[Jpost] The autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government has been wary of changes in Baghdad over the last ten years as pro-Iranian groups have grown in power.
| Abadi’s government in Baghdad worked with parliament to take a disparate group of militias, including Kataib Hezbollah, and make them an official paramilitary force, akin to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran accomplished in Iraq in the years 2016-2018 what it could not accomplish in Lebanon: It transformed Iraq’s form of Hezbollah into an official force. |
At the height of the ISIS war on a row of hills west of the city of Kirkuk,
... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
Kurdish commanders from the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s armed forces, gathered to watch ISIS threats in the distance. They said Iraq faced two threats. One threat was ISIS, which was being slowly pushed back from the gains it had made in 2014. Another threat was Shi’ite sectarian militias called the Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). These groups had risen to fight ISIS but were gathering strength with Iran’s support. |