Iraq’s oil sales fueled much of its $94 billion in revenues in 2025, yet little trickles down to the millions who eke out in a precarious informal sector, with little protection and meager pay. The country is yet to fully emerge from the wreckage of its own wars, and the war the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran in February has already spilled over into Iraq. Several Shia armed groups that are allied with Tehran launched rocket and drone strikes targeting the U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad, NATO troops stationed across the country, against Iranian-Kurdish militias sheltering in Kurdistan, and in the Gulf Arab countries to the south.
Several commanders of Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Shia militia, were assassinated in the capital in unidentified airstrikes on residential areas. Yet not all the Shia militias have been eager to join the fight. Many Shia elites, including paramilitary leaders, showed no desire to abandon their second lives of comfort and state largesse, even as Iran was being bombed during the 12-Day War in June 2025.
Crossing an overpass into my western suburb of Baghdad, militia flags stamped with Ali Khamenei’s face fluttered in the wind. The murdered supreme leader has replaced Saddam Hussein, his image pasted across the city's walls as though he were one of its Abbasid rulers. Some of those who dared to express even a whisper of relief at his death were vilified online and arrested. Silence is a refuge. The more militants are killed, the deeper the city drowns in militant Shia iconography.
“Sacred things,” Bataille wrote, “are constituted by an operation of loss.” So long as American and Israeli leaders treat war as a righteous crusade and take pleasure in breaking the rules of modern warfare, and so long as the militias such as Kataib Sayid al-Shuhada and Harakat al-Nujaba frame the conflict as “an existential war” for their very survival, war becomes a performance without end.
The long shadow of the occupation
Twenty-three years after George Bush and Tony Blair resolved that Iraqis were to be emancipated, the country remains captive to a masquerade of power. The U.S. insists that the Shia political class it has empowered by invading Iraq in 2003 severs its dependence on Tehran and disarms its armed factions. But the latter had grown into the sinew of the Iraqi state itself, dismantling them was never something the Shia elite could readily concede.
Washington maintains a chokehold on Baghdad’s oil revenue, which is deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. In recent weeks, it withheld Iraq’s cash transfers as a disciplinary stratagem to force its implausible vision for a future Iraqi government unbeholden to Tehran. But if al-Zaidi lends the state an independent face, the CF will still be backstage, pulling the strings.
Some Shia figures made overtures to Washington and distanced themselves from the attacks, but other militias like Kataib Hezbollah are unflinching, promising to fight on. The porous Iraqi state and its security apparatus have long accommodated these paramilitaries and their political representatives within a carefully exclusionary arrangement—one that persists despite the present intra-Shia tensions stirred by the wider regional war.
A construction boom presided over by outgoing premier Mohammed al-Sudani was heralded by outside observers as the dawn of a prosperous era, an illusion of progress that Baghdad’s skyline appeared to confirm. But as drones crashed into the Tigris and funeral processions wound their way along freshly gentrified avenues, Iraq’s state of latent emergency has given way to the emergency that this unconvincing simulacrum of Mesopotamian renaissance had long concealed.
Ghosts of Iraqi Freedom
Having been “shocked and awed” in 2003, Iraqis are being hurled into yet another war that is failing spectacularly in its aim of maintaining Washington’s global dominance. As if the calamity of war and its afterlives weren’t enough, Iraqis now contend with the ineptitude and cynicism of rulers they never chose—the protégés of a discredited generation that filled the ranks of the sectarian order Paul Bremer and his local collaborators helped construct in 2003.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these same people would cheer and ululate at the sight of A-10 Warthogs massacring their kin from the PMF—no matter how deep the resentment that entire generations, including the Shia, carry toward the Iranian regime that waged war on and plundered their country. Being a member of a paramilitary group does not legitimize his murder, and soldiers and Ministry of Interior officers alike are now being killed in indiscriminate American and Israeli airstrikes. Not every paramilitary fighter is stained by the corruption of the Shia elite or implicated in spilling innocent blood in recent years.
By nightfall, the warplanes return. I scroll through Telegram channels, anticipating the sound of the next explosion near the airport—where the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, a U.S. facility, and a neighboring military camp, have become recurring targets. Outside my window, the darkened horizon is swallowed by the shadows of nearby concrete towers—sentinels of a new metropolis rising over the Baghdad I watched being put to death after 2003.
If silence was ever a choice, those who already self-censor will soon be forced into the shadows. If even the intelligence services are coming under attack in Iraq, and journalists with powerful passports are abducted in broad daylight, what should local critics expect?
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