Head of Iraqi armed group says it suffered over 100 strikes, lost dozens of fighters
Falih al-Fayadh, head of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), has said that the umbrella organization for armed groups in Iraq suffered more than 100 attacks on its headquarters and lost about 100 fighters since the US-Israel war on Iran began, with dozens more wounded.
In an interview on Al Sharqiya TV, al-Fayadh said the PMF was the party most affected in Iraq by the strikes. He described the attacks as coming from varying sources, saying they were “sometimes American, sometimes American-suspected to be Israeli”.
Al-Fayadh attributed the targeting partly to overlap between PMF facilities and sites used by allied armed factions, but said the attacks were ultimately aimed at pressuring the PMF to rein in those factions.
He said the PMF did not fire a single shot during the recent US-Iran war, and that the group acted strictly under the authority of Iraq’s commander-in-chief of the armed forces rather than making its own decisions on war. “If the state is not officially part of the war, we do not fire a single shot,” he said.
Al-Fayadh denied any intention to transform the PMF into an Iraqi version of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and said he did not expect clashes over disarmament following a US troop withdrawal.
The PMF is an umbrella organization within Iraq’s official security forces, which Iran has increasingly co-opted to wield its influence in the neighboring country. It is mostly made up of Shia paramilitary groups.
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Iran’s parliament speaker hails bond with Iraq
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said attempts to create distance between Iran and Iraq have only brought them closer together.
Tehran and Baghdad have a “shared refusal to allow foreign capitals to determine the fate of our people”, the Iranian parliament speaker said at a ceremony in Karbala in Iraq, reports the IRNA news agency.
Ghalibaf added that the bond between them was rooted in history, geography and religion and that they had a “clear agenda to enhance security and stability” in both countries.
“History will write about us as two nations that refused to become footnotes in the narratives of others and that did not write our fate in the capitals of Western governments,” he added.
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