On May 22, 2024, Iraqi Minister of Higher Education Naeem al-Aboudi made his second trip to the United Kingdom to discuss new initiatives for joint educational programs.1 The trip created pleasing images of Anglo-Iraqi cooperation, but few of the people Aboudi met likely realized that he is the cabinet member controlled by U.S.-designated terrorist movement Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH),2 a group that has killed scores of Americans and Britons since its formation by Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006.3
The reason for tolerating Aboudi’s presence in the United Kingdom is nominally that AAH is now a coalition partner in in the Iraqi government and has been viewed as a political actor since entering parliament in 2014.4 Abdul Amir Hamdan,5 a previous AAH minister from the 2018–2019 Iraqi government, had also previously been hosted in the United Kingdom. He was a well-qualified archaeologist that AAH—not a designated terrorist group at the time—had chosen to present themselves in the best light. Talking to Hamdan at a think tank dinner in London in 2019, I could clearly see that he had no prior links to AAH, which was using him to position the new political party, Sadiqoun, as technocratic and approachable.
The same cannot be said for Naeem al-Aboudi, who has been a dyed-in-the-wool muqawama (resistance) ideologue since the group’s inception as an anti-Western insurgent movement. Aboudi still speaks the language of war, with the edges only slightly rounded off, referring to U.S.-led coalition advisors in Iraq as “occupation forces,”6 dedicating graduation ceremonies to Hamas’ October 7 attacks,7 and promoting campus militia recruitment organizations named after a U.S.-designated terrorist, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.8 Aboudi’s new role atop Iraq’s university system has also not stopped him from adopting confrontational sectarian stances, openly supporting the formalization of a controversial Shi’ite holiday, Eid al-Ghadeer, which Sunnis reject,9 and backing mandatory teaching of Ba’ath Party-era Sunni crimes against the Shi’ites.10
Nor is Aboudi the only AAH hardliner to be recently engaged by the West. Earlier in 2024, on March 5, the U.K. ambassador to Iraq also met publicly11 with Adnan Fayhan, whom AAH had installed as the governor of Babil province in central Iraq.12 Fayhan was publicly identified more than five years earlier in declassified U.S. intelligence reports13 as the man who had been directly responsible for ordering a deadly kidnap-murder attack on Americans in January 2007 that killed five U.S. personnel—four of whom had been tied up and shot in the head in cold blood.14
This fact was well known to the United Kingdom. Indeed, it was British soldiers who captured AAH leader Qais al-Khazali15 after the notorious January 2007 “Karbala raid” that killed the Americans. U.S. military interrogation transcripts showed that it was Qais al-Khazali who authorized Fayhan to launch the attack,16 and al-Khazali was later designated as a terrorist by the U.S. government for both serious human rights abuses in Iraq17 and terrorist crimes.18 And yet on January 31, 2023, al-Khazali received Australian Ambassador to Iraq Paula Ganly in his Baghdad offices,19 an act the Australian government justified with the claim that al-Khazali had joined “the political mainstream.”20
On the sidelines, the U.S. government is quietly watching these test runs with AAH by its closest “Five Eyes” intelligence partners. The U.S. government has always handled Qais with kid gloves: U.S. forces released him in 200921 and he was inexplicably not sanctioned for terrorism until 2020. In the final years of the 2003–2011 U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, Qais was part of gruesome backroom deals to recover the bodies of four murdered Britons (and one live British hostage)22 and a murdered American soldier,23 and to ensure AAH stayed quiet while U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011.24
Since the late 2011 withdrawal of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, Qais’s relations with the United States have been complicated. On the one hand, it was an affiliate of AAH (called Ashab al-Kahf)25 that struck the first blow against U.S. forces after the counter-Islamic State war began to wind down: Ashab al-Kahf explicitly claimed the death of U.S. Army private first class Alexander Missildine, who was killed by a roadside bomb near Tikrit, Iraq on October 1, 2017.26
Yet one reason a façade was maintained in that attack (Ashab al-Kahf, rather than AAH) is that Iraqi lobbyists were, at the time, persistently working to keep Qais off the sanctions list, and then after 2020 to have Qais de-listed.27 Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s April 2024 visit to the White House was stage-managed by those same Iraqi lobbyists, who now operate at the heart of Sudani’s team of Washington-whisperers. As efforts to rehabilitate Qais and AAH appear to move to a new level, it is necessary to ask whether this is a worthwhile effort. What does theory on terrorist disengagement tell us, and what do the specific aspects of AAH’s case portend?
The Debate over the Taming of Terrorist Groups
Whether potential engagement with terrorists is smart diplomacy or a fool’s errand that only strengthens such militants is a perennial debate. Terrorists demonstrably can be drawn away from militancy and into politics, but debate surrounds every such case study, with a number of contending theories used to explain the causal mechanics of the phenomenon. Studies from the decade after 9/11 tiptoed carefully28 around the idea that engagement could “tame” terrorist groups, but even some of these studies concluded that terrorists could become normal politicians. (RAND’s typically mammoth 2008 historical survey of 648 groups concluded that 43% of the cases ended with terrorists integrating into the political process.)29
We instinctively know this to be true given the high-profile transformations of terrorist leaders throughout recent history. As veteran reporter Robin Wright noted in 2017, “I’ve also witnessed some transitions that I never thought would happen,” referring to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s arc from notorious terrorist to Nobel Peace Prize winner and the Arab leader with the single-largest haul of White House visits in history.30 The British have their own version of this story to tell with Sinn Féin, the political wing of Northern Ireland’s Provisional Irish Republican Army, now the Irish party with the most seats in the U.K. parliament.31
Yet academics also caution that there is a negative kind of transition from terrorism to terrorist governments. Robin Wright watched firsthand as Lebanese Hezbollah made this transition from suicide bombers to a terrorist army now holding a whole government, country, and population hostage. Audrey Kurth Cronin, the author of numerous books about how terrorist groups end,32 termed this phenomenon “reorientation,” in which terrorist groups transition to a different form of negative behavior—for instance, learning to play within the rules of the state but remaining fundamentally unreformed, just more powerful. As the don of terrorism studies Bruce Hoffman told Wright, “Hezbollah doesn’t rule Lebanon, but it controls it. The message is that terrorism pays. It is translated into power.” For Cronin, this was “the least satisfactory pattern” by which a terrorism group ends.33
The Argument for Embracing AAH
Which of these models applies to Qais al-Khazali and AAH? Advocates of engagement say Qais has joined the political process.34 AAH is a major player in parliament and served a vital role in selecting the current Iraqi premier Sudani as the ruling bloc’s figurehead.35 Yet other Iraqi terrorist groups36 have parliamentary blocs too: most prominently, Kataib Hezbollah,37 which killed three Americans on January 28, 2024.38 No one is talking about engaging with them.
One common refrain is that the difference is that Qais and his group stopped trying to kill Americans at some indeterminate moment in the last half decade.39 Though this is not confirmed—he continues to saber-rattle and may have indirectly facilitated some attacks or even directly undertaken a smattering of strikes40—it is indisputable that AAH is certainly not the Iran-backed vanguard of anti-U.S. attacks that it was in 2006–2011.41 Al-Khazali increasingly walks a fine line between quite arguably taking a sabbatical from anti-Western militancy, while at the same time making thundering statements to keep his militant base happy instead of looking for leadership elsewhere.42
Qais knows exactly how risky inter-militant coups are because he himself stripped away supporters from his former leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, in order to form AAH. Qais took with him the most aggressive Sadrists who opposed a truce Moqtada made with the Americans in July 2004. Qais himself suffered something similar when the most hardline elements of AAH splintered away in 2012 under Akram al-Kaabi, who used the AAH breakaways to form his Nujaba movement that went on to fight in Syria during the years of relative stability in Iraq in 2012–2013.43 Qais must strike the right balance, and sometimes that may mean swinging back to anti-U.S. militancy.
Furthermore, Western diplomats quietly relate that Qais has been “constructive” on the issue of allowing U.S. forces to stay in Iraq.44 As his deal-making with U.S. interrogators demonstrate vividly—including the betrayal of fellow militants45—Qais is certainly capable of being flexible and pragmatic when violence can no longer secure his interests. His mouthpieces46 regularly underline how U.S. forces might stay in Iraq, in small enough numbers and with a clearly limited mission.47 Qais is by now a wily player who has seen nine U.S. ambassadors come and go since his rise began: they change, but he does not.
Most important to realist analysts, it is near-orthodoxy to assess that Qais is becoming very powerful, very quickly.48 He is perhaps the main influence over Prime Minister Sudani49 and controls most of the senior bureaucrats in key ministries—from oil to industry to education.50 Qais is outperforming the fading generation of older Shi’ite leaders like Hadi al-Ameri and Nouri al-Maliki,51 and he has tried in recent years to achieve parity with his direct rival, Moqtada al-Sadr.52 Having observed Qais from close range in Baghdad, I can say that he is undoubtedly very confident—with good cause.53 In this author’s view, Qais is gifted with strong political instincts, his movement is relatively cohesive, and he is still young by Iraqi leadership standards (he turned 50 this year). In realpolitik terms, a pragmatist might make a powerful argument that Qais could be a new strongman to consolidate Iraqi politics. If the West is in a new Cold War, Qais could become the Iraqi Pinochet, recalling the Western-backed dictator of Chile.54
Reasons Not to Rehabilitate Qais al-Khazali
The U.S. government installed Iraq’s democracy and arguably bears some responsibility to ensure Iraqis retain their rights. Yet, like Pinochet, Qais might be strong, but he is inherently anti-democratic. To claim that AAH entered politics through the front door—accepting its rules as a sign of moderation—would be a real stretch. When AAH won their first seat in 2014, they demanded one of Iraq’s 32 ministerships, despite having just one seat in 328, and yet they succeeded. Then AAH entered parliament in strength in 2018—improbably jumping from one to fifteen seats in a single cycle—only because AAH were the most aggressive cheaters in Iraq’s worst-regarded elections.55 When election oversight was strengthened as a result of AAH’s shenanigans, Qais’s party underperformed again in 2021,56 so he orchestrated a twin drone attack on the prime minister’s house in November 2021 when he did not like the election result.57 Qais and AAH only ended up with a powerful place in the current government because they threatened to overrun the government and then weaponized the judiciary’s post-electoral shifting of the goalposts in government formation,58 turning the result on its head and converting Qais’s coalition into the next government. Thus, in just two electoral cycles, Qais went from masterminding the stealing of seats to masterminding the stealing of the entire electoral outcome. “What next?” one might ask.
If AAH is now the “political mainstream,” as the Australian foreign ministry noted, then the Iraqi body politic is indeed deathly ill. AAH remains an exceedingly violent movement that cannot be considered as a normal political party in any but the most dystopian sense. In this regard, it is only different from Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement by degree, not type. Qais al-Khazali gathered the most violent and sectarian elements of the Sadrist movement in 2004–2006 and allowed them unfettered freedom to undertake mass sectarian cleansing in Baghdad in 2006–2007.59 Qais and his enforcer brother Laith, also detained by coalition forces for terrorist offences, appear to fear no one in Iraqi politics.60 Qais al-Khazali and Laith al-Khazali were first designated by the U.S. government in 2019 for involvement in the mass shooting, torture and disappearance of scores of unarmed protestors.61 In this author’s experience, based on daily contact with Iraqis inside their country, to publicly criticize Qais or Laith is a death sentence in today’s Baghdad.62 To publicly embrace him and his movement would further demoralize Iraqi pro-democracy and pro-reform civil society movements.
Even viewed through a brutally realist lens, the strengthening of Qais al-Khazali and AAH is not only distasteful but risky. The U.S. wants a stable, prosperous Iraq but Qais al-Khazali and his movement are arguably not state-builders, but state-wreckers. The unchecked growth of al-Khazali’s power was built on subverting Iraq’s development by super-charging corruption and oil-smuggling rackets in the world’s fifth largest oil producer.63 AAH literally tore Iraq’s largest refinery apart and sold the pieces to Iran for scrap.64 Now al-Khazali’s rackets are getting more ambitious, with agents emplaced at the heart of key ministries such as oil and industry.65 Al-Khazali’s rapid expansion into the Iraqi oil sector stands a good chance of drawing U.S. sanctions onto the irreplaceable engine room of Iraq’s economy.
The final point—that Qais is no longer attacking Americans—is a thin reed on which to build a partnership. If Qais’s men are not the ones currently launching drones at U.S. forces, that is arguably because AAH’s role within the pantheon of Iran-backed militias66 is propaganda and state capture operations. This “division of labor” explanation is quite well-evidenced in multiple analyses by writers both supportive of,67 and skeptical of68 Western engagement with AAH. While kinetic attacks against U.S. forces (typically with drones and rockets) are largely the preserve today of Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Qais’ AAH is more focused on politics and business. Yet these actors form one system—akin to someone shaking your hand with one appendage while they slap your face with the other.
Nor has Western engagement stopped Qais from non-kinetic attacks on Western influence in Iraq. For instance, he publicly portrays U.S. and Western values as a “malicious project”69 that is infecting Iraq with homosexuality and other behaviors he views as deviant and which his movement violently punishes on Iraq’s streets.70 Qais and Laith al-Khazali were first sanctioned in 2019 precisely because of their brutal suppression of unarmed civilians. It may be a fool’s errand to try to move Qais into a political space where he is no longer a serious human rights abuser—certainly if he receives unconditioned opportunities for rehabilitation by meeting figures as varied as the UN Secretary General and the Australian ambassador.71
Verdict: Preventing an Iraqi Hezbollah
As RAND’s comprehensive 2008 historical survey concluded, the terrorist movements most likely to genuinely join the political process as participants—not overlords—were those groups with the most limited goals, which made negotiation and demobilization simpler.72 Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq could appear, at first blush, to be a pragmatic organization just seeking a place at the top table of Iraqi parliamentary politics, and that is certainly how they wish to present themselves. Some advocates of engagement have argued to the author that all AAH seems to want is to be left alone by the United States and not demonized—a kind of non-aggression pact.73 As expressed to this author, AAH has big plans for Iraq that will ultimately cohere with U.S. interests—or so the promise of Iraqi spin-doctors and lobbyists goes.74
However, the problem is what AAH might do to Iraq if it is left alone. Qais al-Khazali and his brother Laith appear to have almost boundless opportunism, confidence, and ambition. They already groomed one man—Prime Minister Sudani—from an unremarkable member of parliament to the premier.75 The movement and its leaders are strengthening further by the day as ageing rivals dim and their power weakens. The December 2023 provincial elections in Iraq saw AAH challenge all of the other Shi’ite parties combined in Diyala, one of the bellwether Shi’ite governorates, and it took the combination of all other parties to block an AAH takeover.76 Both the RAND and Cronin research efforts found that terrorist groups with narrow, tangible demands were the easiest to detach from terrorism, while Qais and AAH appear to have a simple but very expansive end-state in mind: power over Iraqis, the Iraqi economy, and an important public leadership role in the resistance toward the United States, Israel, and broader Western values. This suggests Qais’s and AAH’s goals are the opposite of the tangible, limited goals that often aid terrorist deactivation.
One of the saving graces for Iraq in recent years has been that there is no single dominant Iran-backed militia but instead a crowd of squabbling factions that balance and undermine each other constantly. In other words, there has been no singular Hezbollah to dominate Iraq as Lebanon is currently dominated. Qais, Laith, and AAH aspire to be that Iraqi Hezbollah.
Indeed, the birth of AAH was designed by Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese Hezbollah architect who was captured in 2007 alongside Qais and Laith.77 AAH’s current trajectory is the reorientation model that Audrey Kurth Cronin most feared: one of terrorist rulership, in which whole countries and economies become hostages. This is why Qais and AAH are arguably so dangerous: not because he fired the odd drone at U.S. bases, but because he is smart enough not to do so. Other militias send drones to U.S. bases: Qais sends lobbyists to Washington. AAH is not Sinn Féin, a group with very limited power within the broader UK system. AAH is instead a terrorist group with a very good chance of becoming “first among equals”—at the very least—atop the political leadership of the sectarian majority.
Most importantly, AAH has not fundamentally rejected the use of terrorism against innocent civilians and other targets. Yes, AAH does not seem to be a major player in attacking U.S. targets now, but this is more properly viewed as a form of successful extortion of the U.S. by AAH: it signals U.S. weakness and can easily be reversed by Qais as circumstances demand. RAND and Cronin both conclude that terrorist groups most often end when they see themselves in a weakening position. Qais, Laith, and AAH see quite the opposite in their review of today’s political landscape in Iraq. This adds up to a very weak negotiating position for the West, and this seems to be evidenced in the repeated granting of legitimacy to Qais al-Khazali in return for precisely nothing—except a continued absence of drone and rocket strikes by his movement on foreigners.
Instead, the West should be hitting the brakes and conditioning any slow start to reengagement on AAH truly detaching from all violence—foremost against Iraqis. The United States and United Kingdom may well decide to forgive Qais for his attacks on their citizens, as governments have chosen to do many times in the past, but they arguably do not have the right to forgive Qais’s attacks on Iraqis or citizens of other nations,78 especially as this violence continues into the present. The United Kingdom could not have engaged with Sinn Féin as it did if the group’s militants had ceased attacking Britain, only to start a terrorist campaign against the Republic of Ireland instead. Nor is it likely that the United Kingdom could have incorporated Sinn Féin into politics if its leaders were directly and egregiously implicated in ongoing intimidation, organized crime, and other efforts to derail the political process.
If one does not like the current approach of engaging Qais and AAH without demands, then it is incumbent on critics to suggest a better approach. One can, for now, set aside the dramatic prospect of simply decapitating AAH by killing some of its leaders—which could be effective, but which is an uncertain approach and an unlikely one as long as Qais refrains from attacking Americans. Aiding Iraq’s government to diminish Qais and AAH through a campaign of legal investigations and removal of AAH members from state institutions might be possible, especially as AAH’s domestic rivals grow more and more keen to undercut him, and this should be considered. However, this is a future opportunity that is perhaps not immediately amenable to U.S. policy, absent a covert irregular warfare effort focused on hastening Qais’s enfeeblement.
The remaining routes to terrorist disengagement all involve negotiation, which should be a two-sided affair. If anyone is going to engage the al-Khazali power base in any way, it should never be for free. This necessitates a clearer definition of what kinds of activities Qais al-Khazali and AAH are committing to cease, in return for gradual engagement. Ongoing negative behavior, even attacks, regularly overlap with negotiations on disengagement from terrorism. This is natural. But terrorist groups are expected to commit to a suspension of terrorist tactics and to normalize their behaviors, not merely morph into violent criminal cartels or redirect their violence against targeted social groups—Cronin’s image of “reorientation” of a terrorist group toward criminality. Qais and AAH need to cease their violent attacks on Iraqi civilians, show a clean record in the next October 2025 national elections and subsequent government formation period, and power down the rampant AAH penetration of Iraq’s economic levers, especially oil smuggling activities that often benefit Iran. If this sounds unlikely, that is because it is—which should give pause to any reasonable person endorsing the rehabilitation of AAH and its leaders.
Qais would also need to show real commitment to changing the nature of his organization permanently and entering a truth and reconciliation process to account for the movement’s crimes against Iraqi civilians. Until then, giving Qais and AAH any relief or engagement is merely signaling weakness and a lack of political acumen.
And indeed, Qais al-Khazali likes making a fool of his enemies. In an iconic March 2, 2023 image, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was punked into posing for a picture with Qais and another U.S.-designated human rights abuser, Rayan al-Kildani.79 (Kildani did the same to Pope Francis on September 7, 2023.80) As a long-term watcher of Qais’s unfortunate rise, I simply wish to caution: let’s learn the lesson of these inadvertent endorsements of Qais al-Khazali. The United States needs to be clear-eyed about who it is meeting and why. Whether it is ultimately right or wrong to try to engage villains like Qais al-Khazali, let’s have a real debate about it, where Congress can ask questions in public and both sides of the arguments can be fully aired. Otherwise, U.S. diplomats could be the next high-profile victims to be punked by Qais al-Khazali, with history books remembering them as the folks who had the bright idea of making an Iraqi Pinochet.