[WarOnTheRocks] Over the last several years, I have met with commanders and fighters from Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (al-hashd al-sha’abi, or PMF), an umbrella organization of some 50 paramilitary groups, to hear about their perspectives on the situation in Iraq. Last month, I re-visited a leader whom I hadn’t seen in some time. As I walked into the room, I noticed that he no longer wore army fatigues ‐ instead, he was in a suit. He joked that things had changed, and he was now returning to politics.He is not the only one. The PMF have become much more than a group of militias, now seeking to establish a legitimate institutional presence and play a role in politics and the economy, against the backdrop of a fragile Iraqi state that remains weak after the fall of ISIL.
A critical aspect of the state rebuilding process is reforming the security sector, which collapsed in 2014 when a few thousand fighters took over one-third of Iraq. During the 3-year fight against ISIL, a number of armed groups ‐ united in opposition to a common enemy but not in command structure or vision ‐ emerged in place of the struggling state armed forces. Although the Iraqi armed forces have since recovered, the state’s weakness has allowed many of these paramilitary groups continue to control territory in liberated areas from Mosul to Kirkuk.
The largest of these groups is the PMF, established in June 2014 by former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki after the fall of Mosul. The PMF includes groups with competing ideologies and rivalling allegiances to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. However, the most powerful groups and leaders in the PMF come from a network of conservative Shia Islamists who enjoy good relations with Khamenei and the regime in Tehran. PMF forces played a key role in the liberation of territory, first on the front lines in much of the initial fighting, and then holding areas as Iraqi forces recovered and began leading the liberation.
Today, in recently liberated areas, the PMF has recruited local fighters and serves as a de facto national guard. Its political influence is also growing. Organized into the Fatah Alliance electoral bloc, PMF leadership is focused on making gains in the upcoming 2018 elections.
The Iraqi government and its international allies have demanded that the PMF integrate into the central state apparatus. Most recently, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi issued a decree to rein in the militias through an integration process. This has traditionally meant incorporating fighters into the command chain of the traditional state armed forces (al-quwwat al-musalaha), which legally fall under the Ministry of Defence or the Ministry of Interior.
But realities on the ground paint a different picture. Benefitting from the weakness of Iraqi state institutions, the PMF leadership has rejected Baghdad’s decrees, and instead offered its own vision for the future of the militias: to become an independent security body protecting the political system, like a praetorian guard for the state. Under this proposal, the paramilitary groups would fall under the Prime Minister’s Office, which separates it from the Ministry of Defence of Ministry of Interior.
Despite Abadi’s ongoing efforts at security-sector reform, so far the PMF leadership has won the debate. It will not integrate in the traditional way; rather, it will become an institutionalized autonomous force, fundamentally altering Iraq’s security architecture and challenging Baghdad’s command structure and monopoly over legitimate violence. Institutionalization, rather than integration, will define the PMF’s role as the Iraqi state rebuilds itself.
Long, click through for the whole thing.
| Herb, please don’t use p and /p to separate paragraphs, but just put a blank line between them (except when doing in-lines, of course). For whatever reason, using p and /p results in two blank lines appearing between the paragraphs, and it’s time-consuming to clean up. Thanking you for the moderators, trailing wife |