U.S., Iran Move Out of ‘Shadow War’ but Threat From Proxy Militias May Remain
Historically, Iran has relied on its network of proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere to attack its adversaries, including the United States. But since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, ongoing conflicts have wreaked havoc on Iran’s allies, leaving them degraded but still potentially dangerous.
On Monday, Iran responded to unprecedented U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles were launched from Iran toward the U.S. military’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. There were no reports of U.S. casualties, and countries like Bahrain, Iraq and Kuwait, where the U.S. has other bases, had shut down their airspace as a precautionary measure.
Last week’s U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities was the latest domino to fall in the region, which has seen a dramatic upheaval of the status quo following the death of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and the overthrow of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, two key allies of the Iranian regime. This week marked the most direct form of warfare that the two powerhouses had engaged in after decades of indirect fighting.
“We’ve moved out of the shadow war that Iran has been waging against the United States and its allies and partners in the region that has been ongoing since the Islamic Revolution,” said Adham Sahloul, a Middle East fellow with the Center for a New American Security and former special advisor for the Biden administration at the Defense Department. “Now that war is more kinetic. It’s state on state, and I think that’s what makes the weight of the events of the last few days more significant.”
What comes next is uncertain, but the consensus among experts is that the last year and a half has weakened the Iranian regime’s grasp on militias in the region. But experts had different opinions about the threat that smaller, less organized proxy groups can still pose — especially for American troops who felt the ire of Iranian-backed militias after the U.S. backed Israel in its war against Hamas for its Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks.
The remaining “connective tissue” that Iran has to these groups, leads Sahloul to believe that “we can’t put it past Iranian leadership to see that, maybe not in the immediate term, but in the medium term, an uptick in destabilizing behavior, threats to U.S. personnel.”
In a June 20 online piece titled “The Deafening Silence of Iran’s Proxies,” Brian Carter, a Middle East analyst for the American Enterprise Institute, wrote that “the extent to which these groups have remained largely uninvolved so far reflects an unraveling of the Iranian regional militia network.”
Although Iran still can use its proxy forces to fight the United States, “the question is how much,” said retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, a former head of U.S. Central Command who led U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq during the surge.
“It would be much diminished, and if they do so, the proxies themselves are putting themselves very much in harm’s way,” Petraeus said. “And if it’s traced back to Iran, Iran is going to be in harm’s way.”
But retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, also a former U.S. commander in the Middle East, said their sometimes-loose connection to Iran is what makes them a threat. He described Iranian proxies as “lonesome doves operating without guidance” and “who are not necessarily waiting for instructions from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force commander.”
“It’s very easy for them to go to ground,” Votel told Task & Purpose. “There could be rogue actors in there who are trying to make a statement and trying to position themselves for more prominence by striking out and trying to take a chance and attack an American facility or installation.”
In January 2024, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a network of Iranian-backed groups, took credit for the attack on a U.S. outpost in Jordan known as Tower 22. Votel said the use of drones is illustrative of the kinds of unconventional attacks that Iranian-backed groups could launch against U.S. troops going forward.
“That would be one group, a small person, an individual, launching a drone or a small number of drones and trying to penetrate into a location with the hope of trying to hit something, a building, a group of soldiers,” he said. “It’s not certainly strategic like these ballistic missiles that we’re watching right now, but it nonetheless could cause casualties, and it could, I think, cause reaction, certainly from the U.S. government.”
The U.S. attack against Iran over the weekend is the latest chapter in more than 40 years of hostilities between the two countries that have threatened to explode into outright warfare several times. Shortly after its 1979 revolution, Iran became locked in a war with Iraq, so it used proxy forces “to advance its revolutionary goals with little investment,” said Heather Williams of the RAND Corporation. Historically, Iran’s primary proxy force has been Lebanese Hezbollah, Williams told Task & Purpose.
“They’ll use all those proxy forces in the region to promote their agenda,” then-commander of U.S. troops battling ISIS, Lt. Gen. J.B. Vowell, told Task & Purpose in June 2024. “Iran can control the militias — they fund them, they train them, equip them. Those missiles in Yemen just don’t get created out there in the desert. The materials, the expertise come from Iran. Same with Lebanese Hezbollah. Same with Hamas and others.”
Votel said when he was CENTCOM commander from 2016 to 2019 and the U.S. was supporting the Iraqi Security Forces, it wasn’t uncommon for American and Iraqi troops to be “operating adjacently” with Shia militias. He said they “signaled” through the U.S. and Iraqi leadership that American troops were there at the request of the Iraqi government and that any attacks from the Shia militia would be met with a response.
“The Shia militia groups did not mess with us, even though we’re in close proximity to them,” he said. “To me, that demonstrated that Iran was paying attention, that they had control over this, and they had exerted their authority over these groups not to take advantage of an opportunity to attack Americans because they were principally there to focus on ISIS.”
However, American troops based in the Middle East have come under attack by those Iranian-backed groups — oftentimes after major moves by the U.S. After the U.S. launched operations to destroy the Islamic State group in 2014, American service members in Iraq and Syria came under attack from Iranian-backed Kata’ib Hezbollah. Those attacks were followed by retaliatory U.S. airstrikes.
Between 2003 and 2011, Iranian proxies killed more than 600 U.S. troops in Iraq, according to a 2019 estimate from the Pentagon. Since 2011, there have been 369 Iranian-backed attacks consisting of rockets, drones and missiles, according to an ongoing count by Ari Cicurel, associate director of foreign policy at Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
Attacks against American troops ramped up in 2023 after the U.S. stood behind Israel in its war against Hamas following the Oct. 7 attacks. In fact, more than half of the attacks since 2011 have occurred since Oct. 7, 2023, including the Jan. 28, 2024, drone attack on Tower 22 in Jordan that killed three soldiers.
“We’ve been edging out Iranian proxies in the Middle East for decades without going after the source of the problem which is the Iranian regime itself, Quds Force and [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps],” said David Cook, a senior enlisted psychological operations soldier in the Army Reserve focused on the Middle East, who was part of those efforts.
The Quds Force is a branch of the IRGC, Iran’s military, that has provided training, weapons and money to armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen at the behest of Iran and as “as part of an anti-West ‘axis of resistance’,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 2016, the U.S. had troops in Syria after the fall of ISIS who were part of ongoing “stability operations” designed to win over locals before Iran could. Cook, who went to Syria in 2018, said the U.S. military units were “filling the void before these Iranian-trained militia groups could get there.” The U.S. built clinics, rebuilt canals and sat down with local leaders to combat Iranian influence — or more specifically, recruiting local men into proxy cells that would be trained and supported by the IRGC.
“You want to be able to support the people in a way that garners favor among them instead of Iran or Iranian-backed militia groups,” Cook said. “Basically, you’re cutting off the ability for them to influence. Cause if you’re starving, you don’t care where the food comes from.”
As Iran has waged its “shadow war,” against the West, the U.S. and Israel have gone after key leaders of those proxy groups in an attempt to stem the regime’s regional influence.
Imad Mughniyeh, one of Hezbollah’s leaders who played a major role in training Shiite militias in Iraq to attack U.S. troops, was killed by the CIA and Mossad in 2008. He was suspected of planning the 1983 suicide truck bomb attack on a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. troops and had also been indicted for the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, during which Navy diver Robert Stethem was killed.
In January 2024, a U.S. airstrike killed Mushtaq Jawad Kazim al-Jawari, also known as Abu-Taqwaa, a leader of the Harakat-al-Nujaba militia, an Iranian proxy group that is a core member of the “axis of resistance.”
The biggest blow to Iran’s relationship with its proxy forces came in January 2020, when the U.S. killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, which oversees Iran’s foreign operations, according to Williams.
“It has been difficult for Iran to replicate his competence and the depth of the relationships he built with proxy groups over decades,” Williams said.
For some of the regime’s major supporters, like Hezbollah, Petraeus said the group is a “shadow of itself,” and it is trying to rebuild without support from Iran. Petraeus also said that the fall of al-Assad has left Iranian proxies in Syria “fighting for their lives, just trying to survive,” adding that it means Hezbollah can no longer move weapons to Lebanon through Syria.
Iran’s ability to provide arms to Shiite militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen has also been severely constrained, Petraeus said. In Iraq, the Shiite militias, who are part of the country’s security forces, may not want to “risk their lives to carry out something for a regime that is very seriously wounded,” he said.
Similarly, Cook said that any proxy groups acting alone in an attack on U.S. troops or bases could end up hurting Iran in the long run.
“Iran, assuming that they can’t control all these proxy groups, will have a choice to make whether they claim responsibility and look like they’re in control or they don’t and they feel the wrath of the U.S.,” he said. “That’s gonna be a real perception problem.”
Originally published in Task and Purpose.