![]() The US has viewed Iraq’s Shi’a militias as a problematic phenomenon that emerged after 2003 and only worsened after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) invasion of 2014, as spoilers to the Iraq’s state building process and a challenge to American efforts to rebuild the Iraqi military. ![]() Trump’s assassination of Soleimani is situated within a consistent American double standard regarding Shi’a militias after 2003 and their post-2014 PMU incarnation, as Washington considers the militias of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) as allies and thus legitimate, while the PMU are deemed either ‘proxies’ and ‘agents’ of the Islamic Republic of Iran, even though both essentially emerged as NSAAs that have been incorporated into quasi-official status within the Iraqi state. ![]() Those events exemplify the PMU’s interactions with this journal’s themed issues of Middle Eastern NSAAs interweaving across notions of sovereignty, geopolitics and territoriality, as well as symptomatic of the constrained and contested nature of sovereignty, in this case Iraqi. The assassination, part of the escalating tensions between a superpower and regional power over the latter’s nuclear program, also killed Soleimani’s Iraqi protégé, Muhandis, whose career began as a leader of an Iraqi NSAA, the Hizballah Brigades ( katai’b hizballah), yet rose to become an official with the Iraqi state. Soleimani had established or supported an array of non-state armed actors (NSAA) in the region, ranging from Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The new decade of 2020 in the Middle East was augured in with an American drone strike outside of Baghdad’s international airport that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s expeditionary Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, as well as Abu Mahdi Muhandis, an Iraqi Popular Mobilization Unit (PMU) leader.
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