January 26, 2026

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Domestic and Regional Challenges Intersect in Iraq

(AP Photo/Farid Abdulwahed)

The regional reverberations of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack are intersecting to challenge Baghdad on both its eastern and western borders, adding to tensions among Iraqi leaders over the formation of the next national government. On Iraq’s western flank, the post-Assad Syrian government’s efforts to control all of northeastern Syria have fueled Baghdad’s fears of a resurgence of the Islamic State (IS) and embroiled Iraq’s Kurdish community in the Syrian Kurdish struggle against Damascus. To Iraq’s east, Iranian leaders, greatly weakened by U.S. and Israeli military action as well as a major domestic uprising, are looking to Iraq to continue providing Tehran strategic depth and to help reestablish Iran’s diminished regional influence.

The turmoil on Iraq’s frontiers is compounding Baghdad’s efforts to deny the United States and Iran the use of Iraq as an arena for their broader power struggle. Trump’s team is looking to Iraq to help it punish Tehran for its brutal crackdown on demonstrations that seemed, at their peak two weeks ago, to threaten the regime’s grip on power. Experts predicted Trump’s team would try to influence Baghdad’s selection of its new leadership team — a process now underway pursuant to national elections in November — to ensure that Iraq’s next Prime Minister cooperates with U.S. policy in the region. However, many of the Shia groups that dominate Iraq’s political structure appear willing to resist pressure from Washington in order to blunt what they see as a resurgent threat from IS and a Sunni Islamist-dominated government in Damascus. (After the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Syria’s interim President, Ahmad al-Sharaa, was an al Qaeda-aligned fighter against the Baghdad government and U.S. forces in Iraq.)

Whereas Iran-U.S. competition in Iraq has long challenged Baghdad policymakers, the new and unexpected threat posed by Damascus’s January push to establish its control over its Kurdish community, concentrated in northeastern Syria, alarmed Iraqi leaders. The Syrian offensive, which targeted the Kurdish-led, U.S.-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), caused the temporary escape of dozens of IS prisoners guarded by the SDF, reviving fears among Iraq’s Shia Arab-dominated leadership.

Last week, after Syrian government forces gained control of the sprawling al-Hol camp, which houses thousands of relatives of IS fighters, Iraq, Syria, and the U.S. jointly agreed to relocate as many as 7,000 detainees from Syria to Iraq. The IS detainees will come from more than a dozen detention centers in northeast Syria that were controlled by the SDF. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a statement, applauded Iraq’s “initiative to detain IS terrorists in secure facilities... following recent instability in northeast Syria.” He said non-Iraqi prisoners would be held temporarily and urged other countries to repatriate them. Iraq also has beefed up patrols along its border with Syria; on Thursday, tanks lined up along the frontier in the northern province of Sinjar and elsewhere along the border.

Iraq’s concerns about an IS resurgence appear to have shifted the political landscape inside Iraq to the benefit of a harder line, more pro-Tehran figure in the competition for the top executive post of Prime Minister. By factional accord, the Prime Minister is to come from Iraq’s Shia Arab community, and the largely ceremonial post of President is to go to a Kurd. In the November 2025 Iraqi elections to a 329-seat National Assembly, the moderate incumbent Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s Reconstruction and Development Coalition won the most seats — 46 seats — finishing well ahead of the 29 seats won by the State of Law bloc led by his main Shia rival, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki served two terms as prime minister (2006-2014), but Washington attributed the IS seizure of vast territories in mostly Sunni Arab-inhabited northern and central Iraq in 2014 to Maliki’s Shia partisanship and successfully denied him a third term. Both Maliki and Sudani’s parties are part of a broader Shia coalition, the Coordination Framework (CF), which collectively won approximately 165 seats in November. The showing enabled the CF to claim that, as the Assembly’s largest bloc, it had the right to nominate a candidate for prime minister.

Although they were initially heartened by Sudani’s strong electoral performance, Trump officials grew progressively more concerned that the leaders of several smaller, hardline, pro-Tehran blocs in the CF — some of whom double as commanders of Iran-backed militias in the broader Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — would try to deny Sudani a second term. U.S. officials feared the militia-linked factions in the CF viewed Sudani as too willing to cooperate with Trump’s efforts to pressure Tehran economically, diplomatically, and militarily. The harder line Shia leaders decided that they needed a more sectarian figure to blunt the gathering threats emanating from Sunni Islamist-run Syria and to help insulate Tehran from Trump’s pressure. Tehran, under assault from the United States, Israel, and massive anti-regime protests in early January, pushed for Maliki’s return in the expectations he would provide Iran with strategic depth in Iraq. A more Tehran-friendly leader in Baghdad could presumably help pressure Trump not to proceed with threatened strikes on Iran as punishment for its killing of thousands of protesters in the recent unrest. As Prime Minister, Maliki also has the executive authority to deny Washington the ability to launch attacks on Iran from Iraqi bases, were Trump to decide to attack Iran.

Reports in early January that Sudani had conceded the contest for Prime Minister to Maliki were verified on Saturday by a CF statement that it would nominate Maliki to return to the prime minister’s seat. He is to be formally nominated by the President, who is slated to be selected at a National Assembly session on Tuesday. After he is formally named, Maliki will have 30 days to form a government and achieve its full confirmation by the Assembly. Reaction from a wide range of Iraqi factions suggests Maliki will be able to form a government. Masoud Barzani, the paramount leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the dominant Kurdish party in Iraq, endorsed the choice, as did leaders of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Barzani is a trusted partner of Washington and helped U.S. officials mediate the de-escalation of the fighting between Damascus and the SDF. Some Sunni Arab figures, however, accuse Maliki of discriminating against them and either withheld judgment or objected to his return. Some Iraqi leaders predict Trump, through his Envoy for Iraq Mark Savaya, will yet try to thwart Maliki’s attempts to form a government. Were Maliki to fail to achieve confirmation of his cabinet, the CF might nominate Sudani or another moderate Shia leader as a “consensus” candidate.

The contest for the prime minister position added to tensions within Iraq’s Kurdish community over the largely ceremonial post of President of Iraq. The KDP and PUK have, until now, largely abided by a tacit accord under which a PUK leader is named Iraq’s President, and a KDP leader serves as president of the constitutionally mandated, autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). In the current government formation cycle, the KDP has sought to leverage its predominant political strength to engineer the selection of a KDP figure for the national presidency, while also retaining KDP control of the KRG presidency. However, according to reports on Saturday, it is likely that the two factions will decide to abide by their existing understandings and, if so, PUK figure Nizar Amedi would be selected as President on Tuesday.

From Washington’s perspective, Trump’s team views Maliki as likely to not only fuel Iraqi Sunni support for militant anti-government groups, but also as an obstacle to Trump’s escalating effort to pressure Iran in the wake of the serious uprising there. However, Trump’s team appears to judge that overt pressure to block Maliki’s return to office might trigger a broad Iraqi Shia backlash against U.S. interference. Should Maliki return to office, Trump officials will likely concentrate on their efforts, already underway, to prevent commanders of any Iran-aligned armed groups from inclusion in the next government. In recent weeks, as Iraqi leaders began the government formation process in earnest, U.S. officials threatened senior Iraqi politicians with sanctions targeting the Iraqi state — including potentially its critical oil revenues — should Iran-aligned armed groups be included in the next government, four sources told Reuters. The threat came after at least a year of U.S. pressure on Sudani, thus far unsuccessful, to demobilize the PMF entirely and establish unitary state control of all armed forces. The latest U.S. warning was delivered repeatedly over the past two months by the U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Baghdad, Joshua Harris, in conversations with Iraqi officials and influential Iraqi Shia leaders, according to several Reuters sources. The message was delivered to some heads of Iran-linked groups via intermediaries, according to those same sources.