The Long Shadow of American Wars on Iraq

On a recent afternoon, I was driving across Baghdad, resigned to the whims of my city’s traffic. An old woman in the backseat of the car beside mine sat with her lips sealed, her face catching the afternoon sun with the patient gravity of a pieta. Her gaze had settled on a child, lonesome and thin, working the edge of a roadside garbage dump. In a beige tracksuit, he was nearly invisible, almost dissolving into the place. He picked up a gunny sack, flipped it upside down, and mumbled something. He rummaged until his small hand landed on a pack of crisps—purple, apparently intact—and held it like a prize.

Iraq’s oil sales fueled much of its $94 billion in revenues in 2025, yet little trickles down to the millions who eke out in a precarious informal sector, with little protection and meager pay. The country is yet to fully emerge from the wreckage of its own wars, and the war the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran in February has already spilled over into Iraq. Several Shia armed groups that are allied with Tehran launched rocket and drone strikes targeting the U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad, NATO troops stationed across the country, against Iranian-Kurdish militias sheltering in Kurdistan, and in the Gulf Arab countries to the south.

In Baghdad, a drone struck the headquarters of Iraqi Intelligence, which the militias accuse of collaborating with Emirati and Jordanian intelligence, killing a young officer. Another drone targeted the residence of Nechirvan Barzani, President of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region, only days after rocket attacks killed six Peshmerga fighters. After the attack, the Popular Mobilization Forces, the institutionalized constellation of Shia militias in Iraq, claimed that American and Israeli airstrikes killed three of its fighters in Kirkuk in northern Iraq. An American air strike on a PMF command headquarters in al-Anbar province killed 15 fighters; and another strike on an adjacent military base in al-Habbaniyah, which also houses a paramilitary camp, killed seven soldiers and wounded 13. The PMF claimed to have lost 80 members to American and Israeli airstrikes.

Several commanders of Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Shia militia, were assassinated in the capital in unidentified airstrikes on residential areas. Yet not all the Shia militias have been eager to join the fight. Many Shia elites, including paramilitary leaders, showed no desire to abandon their second lives of comfort and state largesse, even as Iran was being bombed during the 12-Day War in June 2025.

A wasting of men

That afternoon, I emerged from traffic onto a crossroads in al-Mansour, a district that had once been prosperous. I found myself beholding a billboard commemorating Qasem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander; Sayid Hasan Nasrullah, the leader of Hezbollah; Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of Kataib Hezbollah, and several fighters of his militia. A parade of martyrs killed in American or Israeli air strikes, assembled like a defeated football side making one last appearance. “Our weapons,” a quote on the billboard read, “we owe the Imam al-Hujjah,” alluding to the disappeared and awaited Shia redeemer, Imam al-Mahdi. In this quiet dialogue with the dead, the people on the street needed no words to absorb the message.

Crossing an overpass into my western suburb of Baghdad, militia flags stamped with Ali Khamenei’s face fluttered in the wind. The murdered supreme leader has replaced Saddam Hussein, his image pasted across the city's walls as though he were one of its Abbasid rulers. Some of those who dared to express even a whisper of relief at his death were vilified online and arrested. Silence is a refuge. The more militants are killed, the deeper the city drowns in militant Shia iconography.

“Cults require a bloody wasting of men,” wrote Georges Bataille, the French philosopher. The PMF, known as al-Hashd al-Shaabi, were constituted to fight the Islamic State after Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia religious leader, issued a fatwa for jihad against the terrorists in 2014. It is the sacrificial blood of its young members that sanctifies the enterprise—turning what was initially conceived of as a patriotic force into a shield for Shia political interests and demanding blood to maintain its relevance after the defeat of the Islamic State. 

“Sacred things,” Bataille wrote, “are constituted by an operation of loss.” So long as American and Israeli leaders treat war as a righteous crusade and take pleasure in breaking the rules of modern warfare, and so long as the militias such as Kataib Sayid al-Shuhada and Harakat al-Nujaba frame the conflict as “an existential war” for their very survival, war becomes a performance without end.

Still, the two are far from equal. On one side is a neo-imperial coalition pursuing a self-assigned mandate to reorganize the region into a patchwork of subservient states willing to normalize relations with Israel as the question of Palestinian rights is buried beneath the architecture of new deals. On the other side, the resistance of the region’s people to being so remade. The consequences on ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, are yet to receive the attention they deserve.

The long shadow of the occupation

Twenty-three years after George Bush and Tony Blair resolved that Iraqis were to be emancipated, the country remains captive to a masquerade of power. The U.S. insists that the Shia political class it has empowered by invading Iraq in 2003 severs its dependence on Tehran and disarms its armed factions. But the latter had grown into the sinew of the Iraqi state itself, dismantling them was never something the Shia elite could readily concede.

In January, the Coordination Framework, a coalition of Shia parties dominating the parliament, nominated Nuri al-Maliki, a politician deemed too close to Iran, to take office as prime minister. Yet President Donald Trump’s threat to “no longer help Iraq” if al-Maliki assumed office forced the Coordination Framework to replace him with Ali al-Zaidi, a banker who earned Washington’s blessings.

Washington maintains a chokehold on Baghdad’s oil revenue, which is deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. In recent weeks, it withheld Iraq’s cash transfers as a disciplinary stratagem to force its implausible vision for a future Iraqi government unbeholden to Tehran. But if al-Zaidi lends the state an independent face, the CF will still be backstage, pulling the strings.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz compounded the pains of militia attacks, forcing Iraq to declare force-majeure on foreign-run oil operations and curtail production. Signs of future noncompliance with Trump’s whims may cripple Iraq’s rentier economy and imperil its ability to pay pensioners and employees. In April, consumers found that staples like tomatoes have tripled in price, while an increase in poultry feed cost sent the price of eggs beyond the purchasing power of many. At a grocery stall in my neighborhood, the owner told me that “everything still comes from Iran.”

Some Shia figures made overtures to Washington and distanced themselves from the attacks, but other militias like Kataib Hezbollah are unflinching, promising to fight on. The porous Iraqi state and its security apparatus have long accommodated these paramilitaries and their political representatives within a carefully exclusionary arrangement—one that persists despite the present intra-Shia tensions stirred by the wider regional war.

Shia elites, like their Sunni counterparts, have embezzled billions and enriched their allies. Corruption is not a crisis; it is the system. Both real and manufactured threats have provided the alibi for security spending, securitization, and repression. This stable abnormality has rested on a dual architecture of impunity and rehabilitation—a profitable, sect-transcendent disequilibrium sustained by oil revenues, shadow economies and, more recently, frenzied real-estate speculation.

A construction boom presided over by outgoing premier Mohammed al-Sudani was heralded by outside observers as the dawn of a prosperous era, an illusion of progress that Baghdad’s skyline appeared to confirm. But as drones crashed into the Tigris and funeral processions wound their way along freshly gentrified avenues, Iraq’s state of latent emergency has given way to the emergency that this unconvincing simulacrum of Mesopotamian renaissance had long concealed.

Ghosts of Iraqi Freedom

A few days after my ride across town, on April 7, a rocket fired by militiamen landed in an empty room in a house in my neighborhood, and another killed an eight-year-old schoolboy named Siraj in nearby al-Amiriyah. The sound of impact, the shock, and the news that followed were all familiar. I thought of all the years war has shadowed our lives and infiltrated our speech. Operation Iraqi Freedom remains lodged like an uncanny monument in the middle of every sentence spoken here. There is a “before” of dictatorship and United Nations-sanctioned hunger, and an “after” of car bombs and sectarian death squads. Decades on, death still felt closer again.

Having been “shocked and awed” in 2003, Iraqis are being hurled into yet another war that is failing spectacularly in its aim of maintaining Washington’s global dominance. As if the calamity of war and its afterlives weren’t enough, Iraqis now contend with the ineptitude and cynicism of rulers they never chose—the protégés of a discredited generation that filled the ranks of the sectarian order Paul Bremer and his local collaborators helped construct in 2003.

Amidst the current war, on Mar. 27, it was announced that a joint American-Iraqi committee would be established to combat terrorism and prevent future attacks on Iraq’s neighbors, all while, the statement claimed, “fully respecting its sovereignty.” Seeing their subservient rulers torn between the very state that destroyed theirs and its archenemy in Tehran, Iraqis could be forgiven for wondering where that sovereignty begins—and where it ends. When news of Israel’s secret outposts in Iraq’s desert emerged, Iraqis admonished their leaders as traitors, and the boisterous militiamen affiliated with the government as impostors for allowing their land to be colonized by an enemy.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these same people would cheer and ululate at the sight of A-10 Warthogs massacring their kin from the PMF—no matter how deep the resentment that entire generations, including the Shia, carry toward the Iranian regime that waged war on and plundered their country. Being a member of a paramilitary group does not legitimize his murder, and soldiers and Ministry of Interior officers alike are now being killed in indiscriminate American and Israeli airstrikes. Not every paramilitary fighter is stained by the corruption of the Shia elite or implicated in spilling innocent blood in recent years.

The United States has no standing to dictate what accountability should look like in the ruined country it left behind. Iraqis have been on the receiving end of American interventions for more than three decades, disagreeing with the militias’ rush to defend the Ayatollahs should not be misread as a tacit invitation for more U.S.-Israeli bombing. The deaths of paramilitaries and soldiers are still mourned by segments of the population—they are not, as Judith Butler writes in Frames of War, a category of ungrievable “not quite lives.”

By nightfall, the warplanes return. I scroll through Telegram channels, anticipating the sound of the next explosion near the airport—where the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, a U.S. facility, and a neighboring military camp, have become recurring targets. Outside my window, the darkened horizon is swallowed by the shadows of nearby concrete towers—sentinels of a new metropolis rising over the Baghdad I watched being put to death after 2003.

Motorists move along the highway below, the same road taken by millions of would-be refugees on their final journey out, through Damascus and Amman. I reach for the memoirs of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, searching for some form of solace. “Prophets,” his words whisper back to me, “admonish and denounce, but those who have seen the form that horror has taken in our times no longer want to blame or condemn, and our prophecy is today of this type.”