Qais al-Khazali—The PMU Militia Leader Challenging the U.S. in Iraq
Qais al-Khazali—The PMU Militia Leader Challenging the U.S. in Iraq
On December 6, the U.S. State Department announced sanctions on three Iraqi militia leaders, accusing them of killing peaceful protesters. The most prominent name among those was Sheikh Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (The League of the Righteous—AAH) Shia militia (U.S. Department of the Treasury, December 6).
The power of al-Khazali and his AAH has grown significantly in recent years. Al-Khazali enjoys steady and continuous support from Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Al-Khazali is the military and political leader of AAH, which is one of the most powerful Shia militias in Iraq. It currently operates under the official umbrella organization, the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). AAH fighters have been deployed across Iraq since the military operations against the extremist Sunni group Islamic State (IS) began. The group has since consolidated its positions since the end of major operations against IS. The political arm of AAH now has 15 seats in parliament and two cabinet positions in the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi.
When the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and deputy leader of the PMU Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were killed in a U.S. airstrike just outside the Baghdad International Airport on January 3, there were numerous calls for and anticipation of Iranian retaliation. Eventually, Iran launched missile attacks on two military bases on January 8. No U.S. personnel were killed and Iran signaled that it would not seek further escalation. (Al-Arabiya, January 8).
Al-Khazali pledged that the Iraqi retaliation, especially for the killing of al-Muhandis, was yet to come. (Sky News Arabia, January 8).
Internal Splits Within the Insurgency
AAH was founded when al-Khazali split from the Mahdi Army, the militia that was formed and led by the influential Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, to fight the U.S.-led coalition forces after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Al-Khazali was a member of the movement that Moqtada’s father, Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr founded in the 1990s. The movement depended on a network of young Shia clerics, of which al-Khazali was one of the most active (See Militant Leadership Monitor, January 29, 2010).
After the U.S.-led invasion, Moqtada revived his father’s movement and al-Khazali joined him. Al-Khazali was a field commander in the Mahdi army and spokesman for al-Sadr. After the failure of al-Sadr’s second anti-coalition uprising in the summer of 2004, al-Sadr accepted a ceasefire and tended to avoid direct confrontation with the coalition forces in the following months and years. Al-Khazali and a group of al-Sadr’s close aides did not approve the new policy, and with the support of Iran, they split and formed the AAH (See Militant Leadership Monitor, January 29, 2010).
As soon as al-Khazali founded his own militia, the Shia insurgency in Iraq acquired new momentum and new, more effective tactics. The name of the group was not clear in the beginning of their insurgency, therefore the U.S. military called them the “Special Groups” and defined them as insurgent groups that were operating outside the authority of al-Sadr with direct backing from Iran. Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq was also one of the early splinter Shia groups that were classified as a Special Group.
One of al-Khazali’s senior aides explained that the use of improvised explosive devices that were made in Iran became a signature tactic of the Shia militias’ operations against the U.S.-led coalition forces.
Another tactic that was brought in by al-Khazali and his men was the level of sophisticated training and capabilities they showed in attacks launched by commandos on sensitive targets. In one of the rare and most daring of their operations, al-Khazali sent his men to Karbala where they launched a surprise attack on U.S. forces that were inside the Karbala provincial compound. The attacking group overpowered the U.S. soldiers, kidnapping five of them who they later killed (See Militant Leadership Monitor, January 29, 2010).
On March 2007 al-Khazali was arrested alongside his brother Laith, who was also sanctioned by the State Department in December 2019, for the attack on Karbala. With them was another man, Ali Musa Daqdooq, a Lebanese Hezbollah leader. Al-Khazali managed to keep control of his group even while he was imprisoned. Months after his arrest, his militia launched another commando attack against the Iraqi ministry of finance and kidnapped five British citizens, including the IT consultant Peter Moore and his four bodyguards. Al-Khazali eventually regained his freedom in a prisoner swap deal in exchange for freeing Moore. However, all of the bodyguards were killed in custody before the deal was reached (Alrai Media, January 6, 2010).
After the U.S. military withdrawal, al-Khazali was officially accepted within Iraqi politics, despite that fact that he did not give up his arms, and he did not dissolve his militia. Al-Khazali’s inclusion in the political scene was part of the strategy of the then-Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki, who had become a staunch enemy of al-Sadr. Al-Maliki worked persistently to weaken al-Sadr’s movement by supporting those who had split from his organization. Al-Maliki introduced the policy under the notion of national reconciliation, but the move was heavily criticized for two reasons. First, because Sunni armed groups were not given the same treatment and second, those Shia militias neither denounced violence nor did they dissolve their armed wings.
In later years, al-Maliki explained that he believed that Iraq should form a semi-official militia with the support of the state to guard Iraq and its Shia community (Elaph, November 13, 2016).
From Syria to Islamic State
After he was released from prison and as U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011, circumstances became ideal for al-Khazali to further solidify his group’s influence. When the Syrian revolution against the rule of the secular but Alawite Shia dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad broke out, Iraqi Shias were worried about the possible Sunni nature of the rebels. As the revolution turned into a military conflict, Iran deployed Shia militias from Iraq, and the AAH was one of the first to go. (Middle-East-Online, March 23, 2014).
Years of operating freely with significant backing from the IRGC and the Maliki government meant that when Islamic State launched its blitzkrieg campaign and overran most of the Sunni populated provinces of Iraq in June 2014, al-Khazali and his AAH were ready to mobilize. AAH men were publicly deployed in and around Baghdad even before the famous fatwa that was issued by the senior Iraqi Shia cleric Ayatollah Sistani called for volunteers to carry arms to fight IS. When the fatwa was issued, the AAH was in a good position to absorb a widening pool of recruits (Raialyoum, November 19, 2014).
In the following months and years, al-Khazali significantly expanded his activities. In the propaganda of the AAH, he is portrayed as a bold field commander who joins his men in the battlefield, wearing military fatigues and firing automatic rifles against the enemy. But AAH has been accused of killing civilians and committing human rights violations in the areas they operate in. One of these incidents took place in the town of Jurf al-Sakhar, which is south of Baghdad. The entire Sunni population of the town was displaced during AAH operations there during the early weeks of the war against IS, and they have still been unable to return to their homes. The militia was also accused of killing civilians in Jurf al-Sakhar and elsewhere (Alittihad.ae, August 19, 2019).
Al-Khazali was filmed with his men in the burial site of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Tikrit. The whole building that included Hussein’s grave was demolished. The Shia militias decided to use the fog of the war against IS to settle all of their disputes against enemies from the past and present (Arab48, November 13, 2018).
The Politics of Resistance
Al-Khazali’s military strategy emphasized a unique role for his group, to be done in full coordination with the other Shia militias of the PMU. He frequently appears in public side by side with Hadi al-Amiri, the leader of Badr, which is the only PMU militia that is larger than AAH, to show unity and solidarity (Alghadeer, January 30, 2016).
The same strategy was adopted in politics. Al-Khazali’s political arm (Sadiqoon) went into coalition with al-Fatah, which is led by Hadi al-Amiri and includes all the major PMU militias except al-Sadr’s. Al-Fatah came second in elections after al-Sadr’s party, with al-Khazali’s Sadiqoon winning 15 seats. When the government of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi was formed, al-Khazali was able to appoint two cabinet members (Nasnews, October 11, 2018).
Shia-led governments in Iraq have, since the 2003 invasion, justified including militia leaders in their governing coalitions by claiming that those militia groups had abandoned their arms. This notion has been emphasized further as the PMU was formed as an official organization operating under the command of the government. In fact, however, almost all those militias kept their weapons and maintained their independent decision-making processes and chains of command, despite taking official positions within the government and participating in political events, like elections. Al-Khazali, probably more than any other Shia leader, never shied away from stating that his group, and other Shia groups, are actually “Resistance” groups that hold two key features—one that abides by Iraqi laws and restriction as political organizations, and another that is committed to the cause of Resistance. This includes fighting alongside the Assad regime in Syria and aspiring to play a role in the Arab-Muslim conflict with Israel (Buratha News, December 28, 2019).
Gaining similar military capabilities as Lebanese Hezbollah was always an aspiration of the Iraqi Shia militias. No single Iraqi Shia militia has ever been able to fully emulate Lebanese Hezbollah’s success, but the military capacities of al-Khazali’s group have come closer than any other group. AAH has always maintained distinct capabilities, like being able to conduct commando operations against both military targets and civilian ones, in order to kidnap individuals. Yet with all of al-Khazali’s progress in pursuing both Shia jihadist and political goals, he has failed to dominate the scene the way Lebanese Hezbollah does in Lebanon. Nevertheless he seems to have adapted to the Iraqi situation, which is different than Lebanon, where the militias are older and larger than AAH. In recent years, the media activities of the group have been effective. Al-Khazali owns al-Ahad TV station, which is more influential than the media arms of other militias. In comparison, the larger Moqtada al-Sadr movement never succeeded in launching its own TV network, although it tried a few times.
Al-Khazali has regularly maintained a presence on TV screens, giving interviews to Iraq and non-Iraqi media outlets, since his days as a spokesman for Moqtada al-Sadr. While the Iraqi government was slow in releasing statements in response to the recent mass protests that began in October 2019, al-Khazali was quick to give an interview to the pan-Arab al-Jazeera network. The impact of the interview was clear, and although it did not stop the protests, it did explain the argument of Iran and its allies who view the protests as part of a conspiracy. (YouTube, December 19, 2019).
The Rivalry With al-Sadr
The tension between al-Khazali and Moqtada al-Sadr has cooled down in recent years, as both gained greater political power and it was in their mutual interest to cooperate or at least not to fight. However, the rivalry between the two men and their movements remain a quite important aspect of Shia politics in Iraq. One of the aspects of the multi-layered conflict is the power struggle between al-Sadr’s group from one side and al-Khazali’s on the other. Al-Sadr has pursued a strategy aimed at controlling the protests and using its momentum to weaken his rivals while al-Khazali, alongside all of the other militias, have been vehemently opposed to the protests. In a high profile incident in the city of Amara in southern Iraq, protesters believed to be followers of al-Sadr attacked the local branch of AAH and lynched al-Khazali’s representative in the province (The New Khalij, October 25, 2019).
The dynamics in recent weeks showed that al-Sadr moved closer towards Iran’s vision, which lowered the possibilities of further escalation with al-Khazali, but the rivalry between the two will remain a main feature of the Shia militia politics in Iraq.
More than 15 years since he split from al-Sadr, al-Khazali’s movement is still significantly smaller than the one he left. Yet it is amazing how steady and consistent his rise in Iraqi politics has been.
When news broke on the killing of Soleimani and al-Muhandis, rumors circulated that al-Khazali was arrested by U.S. special forces. The rumors were obviously not correct, but it shows the high levels of public resentment against al-Khazali, with enemies like the United States, Moqtada al-Sadr, and angry protesters across the Shia areas in Iraq. Al-Khazali is likely to experience hard times in the future.
The October Uprising
As al-Khazali was just starting to establish his movement as a main player in the Iraqi government, the anti-corruption protest movement broke out. The protests caught al-Khazali by surprise, and accusations of being responsible for the killing of protesters in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq were quickly directed towards him and his men in the AAH. Al-Khazali’s organization was at the center of the protester’s anger, as it was considered a part of the corrupt political elite. The puritanical status that al-Khazali hoped that he and his group would stand for in the eyes of its Shia community never materialized.
In the face of the difficult situation the protests represented, al-Khazali resorted to an approach that has been central to the Iranian discourse in the Middle East. He started emphasizing and prioritizing his commitment to confront Israel. Although most of that commitment is merely rhetorical, it is still consistent in the discourse of Iran and its allies. But al-Khazali in the past has gone further than any other Iraqi militia leader in his efforts to confront Israel. In 2017, he stirred up a controversy in Lebanon when, during one of his visits to the country, he went to the Israeli-Lebanese border area, which is controlled by Hezbollah, and was filmed using a Hezbollah radio to communicate messages about the situation on the ground. There, he pledged his support for and involvement in the anti-Israeli activities of Lebanese and Palestinian groups (Arabi21, December 9, 2017).
Al-Khazali accused the protests of being orchestrated by a conspiracy involving Israel, the UAE, and Iraqi parties, with the United States playing an indirect role. He even put it in a broader regional context, claiming that the protests were part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan. Al-Khazali never admitted to any role in the series of crackdowns on the protesters, but he maintained his criticism and calls to end the demonstrations (Asrar Media, October 1, 2019; YouTube, October 1, 2019).
Iranian support for al-Khazali and other Shia militias will likely continue in the post-Soleimani era. Al-Khazali has not yet showed any sign that he would be true to his threat to avenge the killing of al-Muhandis and Soleimani. When the U.S. embassy in Baghdad was targeted by Katyusha rockets on January 8, al-Khazali was quick to deny responsibility and suggested another conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the attack (Baghdad Today, January 9). However, al-Khazali will always be committed to the anti-U.S. cause. With the accumulated experience gained in years of fighting in the Iraqi insurgency, Syrian civil war, and anti-IS campaign, he remains capable of launching attacks in different styles against his enemies. His next moves will most likely be made in full coordination with the other Iranian-backed Shia militias and as part of a larger Iranian strategy, and they will come in al-Khazali’s own distinct style.
