A September 30, 2026, Middle East Forum Observer analysis argues that the Haj Hamed network’s growing importance suggests Iran is losing confidence in its traditional militia partners and shifting critical operations to smaller, compartmentalized cells reporting directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. While plausible, this conclusion obscures a more strategically coherent Iranian posture: Iran is not abandoning its traditional militias but, rather, insulating them from exposure to maximum pressure through deliberate compartmentalization.
Strategically, Iran spent two decades building its aligned armed network into genuine power centers within Iraq’s political, security, and economic decision-making apparatus, giving Tehran leverage over the Iraqi state. These factions and militias are the guarantors of Iran’s actual control—not merely influence—over Iraqi state functions; losing them would forfeit Iran’s most significant asset and shift regional power balance toward the United States and its allies.
Strategically, Iran spent two decades building its aligned armed network into genuine power centers within Iraq’s political, security, and economic decision-making apparatus.
The Trump administration’s warning that the United States would suspend monthly dollar transfers to Iraq if Iran-aligned armed groups did not disarm—combined with May 2026 sanctions on these militias—demonstrates the pressure these militias now face. This environment demands that the traditional proxies temporarily decouple those operations involving advanced weapons systems and cross-border attacks that could trigger escalatory U.S. and regional military responses from the main militia structures. If the U.S. military neutralized a Haj Hamid-linked cell, militia leadership can deny responsibility, and the Iraqi government can credibly assert it, minimizing the exposure of core militia leadership and infrastructure to retaliation.
The “Shadow Groups” defensive strategy is not a new tactic. In the years following the first Trump administration’s focus on Iran and its proxies—particularly after Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis’ assassination in January 2020—Iraqi militia factions themselves pioneered this strategy through the creation of front groups. Ashab Al-Kahf group—which emerged in August 2019 but increased dramatically in activity after Soleimani’s death—provides one example. Despite Ashab Al-Kahf’s denials of affiliation with Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, evidence indicates organizational control and operational subordination.
Following the Jadriya neighborhood strike and Israel’s Pager Operation against Hezbollah, and the demonstration that U.S. and Israeli intelligence could penetrate Iran’s senior militia circles, Iraqi faction leaders recognized the vulnerability of centralized command structures and deliberately fragmented their footprint. Thus, the Haj Hamed network was not a sign that leadership had lost confidence in their local command of the militias, but rather, a sign that leadership understood U.S. determination to dismantle militia structures and chose to protect the main body of those structures by pushing operational liability toward subsidiary entities that could be disavowed or abandoned without destroying the core organization.
The Haj Hamed network was not a sign that leadership had lost confidence in their local command of the militias, but rather, a sign that leadership understood U.S. determination to dismantle militia structures.
This is also a recognition that established leaders are hard to replace. Hassan Nasrallah’s replacement, Naim Qassem, is a shadow of the Hezbollah leader he replaced. Likewise, Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Qaani, lacks his charisma and influence.
The September 2026 Saudi East-West pipeline attack is not a novel operation indicating a shift in Iranian doctrine; it is a traditional operation conducted through alternative channels. The traditional militias are still fielding the personnel; they are simply doing so through compartmentalized, deniable channels that allow plausible deniability
The fact that later Iraqi security officials are attributing the operation to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked Haj Hamed—following the Saudi news channel interview with retired Brigadier General Ayad al-Tufan—may itself be a deliberate strategy to deflect blame away from the traditional militias.
The Iraqi government’s subsequent behavior supports this. Rather than unilaterally investigating and condemning Iranian interference, it launched a joint investigation with Iran itself—a response that would be nonsensical if the government viewed these operations as unilateral Iranian actions threatening Iraqi sovereignty. Joint investigations between a supposedly aggrieved state and the accused perpetrator suggest something closer to collaborative management of the narrative than genuine adversarial accountability.
