Once farmland, it’s now controlled by an Iran-linked militia
BAGHDAD — Just south of Baghdad, the urban sprawl gives way to glimpses of green, with lush date palm groves bordering the Euphrates River. But few risk spending much time there. Not even the Iraqi military or government officials venture without permission.
A farmer, Ali Hussein, who once lived on that land, said, “We do not dare to even ask if we can go there.”
That’s because this stretch of Iraq — more than twice the size of San Francisco — is controlled by an Iraqi militia linked to Iran and designated a terrorist group by the United States. Militia members man checkpoints around the borders. And though sovereign Iraqi territory, the area, known as Jurf al-Nasr, functions as a “forward operating base for Iran,” according to one of the dozens of Western and Iraqi intelligence and military officers, diplomats, and others interviewed for this article.
The militia that controls the land, Khataib Hezbollah, uses it to assemble drones and retrofit rockets, with parts largely obtained from Iran, senior military and intelligence officials say. Those weapons have then been distributed for use in attacks by Iranian-linked groups across the Middle East — putting former farmland at the center of fears that the war in the Gaza Strip could grow into a wider conflict.
Such attacks have increased sharply over the past two months as Khataib Hezbollah and other groups linked to Iran have rallied to show their solidarity with Palestinians. Since Oct. 17, Iraqi groups have launched at least 82 drone and rocket attacks against US military installations just in Iraq and Syria, wounding 66 service members, according to the Pentagon.
Many of the attacks used weapons from Jurf al-Nasr, regional intelligence sources say.
Responding to the recent attacks, the US bombed two locations in Jurf al-Nasr, killing at least eight members of Khataib Hezbollah, according to the Pentagon and the militant group.
“They have rockets, mortars, missiles,” said General Kenneth McKenzie Jr., who retired last year as the head of US Central Command, which oversees US forces in the region. He said he did not know the exact ranges that the weapons might have now but that in 2020 — when he oversaw the last US effort to reduce the arsenal — some could reach targets in Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
For decades, Iran’s Middle East strategy has been to meld informal military power through local armed groups with political influence over government policies. Starting in the 1980s, it helped finance and arm Lebanese Hezbollah. Then it gave expansive military and political support to the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, military aid to the Houthis in northern Yemen, and support for the Al Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain.
But Iraq is Iran’s most natural regional partner, even if the countries once fought a long war against each other.
They share a 1,000-mile border, many families have relatives on both sides, and economic ties are strong. Also, Iraq, like Iran, has a Shiite Muslim majority, and it is home to some of the most important Shiite shrines.
After Iraq’s 2021 elections, Iranian-linked political parties, most with militia wings, claimed for the first time a large enough share of parliamentary seats to form a governing coalition and select the prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. This tied him politically to parties whose priorities are often shaped as much by Iran’s concerns as by Iraq’s.
For the United States, Iran’s political gains in Iraq, and the commandeering of Jurf al-Nasr by a militia allied with Iran, are a startling reversal of fortune.
Over the past 20 years, Republican and Democrat governments alike invested $1.79 trillion in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, battling Al Qaeda, and joining Iraq’s fight against the Islamic State group, all with the aim of creating stability and a reliable ally.
Instead, Iran, more than ever, is “the predominant influence in Iraq today,” said Hoshyar Zebari, who was Iraq’s foreign minister for 10 years and finance minister until 2016.
Iran’s interests, he said, affect “every sector of the security forces, the military, the provincial governors.”
Since the rise of Iran’s theocratic regime in 1979, it has wanted to force the US military out of the Middle East. Sajad Jiyad, an Iraq analyst and nonresident fellow at Century International, a research group, said that when President George W. Bush described Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil,” it sounded as if Washington was saying, “You’re next; Iraq, Iran, North Korea, we’re coming for you.”
So Iran focused on creating, training, and arming Iraqi Shiite militias to attack US forces on Iraqi soil. The US military said that between 2003 and 2011, Iranian-backed groups were responsible for the deaths of 603 US troops in Iraq.
One of those groups was Khataib Hezbollah, which from its inception was closely tied to Iran’s Quds Force, the wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard responsible for proxy militias around the region.
In 2011, the US military withdrew from Iraq, and in 2014, the Islamic State group invaded. The Iraqi army collapsed, and the government in Baghdad asked its friends — Iran and the United States — for help.
Iran responded quickly, sending trainers and weapons and helping recruit a volunteer Iraqi force — eventually known as Popular Mobilization Units — to fight the Islamic State invaders alongside Iranian-linked militias, including Khataib Hezbollah. The United States sent help, too, but several weeks later.
Part of the battle took place in Jurf al-Nasr, then known as Jurf al-Sakhar, an Islamic State group staging ground for attacks on Shiite villages and on pilgrims, millions of them Iranians, who traveled through the area on their way to Shiite shrines in Karbala and Najaf in Iraq.
During the fighting, Khataib Hezbollah emptied every Sunni village, telling people they would be able to return once the Islamic State group was gone. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented hundreds of disappearances, primarily of Sunni men, in the area; the 2019 US State Department’s Human Rights Report said 1,700 people were held in a secret prison there.
When the fighting was done, Jurf al-Nasr remained under the control of Khataib Hezbollah.
In an interview in September, al-Sudani did not respond to questions about military activities in Jurf al-Nasr. In October, he publicly condemned the attacks on US bases and camps, but his words have had little effect. In the September interview, though, he said he hoped that families displaced from Jurf alNasr could go back home.
For those families, returning seems a receding dream.
“We have not heard . . . about what happened to our lands, to our homes,” said Abu Arkan, 70, who was displaced in 2014. He waved a reporter away. “I do not want to talk about this subject any longer because it depresses me,” he said. “Nobody comes to us to bring us back. No one compensates us for what we have lost. We are like ghosts.”