Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), known in Arabic as Al-Hashd al-Shaabi, holds a contradictory position in the Middle East's security landscape: it is a legally recognized part of Iraq's own security apparatus, yet it also serves as a major channel for Iranian influence inside the country. The organization's evolution — from a loose collection of militia groups to a formal state institution — captures the central tension in Iraq's post-2014 governance.

The PMF was created by bringing pre-existing armed groups under a single umbrella, a process the Carnegie Endowment examined in detail as early as 2017. Rather than building a new force from scratch, the Iraqi state absorbed militias that had already formed on their own. Many of these groups brought their own ideologies, funding networks, and foreign ties with them. The result was a paramilitary network that carried its old loyalties directly into the formal state structure.

According to Reuters, the PMF is an Iraqi state-sponsored paramilitary network. The Institute for the Study of War more precisely calls it an Iraqi state security service, while the Foreign Policy Research Institute describes it as a legally recognized component of Iraq's security apparatus. These labels matter because they determine the PMF's access to government budgets, its command relationship with the regular armed forces, and the rules that hold it accountable.

The PMF played a key role in defeating the Islamic State (ISIS), a contribution documented by the Brookings Institution. That battlefield record is the political foundation for the organization's continued legitimacy in Iraq. It earned the PMF a degree of public support and institutional standing that would have been hard to achieve through ordinary politics alone.

Iran's influence within the PMF, however, makes it difficult to read the organization as a straightforward national security force. The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Iran has infiltrated the PMF and uses it to wield significant influence in Iraq. The organization is accused of serving as a tool through which Tehran seeks to dominate Iraqi affairs. These are not minor allegations; they go to the heart of whose interests the PMF ultimately serves when Iraqi and Iranian priorities diverge.

The militarization of Iran-aligned factions within the PMF extends well beyond small arms. Iran-backed militias operating inside the PMF have acquired short-range ballistic missiles from Iran, according to the Missile Threat project at CSIS. The presence of such weaponry within a force that is nominally under state control raises questions about who actually commands these units — questions the legal framework does not resolve.

The PMF's internal composition is fragmented. The Ali El-Akber Brigade, for example, is a unit within the PMF affiliated with the Imam Hussein Shrine, showing how religious institutions are woven into the force's organizational DNA. Individual brigades maintain distinct identities, sponsors, and in some cases independent operational logic, making unified command an ongoing challenge.

The organization also reaches into Iraqi civilian institutions. Iraq's state-owned Oil Exploration Company held an educational seminar about voluntary donations to support the families of martyrs and wounded of the Popular Mobilization Forces, indicating how deeply PMF-related welfare frameworks are integrated into the activities of state-owned enterprises.

The PMF's role has also pulled Iraq into diplomatic friction beyond its borders. In 2025, Iraq's Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Lebanese Ambassador in connection with the Popular Mobilization Forces. The specifics of that diplomatic encounter remain limited, but the fact that a PMF-related issue prompted a formal diplomatic protest against another country's envoy signals the organization's capacity to create regional complications.

Brookings identified growing challenges to the PMF's legitimacy, structure, and influence as early as 2022, and those pressures have not eased. The organization sits at the intersection of competing demands: Iraq's need for a coherent security apparatus, Iran's interest in maintaining leverage, and the aspirations of individual militia factions that may resist full integration into the state. The legal formalization of the PMF answered one set of questions while leaving others open — particularly around accountability for actions by individual factions that fall outside the state's operational directives.

The broader context here is that the PMF embodies a structural dilemma no single Iraqi government has resolved. The force is simultaneously a state institution and a coalition of factions with varying degrees of loyalty to the Iraqi state versus Tehran. Its battlefield contributions against ISIS are indisputable; its utility as an instrument of foreign influence is equally well documented. Iraqi policymakers face the task of maintaining security cohesion without either provoking factional defection or ceding further sovereign authority to external actors. The 2025 diplomatic incident with Lebanon suggests that the PMF's reach now generates complications extending well beyond Iraq's borders, and the acquisition of ballistic missile capability by Iran-aligned elements within the force adds a dimension of strategic concern that the legal framework alone cannot contain.