On the night of July 28, Saudi Arabian and American warplanes struck positions of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)—an umbrella organization of mostly Shia paramilitary groups—across seven provinces, from Nineveh to Basra. At least 20 fighters were killed, among them at least five Iranians, and 32 were wounded. Riyadh said the strikes were an answer to drones launched from Iraqi soil at oil facilities in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province and at Riyadh itself; CENTCOM counted more than 30 IRGC-directed drone attacks in 72 hours. Iraq’s prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, was flying home from Ankara when the bombs fell. He had been due in Riyadh the following day.
It was the first time Saudi aircraft had hit targets in Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, and the first time the kingdom had used force against Iraq’s Shia armed groups. Yet within a fortnight, the head of Saudi intelligence was in Baghdad, the director of the Iraqi commander-in-chief’s office was in Riyadh, and the Saudi defense minister was calling Iraq a “cherished neighbor.” Saudi Arabia bombed Iraq and embraced it in the same month. That combination—strike the militias, back the state—is the outline of a new Saudi—and, potentially, wider Gulf—doctrine toward Iraq. Its success will depend on whether Riyadh can do the first without weakening the second—just as al-Zaidi pushes armed factions to surrender their weapons by September 30, the same day the last U.S.-led coalition forces are due to leave Iraq.
The end of a wager
For a decade, Riyadh’s Iraq policy rested on a bet: that sustained trade, investment, and political engagement would give Baghdad an Arab option and gradually strengthen the state against Tehran and its domestic proxies. The 2020 reopening of the Arar border crossing, the Saudi-Iraqi Coordination Council, and Baghdad’s role in Saudi-Iranian diplomacy all reflected that strategy. The goal was never to pull Iraq fully out of Iran’s orbit, but to help build an Iraqi state increasingly capable of saying no to it.
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran called the wager in. In its first weeks, hundreds of drones were fired from Iraq toward American facilities in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom withdrew its diplomatic staff from Baghdad after a strike on the Al-Rasheed Hotel, where its diplomats had been temporarily housed for security reasons. By late July, with Houthi missiles arriving from Yemen to the south and Iraqi drones from the north, Riyadh concluded that the Iraqi state could not, or would not, stop attacks launched from its territory, and that months of patient engagement had purchased nothing. The decision to initiate limited strikes was therefore not merely retaliation; it was a verdict on a decade-long policy of restraint.
Quarantining the strike
Baghdad’s first response was fury. The presidency and National Security Council denounced the raids as a violation of sovereignty that targeted official security institutions; al-Zaidi canceled his scheduled Riyadh visit and ordered the foreign ministry to take the issue to the United Nations. Even the prominent cleric and political figure Muqtada al-Sadr, whose own Saraya al-Salam militia had agreed in May to submit to state authority, condemned both the foreign strikes and the armed groups that had provoked them.
Then, quietly, both capitals moved to contain the damage. On August 7, Saudi intelligence chief Khalid bin Ali al-Humaidan flew to Baghdad, renewed the Iraqi prime minister’s invitation to Riyadh, and agreed with al-Zaidi to keep intelligence-sharing channels open. The foreign ministers followed suit. Intelligence sharing, particularly over drone launches, became the centerpiece of the repair effort. That matters because it addresses the central operational question: whether Riyadh will give Baghdad enough warning to act against launch cells itself, or continue striking first and informing Baghdad afterward.
The formula that emerged is one Gulf capitals have watched Washington apply to Iraq for years, with mixed results at best: distinguish the state from the factions, punish the factions, and reassure the state. But in Iraq that distinction is precisely what is contested. The PMF is itself a state institution, federally funded, and nominally under the prime minister’s command.
The risk is not that Saudi bombs will topple the Iraqi state; it is that they will hollow it. A strike that bypasses Baghdad tells Iraqis that their government neither controls its territory nor is consulted about what happens on it, precisely the factions’ argument for their own existence. Every external intervention that humiliates the state strengthens the groups it was meant to weaken. Riyadh has adopted a doctrine whose central premise, a clean line between the Iraqi state and the armed groups inside it, is the very thing al-Zaidi’s September 30 disarmament deadline is meant to establish.
Three things the strike changed
First, Gulf self-defense has gone kinetic. For two decades the Gulf Cooperation Council’s answer to Iran’s non-state allies was a mixture of American deterrence, air defense, and checkbook diplomacy. A Saudi fighter jet striking a militia depot in Diyala, in coordination with CENTCOM, sets a precedent that Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and others will study closely: Armed groups that hit Gulf infrastructure can now expect a Gulf response inside the country they launched from.
Second, the Iraq-Yemen axis is now Saudi Arabia’s principal threat picture. Saudi officials say their intelligence has detected meetings among Iraqi militia members, Houthi operatives, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) personnel, along with the movement of drones and missiles, ahead of what they expect to be coordinated attacks on energy facilities, ports, and airports. From Riyadh’s perspective, the kingdom now faces a pincer from north and south. Iraq is therefore no longer a secondary arena, but one half of an Iranian-aligned encirclement strategy.
Third, Saudi Arabia has joined the states willing to use force inside Iraq without Baghdad’s consent. Iran, Türkiye, and the United States have all done so; Gulf states had generally worked through Baghdad or Washington. That restraint is now over. For Iraq, the implication is stark: neutrality becomes harder to sustain when neighboring states regard Iraqi territory as a legitimate target whenever attacks originate from it.
Hitting the militias without losing the state
The new Saudi approach can only succeed if its second part, embracing the state, is real. Three things would make it so.
Put force behind diplomacy, not ahead of it. Striking Iraq on the eve of its prime minister’s visit was the worst possible sequencing. It humiliated the one Iraqi leader who has staked his premiership on disarmament of militia groups, and it handed the factions a violated-sovereignty claim that their opponents, al-Sadr included, promptly repeated. The rule should be that Riyadh, and Washington, tell Baghdad before they strike, not after, and give Iraqi forces the first chance to act against the launch cells themselves. Far from being made irrelevant by the disarmament campaign, this is what would give that campaign teeth: a government handed intelligence and a deadline can act; one handed a crater can only protest.
Invest in the state’s leverage over the factions. Iraq is in a liquidity crisis: exports have collapsed since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, July salaries went unpaid for many public employees, and the government is borrowing domestically to pay wages. The militias’ patronage networks feed on exactly this kind of fiscal weakness. Saudi financial support, central bank deposits, oil-backed loan guarantees, progress on reviving an oil pipeline that would transport Iraqi crude to Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port—circumventing the blocked strait—all tied to serious advancements on militia disarmament, would do more to shrink the power of Iran-aligned groups than another sortie.
The two sides should also make the intelligence sphere the center of gravity in their working relationship. The Humaidan visit and the Riyadh delegation point the way. A standing Saudi-Iraqi mechanism for the drones file, including shared warnings, shared attributions, and agreed thresholds, would let Riyadh distinguish the state from the factions in practice rather than in communiqués, and would give Baghdad a reason to act on Saudi intelligence instead of resenting Saudi bombs.
None of this will end the militias’ attacks; only Tehran’s calculations will do that. But the war has already turned Saudi Arabia from Baghdad’s patient interlocutor into its impatient enforcer. The July episode settled that Riyadh would use force in Iraq when its territory is attacked. The harder test for the emerging doctrine is to keep striking the factions without hollowing out the state, so that when Riyadh next picks up the phone, there is still an Iraqi government worth calling on the other end.
