Iraqi officials often insist that the Popular Mobilization Forces are an integral part of the country’s national security apparatus. They point to a 2016 law passed by Iraq’s Parliament that formally incorporated the forces into the armed services and placed them under the prime minister’s direct supervision.
That may be true on paper. On the ground, however, the reality is markedly different. The PMF is an umbrella organization comprising military brigades affiliated with armed factions that retain varying degrees of organizational independence and differ sharply in their ideologies, political loyalties, ties to Iran and relationships with Iraq’s religious authorities.
The Iraqi government is now seeking to fully integrate these factions into the formal security establishment and has given them until the end of September to surrender their weapons to the state. But some of the most powerful groups — and those closest to Iran — have said they have no intention of doing so.
According to Iraqi sources close to the government who spoke to MBN this week, an agreement has been reached under which the factions would hand over their weapons exclusively to the Popular Mobilization Commission rather than directly to the Iraqi government. The arrangement was based on a proposal put forward by Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf during his latest visit to Baghdad on Aug. 19.
The Iraqi government has not officially announced such an agreement. But Sabah al-Numan, the military spokesman for the prime minister, told MBN that the plan calls for weapons to be handed over to the PMF and then reorganized, on the grounds that “the PMF is an Iraqi security institution under the law and is subject to the orders of the commander in chief of the armed forces.”
The United States opposes the PMF’s growing influence and regards most of its constituent factions as instruments of Iranian power in Iraq. Washington has repeatedly carried out airstrikes on bases belonging to PMF factions in retaliation for attacks on American interests in the country. It has also imposed sanctions on senior PMF officials.
The United States “fully supports disarming the factions and handing their weapons over to Iraq’s central government,” a senior administration official told MBN last week.
The PMF’s Power Structure
Figures close to Iran control the most important positions within the Popular Mobilization Commission, including its chairmanship, chief of staff’s office, and security and intelligence operations. They also command several of the most prominent military formations and armed factions under its umbrella.
The commission is headed by Iraqi politician Falih al-Fayyadh, who has been under U.S. sanctions since 2021 over accusations that he committed serious human rights abuses in Iraq.
When the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Fayyadh, it said he had been a member of a crisis cell supported by Iran’s Quds Force that included prominent armed-faction leaders. It also said PMF personnel had used live ammunition during the crackdown on the Tishreen (October) protest movement, which began in October 2019.
Fayyadh, a former national security adviser, controls administrative and financial affairs, according to a PMF official who spoke to MBN. The commission’s chief of staff, Abdul Aziz al-Muhammadawi, better known as Abu Fadak and also under U.S. sanctions , is considered the organization’s de facto commander because he oversees and coordinates its military and field operations.
The official, who requested anonymity, said decisions involving combat operations and weapons within the PMF are managed by Muhammadawi, although some are controlled separately by individual factions.
The PMF can be divided into three main blocs. Iran-aligned factions form the largest, including the Badr Organization, Kataib Hezbollah, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Except for Badr, all other groups are designated as terrorist organizations by the United States.
The organization also includes Saraya al-Salam, which is affiliated with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as well as several factions linked to Iraq’s senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Sunni tribal units and Turkmen, Shabak, Yazidi, Christian and other local formations are also represented but wield little influence within the PMF.
“Abu Fadak”
Kataib Hezbollah offers perhaps the clearest example of how an Iran-aligned faction has come to dominate the PMF’s most important decision-making centers. In addition to controlling three brigades — the 45th, 46th and 47th — senior Kataib Hezbollah figures hold key positions in the commission’s command and security structures. The faction’s influence therefore extends from combat units to the institution’s highest levels of authority.
The most prominent of these figures is Abdul Aziz al-Muhammadawi, or Abu Fadak, a senior Kataib Hezbollah commander who became PMF chief of staff in 2021. He has since emerged as the organization’s leading operational official, and American studies describe him as one of the main figures overseeing its day-to-day activities.
Muhammadawi succeeded Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the founder of Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, who was killed alongside Qassem Soleimani, the former commander of Iran’s Quds Force, in a U.S. strike near Baghdad airport in January 2020.
The faction’s reach extends beyond the chief of staff’s office. In June 2024, PMF Chairman Falih al-Fayyadh appointed Hussein Falih Aziz al-Lami, known as Abu Zainab al-Lami, as deputy chief of staff. Lami, another senior Kataib Hezbollah commander, had previously headed the PMF Security Directorate, the body responsible for disciplining PMF commanders and personnel who violate orders or regulations.
Both Muhandis and Abu Fadak have been designated as terrorists by the United States. Lami has been under U.S. sanctions since 2019 over allegations of serious human rights abuses during the crackdown on the Tishreen protests.
Washington also says that although the PMF was created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group, many of its factions have increasingly focused on advancing their own economic interests and supporting Iran’s regional agenda in Iraq rather than protecting the Iraqi state or its citizens.
The 2016 law defined the Popular Mobilization Commission as an independent legal entity, part of the armed forces and directly answerable to the commander in chief. It also barred its members from political and partisan activity.
But the law is one thing, and the way the institution operates in practice is another, according to a former Iraqi government adviser who spoke to MBN on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
“At present, Muhammadawi controls most of the movements of the factions within the PMF, coordinating exclusively with the leader of each armed group, even when those movements conflict with the central government’s position,” the former adviser said.
“They simply inform the Iraqi government that they will move in one direction or another; they do not seek its permission,” he added. “Sometimes the government is not informed at all, which is why clashes and overlaps in authority occasionally occur.”
Over the past five years, a series of incidents has exposed the strained relationship between the Iraqi government and the PMF and its affiliated factions, raising questions about the limits of the commander-in-chief’s authority over these groups.
The arrest of Abbas al-Yaqoubi, the PMF’s director of intelligence operations for the Baghdad Belt, marked the latest confrontation over the boundaries of their respective powers.
In mid-August 2026, Iraqi security forces arrested Yaqoubi, who is also a commander in the U.S.-designated terrorist group Harakat al-Nujaba, on allegations related to drone attacks.
Just one day later, Yaqoubi was handed over to the Popular Mobilization Commission, which announced that it had released him without charge.
Only days afterward, a joint Iraqi force conducted an operation in Baghdad that resulted in the arrest of four PMF members. They included Abu Jaafar, a member of the commission’s chief of staff office, who was detained at his home in the Baladiyat district of eastern Baghdad. Hours later, however, authorities announced that the detainees had also been transferred to the PMF.
The former government adviser said Nujaba and allied factions had threatened to blockade Baghdad’s Green Zone and enter into an armed confrontation with the Iraqi government unless the detainees were released or handed over to the PMF.
The episode recalled events under former Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. In June 2020, Kadhimi ordered a raid on a Kataib Hezbollah base in Baghdad after the group was accused of preparing attacks on the Green Zone and American interests.
Thirteen Kataib Hezbollah members were arrested but later handed over to the PMF Security Directorate and released after the militia threatened to storm the Green Zone.
Another confrontation occurred in July 2025, when PMF members affiliated with Kataib Hezbollah stormed the Karkh Agriculture Directorate building in Baghdad. A clash with federal police forces followed, resulting in casualties.
The Iraqi government said at the time that PMF units had acted without orders and acknowledged a breakdown in command and control.
Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist
Statements by senior PMF officials, in addition to these incidents, suggest that their actions are tied to external authorities and are not governed solely by the Iraqi state.
In April 2024, Abu Fadak said he was awaiting a decision and position from Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, before responding to the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
Before that, Akram al-Kaabi, the leader of the PMF-affiliated Nujaba group, declared in August 2016 that he followed “the path of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist under the leadership of Grand Ayatollah Khamenei,” according to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.
The PMF also hosts Iranian advisers, as demonstrated by U.S.-Saudi strikes on its positions in early August 2026 that killed several of them.
Those strikes confirmed what MBN reported in April about the important role Iranian advisers have played in reshaping Iraq’s armed factions, including their organization, weaponry and combat doctrine.
Describing the advisers’ work in Iraq, a former Iraqi government official told MBN: “It is a secret world about which we know very little. We know only that they were here before and that, ahead of the latest war between Washington and Tehran, others were sent to work in Iraq.
“The advisers are present, but their presence is not officially acknowledged,” added the former official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “They operate under the protection and umbrella of the PMF, not within the other branches of the regular armed forces.”
The former official said the PMF provides for the advisers’ needs, while the advisers issue orders and the PMF “carries them out on the ground.”
“There is a group of key power brokers within the PMF,” he said. “I am not talking here about ordinary members, but about those who possess decision-making authority. They are either Iranians working as advisers, Iraqis who hold Iranian citizenship or have lived in Iran for long periods, or people with Iranian citizenship who live in Iraq. It is a mixture of all of these.”
The Popular Mobilization Commission has tens of thousands of fighters. Iraqi budget figures from recent years and statements by PMF officials indicate that it has more than 200,000 personnel, though there is no independent, reliable figure establishing the true number.
The PMF’s annual budget is roughly $3 billion, according to one of its officials, who said most of the money allocated to the organization is spent on salaries and weapons.
The official said all factions, including those refusing to surrender their weapons, receive their salaries through the Popular Mobilization Commission.
An Iraqi parliamentary source said the government exercises no control over those funds. It allocates money to the PMF in the national budget and transfers it to the commission without knowing how it is spent or the true number of personnel receiving payments.
The problem is not new. Former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi raised it in November 2017, when he said the PMF’s payroll included fictitious names and accused some commanders of exploiting the salary system by registering fighters who did not exist.
Abadi said at the time that he had ordered an investigation into the distribution of PMF salaries to ensure the money reached actual fighters.
“No one dared to pursue the investigations, either because of the influence wielded by PMF leaders or because of political deals that were struck,” the parliamentary source told MBN.
The Root of the Problem
Critics say many of the problems facing the PMF today can be traced to the way its governing law was drafted in 2016. The legislation was brief, consisting of only three articles, and did not spell out the mechanisms for command and control, weapons management or the organization and operation of the force. Fundamental questions were left unresolved.
The law granted the PMF formal status within the armed forces but failed to provide enough detail on how to unify its formations, ensure their genuine submission to a single chain of command, or regulate their relationship with factions that retained their previous leadership and organizational structures.
Over the years, that legal ambiguity has helped preserve the gap between formal authority and actual control over some PMF formations.
“The law did not establish a hierarchical institutional structure or clear mechanisms for oversight and discipline,” said Aqeel Abbas, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative under its Middle East programs. “It linked the PMF directly to the prime minister in his capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces, without creating a higher institution to monitor the regular, day-to-day enforcement of Defense Ministry regulations.
“Unlike the army, where the chief of staff and the Defense Ministry perform oversight and accountability functions, the PMF was largely left to manage itself,” Abbas added. “This institutional vacuum created most of the problems the PMF faces today and made its chief of staff the most important figure within it.”
The viability of transferring the factions’ weapons to the PMF is therefore directly tied to the problems created by the law’s wording, particularly the lack of clear institutional command and oversight mechanisms. That raises the question of whether handing the weapons to an institution that still suffers from these shortcomings would truly end the factions’ autonomy.
“Transferring weapons from an armed faction to the PMF will mean very little if the same faction-affiliated commanders retain effective control over those weapons and continue to operate with political or military independence,” Hayder al-Shakeri, a researcher at Chatham House, told MBN.
The Iraqi government’s deadline for bringing all weapons under state control expires on Sept. 30, coinciding with the end of the international coalition’s mission. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has instructed security forces in several meetings to prepare to carry out his orders if the factions refuse to surrender their weapons by the deadline.
Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib al-Imam Ali announced on June 2 that they were severing their ties with PMF formations and beginning steps to place their weapons under state control. Kataib Hezbollah, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada and Harakat al-Nujaba, by contrast, continue to hold on to their arsenals.
Like successive Iraqi governments since 2003, the Zaidi government is trying to balance its relations with Washington and Tehran, both of which wield political, economic and security influence in the country.
By proposing that the factions transfer their weapons to the Popular Mobilization Commission, Iran appears to be trying to buy time and ensure that its influence in Iraq — exercised through allied armed groups — survives the coalition’s withdrawal.
“The final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq has been an Iranian objective since Soleimani’s killing,” said Ibrahim al-Marashi, an associate professor of Middle East history at California State University.
“If Iran can keep its proxies intact,” he told MBN, “it will have achieved a strategic objective.”
Adapted and translated from the original Arabic.