A Visit to the Badr Organization’s Najaf Branch

Iraq is gearing up for parliamentary elections next month, and among the parties that primarily gain votes from the country’s Twelver Shia community, the Badr Organisation is undoubtedly one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent of the groups that are broadly in favour of a strategic alliance with Iran. During a recent trip to the city of Najaf in southern Iraq, I decided to visit the Badr Organisation’s office to get a sense of the group’s current outlook on Iraq and the wider region. To be sure, this visit was not conducted as a formal journalistic interview with the office, but was more of an informal discussion in which I also shared some of my observations on the current situation in Syria, particularly with regards to the status of the Twelver Shia minority there (a topic that is of obvious interest to them).

In general, the Badr Organisation seems very satisfied with the current status quo in Iraq in which the government has been led by the ‘Coordination Framework’ of Shia parties with the notable exception of the Sadrists, whose own poor political manoeuvring in 2022 brought about their exclusion from government. Indeed, when I inquired about whether Iraq was facing any major problems or challenges, the officials I talked to denied that there were any, and instead painted a rather rosy picture of Iraq moving forward with development and a security situation that is arguably the best it has been since 2003. After all, despite repeated concerns raised over the years about the prospect of an Islamic State ‘resurgence,’ the group’s insurgent activities remain at minimal levels. Unaddressed in this picture are issues like the over-dependence of the government on oil revenues, the rentier state and environmental challenges.

Photo: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Unlike some of the other pro-Iranian factions in the country like Kata’ib Hezbollah, which has repeatedly called for the expulsion of the “American occupation forces” from Iraq and participated in the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” coalition of factions that targeted U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria in 2023-2024, the Badr officials I spoke to do not see the current American military presence in Iraq as an ‘occupation’ at all. Rather, the comparison was made with the presence of U.S. bases in Gulf Arab countries, and they acknowledged that the U.S. presence in fact brings Iraq some benefits. This corroborates a point made by Douglas Ollivant about how many in the Iraqi political class see the U.S. presence as a useful tool for international legitimacy. Further, for Badr, the U.S. presence is not so problematic considering that U.S. forces are operating in relatively remote locations. By comparison, they noted that the U.S. would not dare to place its forces in Shia towns like Najaf or Basra, in contrast with the days of the Iraq war and subsequent U.S. occupation (2003-2011).

A key interest for Badr in terms of maintaining the favourable status quo is the preservation of the Hashd Sha‘abi (“Popular Mobilisation”) forces as a state-supported institution. Per the estimate of one of the Badr officials I spoke to, around half of the forces on the registers of the Hashd Sha‘abi Commission (an institution formally affiliated with the prime minister’s force) are Badr’s forces. Badr indeed has several brigades registered on the commission, and notably leads the Hashd’s operations command in Ninawa province (previously the centre of the Islamic State’s territorial ‘caliphate’ in Iraq). It should be noted however that Badr is not seeking exclusive control of the Hashd, but rather accepts the Hashd as an institution in which multiple “factions” (Arabic: fasa’il) play a part.

Photo: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Of course, for Badr and other groups that have brigades on the commission, there is an obvious material interest in preserving the institution: fighters on the registers get salaries with state financing, and thus the institution contributes to the patronage networks of Badr and other factions. But Badr also believes the Hashd in general is vital for the maintenance of Iraq’s security, and I do think that belief is genuine, reinforced also by the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria.

Photo: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

During our discussion, I shared some of my own observations on the Iranian and Hezbollah-backed ‘Local Defence Forces’ project of ‘auxiliary forces’ for the Syrian army and how this project ultimately failed and collapsed. In the view of the Badr officials, one problem was that the Assad regime and its allies failed to build up an institution like the Hashd: that is, rather than being auxiliary forces whose personnel were motivated in significant part by salaries and a desire to avoid harsh terms of compulsory military service, these forces needed to be an “ideological” Hashd. By this, they meant auxiliary forces with sincere and strong belief in a cause worth fighting for.

It may be tempting to dismiss this notion as mere rhetorical bluster, but I think there is some truth to it. While many of the constituent groups of the Hashd Sha‘abi existed prior to the Islamic State lightning offensive that seized much of northwestern Iraq in summer 2014, the Hashd Sha‘abi as a institution draws ideological and religious legitimacy from Ayatollah Sistani’s fatwa for ‘collective jihad’ in defence of Iraq, and there is no doubt that it served as a real motive for many Shia to fight to retake Sunni-populated areas that were held by Islamic State, despite the supposition of some that Shia fighters or groups would not be interested in retaking those areas. In other words, given the importance of clerical authority among Iraq’s Shia, the Hashd has a religious legitimacy that the ‘Local Defence Forces’ in Syria generally did not have, with the exception of some Syrian Twelver Shia- ultimately a small minority- who might have believed in the necessity of fighting on behalf of the regime partly for the purpose of defending Shia shrines in Syria.

And what of the current government in Syria? For the Badr officials, their view was unequivocal: that government is a “terrorist” government in view of the background of Ahmad al-Sharaa and the armed groups that brought him to power- a view not dissimilar from the Israeli government’s overall hostility to that government. However, unlike the Israeli incursions and interventions in southern Syria, there is no desire on the part of Badr to see Hashd intervention into Syrian territory as some kind of pre-emptive measure. Rather, the position is a defensive posture of “readiness” to retaliate against any attack or threat emanating from Syrian territory.

Published originally on October 6, 2025.