The warning came from a shepherd in a remote stretch of desert in southern Iraq who spotted unmarked military vehicles and “foreign forces” descending from helicopters.
Alarmed, Iraq’s security forces launched a reconnaissance mission to the area near the Saudi border. They soon came under fire, leaving one soldier dead and two injured.
Iraq publicly condemned the “reprehensible and deplorable incident” but offered no details about the identity of the foreign forces, fuelling suspicions across the country. That silence reflects a deeper uncertainty: Iraqi authorities have struggled to confirm exactly who carried out the attack last week, people familiar with the investigation, including Iraqi security officials, told the Financial Times.
“We have some suspicions, but we can’t say for sure,” an Iraqi official said, suggesting the raid – along with several others over the past week – was probably conducted by US special forces.
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Two people familiar with the situation said Saudi Arabia had faced attacks from within Iraq. One suggested foreign forces had crossed into Iraq to neutralise the threat.
The intervention in the sparsely populated desert illustrates how Iraq has emerged as a shadow front in the US and Israeli war against Iran, throwing the country’s fragile economy and security again off balance.
A US defence official said Washington has carried out operations in Iraq as part of its Iran campaign but “it was just in defence of US troops”.
“They were attacked by Iran-aligned militia groups,” the official said. The US “responded in self-defence”, they added, saying US forces had not engaged in conflict with Iraq’s security forces.
Israel has also previously carried out air strikes in Iraq, but an Israeli military official said they were not aware of any recent operations there.
Iraq has been a battleground for Washington and Iran’s competing interests since the US-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. That rivalry has led to several outbreaks of violence after the US and Israel began attacking Iran last month.
Tehran-backed Shia militias have taken credit for more than a dozen rocket and drone attacks targeting US military and diplomatic installations. This includes the US embassy in Baghdad – previously considered a red line – and a US airbase in Erbil.
Shia militias targeted a US diplomatic and logistics facility inside Baghdad’s airport complex with several drones on Tuesday night, said people familiar with the situation. All but one were intercepted. The people said retaliatory strikes were then launched on militia positions on Wednesday.
The armed groups have also attacked oil installations, an airport and several hotels housing US citizens in Erbil and have claimed attacks on Jordan and Kuwait. The US embassy also warned that armed Shia groups might target US-owned oil and energy infrastructure in Iraq.
While physical damage has been limited, the assaults – involving hundreds of drones in the Kurdistan region alone – have led to chaotic evacuations and the shutdown of several facilities.
Iraq’s defence ministry on Wednesday condemned what it called “repeated hostile operations” on the country’s own bases, insisting there was “no representation of any foreign forces” in them.
Iran, for its part, has attacked the bases of Iranian Kurdish anti-regime groups, killing several fighters, as reports emerged last week that the US and Israel were priming them to launch an incursion into western Iran.
Iraqi officials say multiple apparent US air strikes have hit militia leaders and headquarters, weapons depots and logistics nodes.
An air strike last week in central Iraq killed a long-standing commander in the US-designated Kataib Hizbullah. On Friday, one Shia militia claimed to have clashed with US Apache helicopters above Mosul.
Analysts have struggled to explain why Washington has not publicly claimed the attacks. “And they have not been asking for our permission,” said an Iraqi official.
Victoria Taylor, a former senior US state department official on Iraq and Iran who is now at the Atlantic Council, said the apparent US strikes had been limited and happened “much sooner than I thought they would”.
“But the timing ... suggested that they were trying to take out air monitoring or communications systems that would have been pivotal to the militias – trying to blind them right at the outset.”
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Against this backdrop, Iraq’s crude oil exports have plummeted as Iranian attacks blocked its trade routes, threatening its oil-dependent economy and triggering blackouts. The energy crunch comes as the country’s political elite struggles to form a new government.
“The strategy right now for Iran is chaos, to raise the costs of this war everywhere,” said Renad Mansour, director of London-based think tank Chatham House’s Iraq Initiative. “Iran can easily do that in Iraq,” where it has broad influence and long-standing ties to politicians and armed groups, he said.
Iraq’s Shia militias were mostly formed following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, although some larger ones go back decades. The dozens of groups collectively command more than 100,000 fighters, analysts estimate. Some were integrated into state security forces, with their fighters on state payroll.
They have long maintained an adversarial relationship with the US, whose occupying forces they fought in the decade following 2003.
The militias fought alongside the US-led coalition to defeat Islamic State after 2014 but sporadic clashes between the Shia groups and US forces never stopped. Washington has killed several key militia figures in recent years. The US has long pressed Iraq’s leaders to rein in the groups.
Yet many of those paramilitaries have expanded their reach. Several militia figures are in government and regularly meet western dignitaries. That pivot caps years of pragmatic opportunism through which the groups came to prioritise survival and financial interests over blind loyalty to Iran.
For example, after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, some Shia armed groups initially targeted Washington for backing Israel, but they pulled back after the US retaliated in early 2024 for the deaths of three US service members in a militia drone attack, fearing that US and Israeli retaliation would annihilate them.
The militias subsequently sat out the June 2025 war between Israel, the US and Iran. People familiar with Iran’s decision making said Tehran had told the groups to stay on the sidelines.
Most Iraqi militia leaders since then have privately said they would not get involved in another Israel-Iran conflict but would prioritise their own survival. Yet after the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, the militias joined the fight.
Experts say the groups are not unified in their priorities. Those more embedded within Iraq’s establishment have stronger incentives to avoid an escalation, Mansour said.
But smaller factions with stronger ties to Iran “view confrontation as necessary to maintain their political, economic and ideological authority”, he said.
That helps to explain why fighters from groups such as Harakat Hizbullah al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyed al-Shuhada have seemingly involved themselves in the conflict, he said. “Each group is pursuing its own logic of survival right now.”
Those taking credit for attacks are rogue groups hiding behind newly formed fronts, giving them plausible deniability.
It also raises questions about who is ultimately directing their attacks, analysts and Iraqi security officials said. Elements within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have cultivated some of these groups more aggressively since the June war, Mansour said.
Iraq’s political leaders – such as caretaker prime minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani – must navigate their response as Iran and its proxies increase pressure on Baghdad.
Politicians must reassure Washington they are curbing the militia’s attacks – while relying on those same armed groups for support. At the same time they are forced to avoid the appearance of collusion by denouncing foreign forces for operating in Iraq.
Militia-aligned MPs on Saturday chanted “Death to America” in parliament.
The ruling coalition has said it stands “firmly against any party that tries to drag Iraq into conflict”, with Sudani attempting to project authority over the security services.
But it is also trying to cobble together a government four months after a national election devolved into fierce horse-trading. Sudani is trying to return as premier by rallying support for a one-year government with emergency powers, said people familiar with the talks.
But it is not certain he will succeed, and, like many Iraqis right now, Sudani is not immune to the perilous volatility. As he was in a meeting to negotiate his political future last weekend, a rocket attack targeting the US embassy in Baghdad landed nearby. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
