of Integration
Let's look at the actual mechanics of how power operates in Iraq. Western analysts loved the narrative of the 2016 law that formally integrated the PMF into the Iraqi security forces. The media reported it as a step toward state control.
The reality? It was the exact opposite. It was the state surrendering to the paramilitaries.
Law No. 40 of 2016 did not force the militias to conform to the rules of the Iraqi military. It forced the Iraqi budget to bankroll the militias while allowing them to maintain their independent command structures, ideological allegiances, and economic empires.
Think of it as a corporate restructuring where the parent company takes on all the debt and liability of a rogue subsidiary, gives the subsidiary's executives permanent board seats, and abdicates the right to fire any of their workers.
When Prime Minister after Prime Minister issues decrees ordering the PMF to close their offices or cut ties with political parties, it is nothing more than political theater. It is a performance staged for foreign donors and IMF loan negotiators.
The Structural Reality: The PMF answers directly to the Prime Minister's office on paper, but in practice, its leadership wields veto power over who becomes Prime Minister in the first place. You do not disarm the people who write your paycheck and command the security detail outside your bedroom window.
The Economic Empire of the Hashd
If you want to understand why disarmament is a fantasy, stop looking at the theology and start looking at the balance sheets. The PMF has evolved far beyond a network of armed brigades. They are a massive, multi-billion-dollar state-sanctioned conglomerate.
In 2022, the Iraqi government approved the establishment of the Muhandis General Company. Named after Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the PMF commander killed in a US drone strike, this state-owned enterprise is modeled directly after Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya—the economic wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The Muhandis Company has been granted massive, non-competitive contracts for:
- Large-scale agricultural development in western Anbar province.
- Urban real estate development and infrastructure projects in Baghdad.
- Import-export monopolies and customs control at critical border crossings.
The Iraqi state budget allocates billions of dollars annually to the PMF for salaries alone. When you add the revenue from their corporate fronts, real estate seizures, and informal taxation at checkpoints across the country, you are looking at an entity that is completely self-sustaining.
Imagine a scenario where the pentagon was entirely funded by the US treasury but owned Amazon, all major agricultural land, and the ports of entry, while its leadership remained answerable only to an ideological council. Would that entity ever agree to lay down its arms because a politician in Washington asked nicely?
To ask the PMF to disarm is to ask a multi-billion-dollar corporate monopoly to voluntarily liquidate its assets, fire its workforce, and surrender its market share for the sake of "good governance." It defies basic human incentive structures.
Dismantling the PAA Fallacies
The global discourse around Iraq is clogged with bad assumptions. Let’s address the standard questions that fill the "People Also Ask" boxes on search engines, using the brutal reality of Iraqi street politics rather than Western diplomatic jargon.
Can the Iraqi Army Force the PMF to Disarm?
No. The Iraqi Army and the PMF are not two distinct peer competitors waiting for a civil war. They are thoroughly intertwined. Intelligence agencies, federal police units, and specific army divisions are heavily infiltrated by, or openly sympathetic to, different paramilitary factions like Badr or Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq. Furthermore, the PMF often possesses superior morale, specialized asymmetric weaponry, and an unshakeable ideological cohesion that the regular conscript army lacks. A kinetic attempt by the state to disarm the PMF would shatter the regular military along sectarian and factional lines.
Will Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's Death End the PMF?
This is a massive point of vulnerability that the optimists get completely backward. The lazy argument states that because the PMF was formed via Sistani's 2014 fatwa (Kifah al-Kifa'i) to fight ISIS, his eventual passing will allow the state to revoke their legitimacy.
The opposite is true. Sistani is the only figure in Iraq with the moral authority to even attempt a moderation of these groups. His office has consistently tried to pull the "shrine militias" (groups loyal to the Iraqi religious establishment in Najaf) away from the hardline, Tehran-aligned factions. When Sistani passes, the internal dam breaks. The pro-Iran factions will aggressively absorb or marginalize the moderate elements, using their vast state resources to claim total monopoly over Shia religious legitimacy. His absence removes the brakes, it doesn't stop the car.
The Sovereignty Myth
The West likes to view Iraq through the lens of Westphalian sovereignty: a defined territory, a central government, and a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Iraq is not a Westphalian state. It is a hybrid sovereignty ecosystem.
In this system, power is decentralized, negotiated, and transactional. The formal institutions of government—the ministries, the parliament, the judiciary—are hollow shells used by various factions to extract resources. The real authority lies in the informal networks of militias, tribal confederations, and clerical families.
The PMF is the ultimate expression of this hybrid model. They provide security where the state failed. They provide jobs where the ministries are choked by corruption. For a young man in Nasiriyah or Basra, joining a PMF brigade is not an act of rebellion against the state; it is the only viable path to economic survival and social advancement within the state.
If you force a disarmament program tomorrow, you do not create a safer Iraq. You create an immediate, catastrophic vacuum. You instantly throw hundreds of thousands of armed, trained men off the state payroll and into the ranks of organized crime or ideological insurgencies.
The Dark Truth of the Status Quo
Here is the bitter pill that Western policymakers refuse to swallow: the current configuration of the PMF provides a twisted form of stability.
No one wants to say it out loud, but the total fragmentation of Iraq was prevented not by the clean, professional units trained by NATO advisors, but by the raw, brutal mobilization of these paramilitaries when the state almost collapsed in 2014.
The downside to my contrarian view is obvious and grim. Acknowledging that the PMF cannot be disarmed means accepting that Iraq will remain a fractured sovereign entity for the foreseeable future. It means accepting that Iran will maintain a permanent, institutionalized land corridor through Iraq to the Levant. It means admitting that the billions of dollars spent by Western coalitions on security sector reform over the last two decades failed to produce a unified, Western-style democracy.
But continuing to pretend that disarmament is just around the corner is a form of intellectual cowardice. It leads to terrible policy decisions. It causes Western governments to pour money into training programs that ultimately benefit militia commanders, and to support Prime Ministers who promise reform they have zero capability to deliver.
Stop looking for the day the militias hand in their rifles. That day is a mirage. The paramilitaries have built the banks, bought the land, written the laws, and staffed the ministries. They are not going to dismantle the fortress they spent twenty years building just to satisfy a foreign policy checklist in Washington or Brussels.
Deal with Iraq as it actually exists, not as it appears in your outdated political science textbooks.
