Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/14/26 Elfidel Ibrahim on How the Iran War is Impacting Iraq

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

Scott interviews writer and analyst Elfidel Ibrahim about the current state of Iraqi politics. The US-backed Iraqi government sits in a strange, awkward and concerningly unstable place between Washington and Tehran amid this ongoing war. Ibrahim breaks it all down and also provides some clarity on the recent escalation between the Houthis and Saudis. Discussed on the show: “As Baghdad tries to please Trump, Iran tells Iraqi militias not to disarm” (Responsible Statecraft) Elfadil Ibrahim is a writer and analyst covering the politics of the Middle East and Africa, with a special focus on Sudan. His work has been featured in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The New Arab, Open Democracy and other outlets. Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, sir, it's the Scott Horton show brought to you by expat money. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest reporting to the American people what's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show, libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries in five years.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Elphidil Ibrahim. He wrote this important thing that it won't let me screen share and show you, but it's at ResponsibleStatecraft.org. It's called As Baghdad tries to please Trump, Iran tells Iraqi militias not to disarm.

Welcome to show. How are you? Thanks, Scott. I'm doing good. Doing good. How are you? I'm doing great. Really appreciate you joining me on the show today here. Especially when I'm trying to get my technical act together. No fault to my own that everything is wrong.

That's usual. But the no fault part, not the everything wrong part. Anyway, so what an interesting article. America versus Iran, and by America, I mean American Israel, versus Iran with the poor Iraqi stuck in the middle as always. and so now they have a new prime minister, and instead of coming from the Dawah Party or the Supreme Islamic Council,

he's a businessman and he's the guy that Donald Trump wanted rather than the guy that the Ayatollah wanted. Is that right? Or I guess the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah's gone. Yeah, largely correct, although it would be specifically the coordination framework, which is the big coalition containing a lot of parties that are pro-Iran,

that are Iran aligned. They wanted Madiqi. Maliki, however, has a pretty bad history in Iraq. He ruled Iraq during the time of ISIS's takeover in 2014, of mostly Iraq's second biggest city. So Zaidi was a compromise candidate, someone with no political base, someone, the coordination framework thought they could kind of,

you know, manipulate. But it hasn't quite turned out the way that they want them. Well, geez, if Nuri al-Maliki is a bad choice now because he's so pro-Iran, then what does it mean that America's entire Iraq War II was bought for Nari al-Maliki and his friends in the Dala Party right up until the other day, I guess? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think the U.S. history and strategy in Iraq has always been incoherent, and it's always been kind of like fumbling and learning.

about their choices after the fact. And that legacy continues today. So in Iraq War II, David Petraeus turned the biggest militia, the Bada Brigade, into the Iraqi army. And Muttal al-Sauder still had his group. And there were a couple of smaller militias. But it was really in Iraq War III after Obama built the caliphate for Osama bin Laden, well, for Iman Ossiwahiri anyway.

And then they invaded Western Iraq. that then the Ayatollah Sestani down there, Najaf, called up all Shiite males to grab a rifle and go join up to create this entire new generation of Shiite militias, the popular mobilization units that fought with American air cover, fought to destroy the Islamic State back in 2014 through 18, whatever, after Obama again built it for them in the first place. So now, after this even further incoherent Iraq policy, now there's this. entire new set of Shiite militias with, I don't know, 10 different names or whatever, that have to be growled that they're always referred to as Iranian-backed, I think mostly, plausibly so, as we saw from Kud's Force and IRC intervention in Iraq War III there against ISIS. So that makes sense. I did read a thing a few weeks ago that said that Muttal al-Sauder has given in, and he already told his Madi army to join the army.

although I don't know if that actually happened or not. And then you saying here, a Sebel Haq, which I know is a very important Shiite militia, that they have agreed to either lay down their arms or join the military or both, one or the other, or something like that. But then how many other of these militias are there of what varying degrees of population do they have?

How large are they and how important are they in how much of a contest is this going to be between the new national government or the new, you know, administration and these militias. Yeah. So yeah, you bring up a great point that there's so many of them. They vary in size. Some are massive, some are relatively smaller.

They are quite different when you start to look at their positions, how embedded they are in the Iraqi state, how aligned they are with Iran. So the bigger ones are basically all on the same thing. page that they're not disarming. They're now offering some kind of token disarmament, something that they're calling freezing their weapons, maybe locking them up in arms depots for two years.

As you mentioned, the Mahdi army of Sala'a'a'is-Salam of Muktadah's-Sadr's is kind of put them in a bind because it said, we're going to integrate, we're going to remove our badges and put on Iraqi government or military, badges instead. But of course, their legions are still to Mokeda. So it's very much a game that's being played right now. But we've only got about two weeks left until that deadline reaches, September 30th, when the Iraqi armed forces is supposed to have a monopoly of force. There's no way that gets met, especially with what's happening now. Over the weekend,

we had strikes hitting Saudi Arabia from Iraq. The Houthis have a joint operations room with a lot of the PMUs, the popular mobilization units or forces in Iraq. So they're very much still seeing that their need for weapons is very much alive in the face of a continued standoff between Washington and Iran. And now, so, okay, Sauter has his own party, more or less, or, you know, coalitions with other parties. I referred to the Bada Brigade earlier, which I guess they sort of broke off and made their own party, but they started out as the militia of the Supreme Islamic

council. So then that makes me wonder, are these essentially all party militias? Like there are groups in power in the parliament and then each one of these militias represents their faction there? Or some of these militias are separate from the political process. They're just out there in the countryside or what? Yeah. So for the most part, all of them have a political face and also a military face. So as you mentioned, the better organization, um, its, its leadership is very much involved in the coordination framework and in the parliament and in different cabinets. And they're still led by Amiri? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And he's been very much a part of that process of disarmament and trying to find some kind of middle ground between Azadis position and the position of the other PMU forces. So, I mean, what's interesting is that, you know, a federal organization has a very unique history in a way because a lot of these militias work. created after the U.S. invasion of Iraq,

and another chunk of them were created after the rise of ISIS. The federal organization actually has a much deeper history, and it was actually in exile in Iran, and it actually, with Iran, fought against Saddam Hussein's forces in the Iran-Iraq war. So it's got a longer institutional history, but, yeah, I mean, very much a part of the political process, as are the other groups.

Well, I know, okay, I'm going to ask you about the Sunnis out west here in a minute, but we're not talking about that. We're just talking about Iraqi Shiaistan from Baghdad down to Kuwait and over to Iran and the fight essentially within the super majority Shiites over who's going to rule within there. But it's interesting that, and I know there are Kurds involved in Sunni's involved in a way, too, but essentially what we're talking about is this is the, Iraqi democracy and each one of these Shiite political parties has their own militia and refuses essentially to give them up to the national government. But like really why? I mean, obviously they're

jealous of their own power. But then again, like they are part of this coalition and they do have an interest in building up the Iraqi Shiite army and the Iraqi Shiite state, don't they? Or they just have such high time preferences and more, you know, short-sighted narrow interests or what's going on? Yeah, that's a million dollar question. Because as you mentioned, in theory, everyone wants, you know, they're in their country to be stable, to be prosperous. But at the same time, as you see, I think throughout the whole region, once you are an armed actor and once you have more power than the National Army, then you can dictate basically what the politics is and how resources get split. So a lot of these groups control big sections of the economy, big segments of the

economy. They enrich themselves. They pay their soldier's salaries. They have captured the state. So once you're in a position where you have so much power, economic and political, it becomes very difficult to say, okay, I'm going to now trade in all of my leverage in exchange for a bigger goal. And I think this is kind of like human nature being at play here. Everyone's kind of trying to maximize their individual interests over the collective interest. Yeah. All right. So what is going on out west? because, well, because I don't know. Yeah, yeah, you and me both.

I think a lot of the focus now has been on, like, the Iran-aligned groups, and that's essentially what this tug of war is over right now. To be honest, what's going on in the West, you know, the awakening that we saw earlier during the days of Iraq's, like, sectarian issues, while the U.S. was still very much involved post-invasion. You know, we're not seeing something like that happening now, but I'm actually not too sure what's going on with the Sudanese in the West or in other parts.

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And it's totally a great deal. And I highly encourage you to check it out at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. Well, you know what's interesting about that is if you look at somewhat recent history there, you see where when, Obama built an Islamic State Caliphate in Syria in 2013, it invaded and conquered all of Western Iraq with a snap of fingers in 2014 because all of Western Iraq was wide open territory

because the Shiite regime under Maliki was so chauvinist. It wasn't that just that he was persecuting them all. It's just that he had left them all out in the sun to burn because who cares? He's got all the oil down south and up north and what are they going to do about it? And so Patrick Coburn had told me, and this is why I was such an alarmist about this on the show for a year before the caliphate took over Western Iraq, was that Patrick Coburn came and told me on the show that, yeah, you know, I went to Tikrit, and there's no soldiers anywhere.

And I went to Mosul, and there's hardly any Iraqi army soldiers anywhere. And essentially all of Western Iraqi Sunistan is ungoverned territory. We helped the Shiites win the second Iraq war, but they didn't want the whole country. They just wanted the capital city. and all the land, you know, to the east and to the south from there and consolidate that and screw the Sunnis out in Fallujah and up in Mosul and whatever. But that was why Western Iraq was wide open for the bin Ladenites to come in and sack the place so easily in June of 14.

Well, guess what? Donald Barack Obama or, well, Joe Barack Obama Biden, along with Netanyahu and Recibertoine, they built another ISIS caliphate in Syria. And only this time it's sack Damascus. know how interested they are in taking Western Iraq, but seems like all they need is a giant column of Toyota Helix pickup trucks and some AK-47s, and potentially they could roll right back in there if the Iraqi Shiite army is not doing an effective enough job of holding down that territory at least enough to keep other forces out, unlike the situation was 12 years ago.

Yep, yeah. And, you know, as you rightly note, it was two things. If you control the oil, you control Iraq, right? So that, as you mentioned, that strip of land from Baghdad all the way down to Basra. That's really like, you know, Iraq's like golden area. The western desert, of course, is open. However, you know, terrorism, al-Qaeda, ISIS, you know, they're largely, crushed still around, they're still sleeper cells. And it'll be interesting to see what happens after September 30th when the U.S. is gone in a, in terms of not having a combat role anymore. We know, of course, that these militias, the Shia groups, the PMF groups are very anti, you know, I want to say Sunni jihadism, because Sunni jihadists have an affinity towards attacking Shia holy sites. So I don't think, I'm, you know,

I wouldn't place any money saying that those groups are going to be coming back or rising that the way that they would. But there's still an issue of having, like you mentioned, huge swaths of ungoverned territory, people that are armed, that are marginalized. It could be a ticking time bomb in the coming year, but we'll see. Even back then, Jolani was cooperative.

They told him, you face West. And he was like, all right. And they kept supporting him, even after the rise of the caliphate, they kept supporting him through the end of Obama's presidency in six months into Trump one. And so I guess as long as he stays tame and stays, you know, with his new shore on the Mediterranean there and everything facing West and facing Hezbollah in Lebanon and doesn't mess around with Western Iraq, then maybe he'll be all right.

But, you know, I don't know. If Jolani is as tame as they say, then I don't think he's going to last. He's going to be replaced by another Baghdaddy sooner or later because that's who his entire regime is made up of, right? Yeah, yeah, essentially. Essentially a lot of people have very tainted histories in the Syrian army. But, I mean, we'll see. And, you know, U.S. troops have also left Syria. I think they left in April.

So so far, the army is becoming unified. You know, the Kurds there have been dealt a very different set of cards than the Kurds in Iraq. They had to rush into like very quick integration deals. So now the Syrian Democratic forces is pretty much no more. It's been at least according to the latest reporting totally merged into the National Army. But yeah, I mean, what happens there will see. There's still, of course, you know, outstanding issues. One chunk of the country is still not under a.

effective government control, Sueda, where the Druze are. So, yeah, I mean, we'll see. And it's interesting that just Syria being so close to Iraq, having in many ways like similar challenges, is right now moving in a totally different direction. Iraq is still very fragmented. You've got multiple armed groups. In Syria, you've got consolidation.

But as you mentioned, it's a tough country. It's a tough neighborhood as well. So we'll see if Jordani can balance diplomacy. and hard power. Now, as far as the Iranian so-called axis of resistance or the Shiite crescent as the king of Jordan named it back, you know, when W. Bush made it by adding Baghdad to Iran's side of the roster there. Really, Iraq has mostly stayed out this whole time, right?

Geographically, like on a map, you go, wow, W. Bush just gave Iraq to Iran. Looks like a big prize. But then we've seen where the Iranians are able to count. on Hezbollah to jump into a fight, for example. But the Iraqi militias have stayed essentially tame and out of the fight until very recently, but now they're in it. And as you said at the beginning of the interview here, at least the reports are, it

wasn't the Houthis. It was Iraqi militias that hit the Saudi East-West pipeline there, correct? Yeah, the Iraqi militia is most likely acting with Houthis. Houthis have joint operations with those groups. So in the last round of air strikes, that Salga in the U.S. mounted on Iraq, there was actually a hootie operatives among the dead. Oh, is that right? I had missed that.

Yeah. So, I mean, there was a time when Iran would tell the Houthis what to do, and the Houthis would say no and do whatever they wanted. And there was a guy named Eustilterman, a Dutchman who wrote this article, I think Dutch, who wrote this article called The Houthis are not Hezbollah. And it was about how, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, you're right. Hasbala really is Iran's 51st. state and Nasrallah does what he's told and whatever. But the Houthis, they're not, there's

80 Shiites and they're different than the 12ers and they don't respect the Ayatoll the same way. And they weren't made by Iran the way that Hezbollah was, which not that they entirely made them, but they sure helped from the very beginning in a way where the Houthis just didn't owe Iran that much and all that. But now, after all these years of war, it looks like the Houthis are now just another state in the Iranian Union and are willing to act to. shut down the Red Sea and do whatever is required of them as fighting as an adjunct in Iranians, you know, alliance system over there. Are you reading that the same way? Largely, yeah. And you point out something very important, which is that their origin

stories are very different, right? Like, Hezbollah was, you know, it's debatable that Hezbollah would not exist today if it wasn't for the IRGC. The same can be said for the Houthis. The Houthis was a totally different, has a totally different origin story, independent of Iran and that Iranian support only really started the flow in T Yemen after 2014 when the Houthis took the capital. So as of right now, and I think this is very debatable, like to what extent Iran is leaning on the Houthis to carry out its bidding. You could say that right now it looks like there's a high level of coordination because

straight of Hormuz is closed and now Babid Mende looks like it's under Syria. threat, he had been Houthi gains over the last few days. If you look at Iranian policymakers and specifically their Quds Force commander who is the one coordinating between these different access of resistance units back in June, he said that we're, he referred to the security belt as, you know, being this like the swath of the Strait of Hormuz and Babin Mendeb. And he talked about it as if it was one unified,

tool that Iran could use to pressure the United States. As of right now, that looks to be the case. However, as you also mentioned, the Houthis have a totally different set of demands, and they have a totally different grievance with Saudi Arabia that's also going back into history. Saudi Arabia, even before Yemen's revolution and civil war, the Houthi movement actually rose in opposition to Saudi Arabia's

the proselytization in Yemen, exporting its brand of Islam, the Wahhabi or like the more austere Sunni version of Islam, into the Houthi heartland. So for the Houthis, Saudi Arabia is kind of an ideal, like a theological enemy in some ways.

Historically, it's sought to dominate the Houthi and the Zadi sect through exporting its brand of Islam. And then later on, as it's, I guess, you know, bankrolled the Houthi's enemy, like the Yemeni state at the time, which was fighting the Houthis and which killed the original founder of the Houthi movement, Hussain al-Houthi. Saudi Arabia became something else. And then after the revolution, when Saudi Arabia got involved in Yemen directly through its coalition with the UAE

and other states and mounted airstrikes to roll back the Houthis and to bring the internationally recognized government back to the capital, it became a different kind of enemy. So in many ways, the Houthis look at Saudi Arabia and they see an enemy on many days. different levels. So I could imagine a world where, you know, it's unlikely, but let's say the US and Iran cut a deal and things go fairly back to normal. I could imagine the Houthis still fighting Saudi Arabia, still attacking Saudi Arabia, still attacking Saudi government-backed troops in Yemen. Yeah. Mm, Mundo's artisan coffees. Explicitly, Scott Horton's show flavored coffee from Moondos artisan coffees get it they hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports the war party

but Moondos artisan coffees they support peace and um so here you go Scott Horton show flavored coffee it's part umatran and part Ethiopian all mixed together and tastes so good in the morning and also in the mid afternoon if you start getting sleepy Scott Horton.org slash coffee get you some All right, you guys, me here for expatmoney.com slash Scott. And what it is is it's this great guy, Mikkel Thorup, and he's a world traveler and a real expert in what you can do to buy property and invest in property overseas, protect your assets, and look into even living overseas if that is your interest. And if you just go to expatmoney.com slash Scott, you can get this free handy booklet, plan B, residences, and instant citizenships. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. That totally makes sense. I mean, the Iranians warn the Houthis not to take the capital

city at the end of 2014 because they said, Saudi's going to freak out and start a war against you. And they did it anyway. So, and then the Saudis learned the hard way after, what, seven years of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, starving them to death mostly, that this isn't working. And the Houthis kept reaching out and touching their refineries wherever they felt like it. And so, you know, and now they got the Iraqis willing to coordinate with them. The Saudis are screwed. As Darrow Cooper pointed out on our show, the Uthi's don't have much to lose, right?

The Saudis and the UAE and whoever, I don't know, they're not in on this one, but the Saudis can fly their F-15s around and drop bombs on the Houthis. But the Houthis don't have much to bomb. And when it comes down to the missiles they need and whatever forces, they can hide all that under a granite canopy wherever they need and be fine. And so after seven years of bombing, we already saw it, doesn't work. It actually doesn't really take you anywhere. The Saudis, on the other hand, have $10 trillion worth of infrastructure laying out in the open sun all over the place,

where all the hoot these have to do is just make a wish and blow something up, the slightest of effort and the slightest of cost. And so the equation pretty much writes itself out. We already saw it play out over seven years. and then that was what ended the war was they blew up one last refinery and then MBS just cried uncle. I think that was a direct quote, Uncle!

And then that was it, dude, you know? So, yeah, it doesn't look good for them in this. So back to Iraq again, though. Well, okay, let me back up a step. You write about this in your article. What exactly was it about? American power and influence in Iraq that they were able to dictate who should be the new prime minister, that it should be this guy Zadhi, and is that just a coincidence, that it should be

this guy Zadhi instead of Nuryal-Maliki? If America only has barely any combat troops there anymore and they're up in Kurdistan and they're leaving anyway, then what leverage did America have to even get the prime minister they want it for all the difference it's making so far? Yeah. So really the U.S. has immense leverage because it controls the flow of money into Iraq. And this is by design after the 2003 invasion. Iraq's oil proceeds, which fund, you know, pretty much 90% of its budget and all of its public sector salaries, which, and its public sector is huge in Iraq. the money from Iraq's oil sales funneled into an account in the Federal Reserve of New York. And those dollars are physically flown into Iraq on a periodic schedule. So what the U.S. said is we're not going to send you any more money until you get rid of Matici

and you bring someone else that we approve up. And that was enough to make it happen. Yeah. Although I know you're right about that and I see that reported all the time and I saw where you wrote that in your article. but I don't understand how America is able to make that stick. I mean, I could see if the promise was or no more weapons for you or whatever and then they bow down, fine. But can't Iraq just say to their customers deposit your money in our account instead of the New York Fed? Or by what angle is America able to extort all of Iraq's customers into paying them instead of Baghdad?

Yeah, so that's a really good question. And again, I'm not sure about what mechanisms they have. to force customers to pay into certain accounts versus other accounts. I'm actually not sure. I'm very curious to know more about how it actually works in practice. Yeah. That seems strange that they had no way of standing up for that. I mean, they still hold the oil.

It ain't like in Donald Trump's imagination where somehow you have a giant spoon and you just take all the oil in one, you know, with a crane and just lift it out of there. What else that I have in my notes here? Oh, America's leaving Iraq again? Really? Yeah, I think it's going to be now the third time since 2003.

Huh. That's odd. But okay. You know, I guess I'll believe it when I see it actually finished. But yeah, so, well, I know, I guess I'll ask you a little bit along those same lines then. All these bases other than whatever they have at the embassy and the embassy and the green zone, but the actual military combat forces there are all in Iraqi Kurdistan up in the north adjacent to your bull there, right?

Yeah, at the moment. Yeah. And then, so what is the status of the Iraqi Kurdish sort of pseudo regime there? Remindy was Talibani or Barzani died and Palisani's still alive, right? So, I mean, the prime minister is Barzani. What's for Barzani? Oh, okay. It was Talibani that died.

Yeah, I think he was the older one, yeah. Yeah, okay. And then, but they're on relative good terms with the Shiite regime and participate in the parliament? I mean, good terms, I mean, they are definitely, you know, part of the, like, the political structure. But in terms of being on good terms, I would not say so. Because the Kurdistan region of Iraq has, you know, also a very complicated history with the rest of the country from Saddam days. So Saddam famously used chemical weapons on. on Kurdistan in response to their uprising against his rule.

And when ISIS came, that was much closer to them than it was to the bigger population centers in southern Iraq. So they faced that threat. For them, that was an existential threat. And they were very much ready to sacrifice lives and men and women to fight to fight ISIS. And they did. And the reward that they thought that they deserved was independents because right after ISIS was crushed,

they held a referendum to separate from Iraq. And they voted overwhelmingly for it. I think it was something like 92% voted in favor of separation. And Baghdad would not let that happen. The central government would not let that happen.

So since then, it's been a very complicated process between them where before the U.S. Iran war that recently took off, the Kurdistan region had been trying to negotiate some kind of a more equitable split of the oil and gas revenue because they produce a lot of oil and it gets sent into Baghdad. And then they get a share back. So they get back 12.67%.

They want to up it. They've got census data showing that the population is grown, that they have greater needs. But, the central government is saying we're not going to give you that. You also have to give us your not oil revenue. We know you get money from, you know,

customs and other things that you're not sending us. So that was kind of a live debate going on between them before these events kind of overtook the season. Yeah. So then if that's, you go. It was in 2017, right when the Shiite army went and took over all the oil fields that were at that time under Pesh control,

but they just had to withdraw. Yeah. And then I can't believe that was nine years. ago already that that so so in other words and that's that's essentially all the oil right in that kirkirkook field the kursing really got much else besides what is which they don't have that even right that that that's all lost to shiat control yeah kirk kirk kukuk now is very much like firmly under central government control they've got other sites they've got you know they've got other like production sites in within the the kirtish heartland um but again the other issue is that it

constantly comes under attack. And it's actually, in a way, the civil war never ended in Iraq because it's a lot of these PMU forces that are launching missiles and drones into Kurdistan and hitting oil and gas fields for a number of reasons. A lot of them are joint ventures with U.S. companies. A lot of them, I mean, another part of it is the fact that Kurdistan has always been a very pro-U.S., like part of the country. And that's why it's currently hosting U.S. troops at the moment.

And the U.S. is going to have actually its biggest consulate in the world in Kurdistan. So that's always kind of annoyed a lot of the popular mobilization forces. So they routinely throw drones over there, bomb infrastructure, sites that they say are closely connected to the U.S. And they blame Kurdistan for hosting the Kurdish groups that were part of Trump's original plan to mount a ground invasion on Iran. So they've got many, many bones to pick with the Kurdish region. So the U.S. leaving now puts them in a really difficult bind as well.

And we'll have to wait and see what happens with them. Yeah. Man, it's so interesting. Well, I'm so glad that you're writing about this stuff. Hardly anybody writes about Iraqi politics anymore. But I sure love reading about it and keeping up with the balance of power there because like I was saying, kind of in the intro, it's really, like, even the clean break, right? It was all about, well, since we can't attack Iran, what else might we do to weaken Hezbollah?

Right? Like, that's the whole game here, is trying to figure out how to screw the Iranians, and it never works. It always just makes them more and more powerful. And so here we are, again, more with the worse of the same. So thanks for keeping track of it and keeping us so well informed. And let me get your title of your article here to tell everybody. It's at ResponsibleStatecraft, ResponsibleStatecraft.org, as Baghdad tries to please Trump, Iran tells Iraqi militias not to disarm. Elphidil Ibrahim. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Cool. Thanks, Scott Horton Show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News.

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