Iraq's New PM Pledges to Disarm Iran-Backed Militias, Faces Steep Challenge

Ali al-Zaidi took office as Iraq's Prime Minister without the usual political machinery behind him. He had not spent decades in parliament, had not built a faction, had not accumulated the kind of leverage that typically precedes such a position. Yet within weeks of his appointment, he sat down to discuss what may be the most consequential and intractable problem facing his government: the armed militias that answer to Iran rather than to Baghdad.

These militias have operated with near-impunity across Iraq for years, accumulating weapons, territory, and political influence. They emerged during the fight against ISIS but never dissolved when that conflict receded. Instead, they calcified into a parallel state apparatus—collecting taxes, running courts, controlling neighborhoods. Their loyalty flows eastward to Tehran, not upward to the Iraqi state. Previous prime ministers have tried to rein them in. All have failed, or come close enough to failure that the militias remain armed and autonomous.

Al-Zaidi, in his interview, did not shy from the scale of the task. He presented a timeline for disarmament that he framed as realistic but also, implicitly, as urgent. The specifics matter: he was not speaking in abstractions about "eventual integration" or "long-term dialogue." He named a sequence of steps and a window in which they would occur. Whether that window could actually close—whether the political will, the security apparatus, and the international support necessary to enforce such a plan actually exist—remained the unspoken question hanging over the conversation.

The challenge is structural. These militias command loyalty from their fighters through a mix of ideology, sectarian identity, and material incentive. Many of their members have no other source of income. Disarming them without offering an alternative means creating thousands of armed men with grievance and no paycheck. Integrating them into the state security forces, the alternative approach, risks importing their factional loyalties directly into the institutions meant to transcend faction. And any attempt at coercion risks triggering the very conflict that disarmament is meant to prevent.

Iran's role complicates every option. The militias are not independent actors pursuing their own agenda; they are instruments of Iranian regional strategy. Disarming them would represent a significant loss of Iranian leverage in Iraq. Tehran has invested years and resources in building these networks. It is unlikely to simply accept their dissolution without some offsetting gain or without making the cost of disarmament prohibitively high.

Al-Zaidi's political inexperience cuts both ways. He carries no baggage from previous failed attempts, which means he is not immediately tainted by association with past compromises or half-measures. But he also lacks the deep relationships within Iraq's security establishment, the regional connections, and the demonstrated ability to navigate the country's byzantine factional politics. A newcomer can sometimes move faster than an insider. A newcomer can also be outmaneuvered by those who have spent their careers learning how the system actually works beneath its formal structure.

The timeline he outlined will be tested almost immediately. Disarmament is not a process that unfolds in the abstract. It requires concrete actions: militias handing over weapons, fighters accepting new roles or leaving the armed struggle entirely, checkpoints coming down, parallel security forces dissolving. Each step creates a moment of vulnerability and a point at which resistance can crystallize. The question is not whether al-Zaidi wants to succeed. The question is whether the forces arrayed against success—Iranian interests, militia commanders with their own power to protect, Iraqi factions that benefit from the current disorder—will allow him to.