A commander of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia that is a proxy for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has been charged with plotting to attack Jewish sites in the United States, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday.
The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, has cast a spotlight on the militia, one of the most hard-line and powerful Iranian proxies in Iraq.
The group is a leading faction in the Popular Mobilization Forces, the militia umbrella group that was folded into Iraq’s security apparatus.
Rocket and Drone Attacks
The militia was founded after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which spurred an effort by Iran’s theocratic regime to recruit, train and arm Iraqi Shiite militias to attack American troops on Iraqi soil.
With Iran’s backing, the militia has continued to exert power. Amid the American military campaign in Iran this spring, Kataib Hezbollah launched near-daily drone and rocket attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq and neighboring countries like Jordan and Kuwait.
The group has also claimed responsibility for high-profile abductions. This year, the group kidnapped Shelly Kittleson, a U.S. journalist in Baghdad, freeing her after a week. The militia is perhaps best known for its 2023 abduction of Elizabeth Tsurkov, an Israeli Russian doctoral student. It held her hostage and tortured her for more than two years.
From its inception, Kataib Hezbollah has been closely tied to Iran’s Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards. Its repeated attacks on U.S. posts in Iraq and Syria over the years have contributed to Washington’s 2009 designation of the group as a foreign terrorist organization.
Fighting ISIS and the Iraqi Government
In 2014, Kataib Hezbollah joined with other mostly Shiite militias to fill the vacuum left by Iraq’s faltering military and take on the battle against the Islamic State, or ISIS.
Loosely organized under a coalition called the Popular Mobilization Forces, or P.M.F., those militias helped wrest back territory and, after years of fighting, demolished ISIS’s self-declared caliphate.
Eventually, the P.M.F. came under the formal supervision of Iraq’s national security forces. But factions like Kataib Hezbollah continued to operate with significant independence from the government and remained under Iran’s influence.
A Deadly Attack on an Air Base
In 2019, Kataib Hezbollah was accused of an attack on an Iraqi air base that killed an American contractor. That contributed to the U.S. decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, while he was visiting Iraq.
Iran has long supported Kataib Hezbollah by providing weapons and other aid. Kataib Hezbollah is also partly financed by the Iraqi government, with thousands of its members drawing salaries from the state.