Even after a ceasefire officially halted the US-Israel war with Iran on 8 April, the Gulf states have endured drone attacks originating from Iraq.
Furthermore, there are growing indications that a large share of drones targeting these countries during the war came from Iraq rather than directly from Iran itself.
For years, Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has helped its Iraqi militia proxies assemble and deploy an increasingly deadly drone arsenal that they can unleash against targets outside Iraq.
On 17 May, Saudi Arabia announced it had intercepted three drones flying from Iraqi airspace. The same day, drones targeted the Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the first time.
Two days later, the Emirati defence ministry said that all those attack drones came from Iraq. The latter attack was described as a “warning shot” by Iran and the Iraqi militia perpetrators as an emergent “escalating actor in the region” .
Additionally, Kuwait announced on 24 April that two drones launched from its northern neighbour targeted its northern border posts. Political tripwire The new Iraqi government of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has scrambled to alleviate the concerns of its Gulf neighbours. It swiftly pledged to cooperate with Saudi Arabia and announced the dispatch of a senior security team to the kingdom and the neighbouring UAE to investigate the 17 May attacks.
Baghdad is also reportedly considering creating a new security ministry to restrict the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) under which many of these Iran-backed militias operate.
However, Lawk Ghafuri, an independent Iraq political analyst, doubts that the Iraqi state has “the capability and the political space” to either disarm or dissolve these powerful Iran-backed groups.
“Previous governments could not do it, and the current cabinet faces the same reality: any serious attempt to confront these factions could trigger major retaliation and internal instability,” Ghafuri told The New Arab .
“Over the years, the IRGC heavily empowered these groups with weapons, training, manpower, and advanced drone capabilities, making them far more powerful and entrenched than many outsiders realise,” he said.
“At the same time, Iraq is now under growing regional and international pressure, especially from Washington and the Gulf states, to prevent Iraqi territory from being used for attacks against neighbouring countries.”
The Iraq analyst believes that Baghdad currently faces its “last real opportunity” to reassert its state authority as the militias’ Iranian patron finds itself under significant pressure from the US and Israel.
Despite this pressure, Tehran and its proxies are still highly capable of creating instability throughout the region, as these attacks demonstrate.
“If Baghdad fails to act or continues avoiding difficult decisions, Iraq could face serious political, economic, and security consequences, including further regional military responses inside Iraqi territory,” Ghafuri said. Numbers game An 18 May Al-Monitor report cited regional diplomats saying that the Saudi government and the Trump administration believe that approximately 50% of all drone attacks targeting the Gulf countries originated from Iraq. They assessed that the majority of drone attacks targeting Saudi Arabia also came from Iraq.
Luca Nevola, a Senior Analyst on Yemen and the Gulf at the non-profit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, doesn’t believe the drone threat from Iraq to the Gulf states is comparable to the one from Iran.
“Firstly, if we rely on public reporting, attacks launched directly from Iranian territory vastly outnumber those carried out from Iraq,” Nevola told TNA .
“In terms of sheer numbers, ACLED has recorded only 68 events involving attacks by Iraqi militias against Gulf countries (as of 20 May), representing around 8% of all attacks targeting the Gulf during the current conflict,” he said.
“By contrast, ACLED has recorded more than 730 Iranian attacks, approximately 80% of which involved the use of drones.”
Nevertheless, Nevola advised that one should treat these figures “with caution” as the definitive number of attacks the Iraqi militias carried out is “almost certainly underestimated”.
He noted that the Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen targeted two Gulf states with drone attacks to date, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The former was targeted twice in January 2022, while the latter faced 360 drone attacks between 2018 and 2022.
“Overall, two main patterns emerge: high-intensity drone campaigns launched from expected directions, and sporadic drone attacks that succeed by taking air defences by surprise,” Nevola said.
Michael Knights, the head of research at Horizon Engage, a strategic advisory firm working with the largest companies in the Gulf States, Europe, and the US, assesses that, “in terms of the weight,” the Gulf states’ experience of attacks from Iraq during the war is certainly unprecedented.
“We’re tallying the numbers now for a major report, but they number in the hundreds,” Knights told TNA . “Also, Iran for the first time brought ballistic missiles into Iraq and fired them from within Iraq, probably to face a lessened risk of US counter-fire,” he added.
“What Iraq and Iran did in this war was unprecedented in terms of the high numbers of long-range systems fired at the Gulf from launch sites outside Iran.” Directionality and distance ACLED’s Nevola suggested that one can make an interesting comparison by examining the “directionality of the attacks” and the distance between the launch site and the target.
He recalled that Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia and Iranian attacks in the Gulf occurred in the “context of high-intensity warfare”. Launched from relatively short distances, they often relied on “swarming tactics” with an aim to “saturate” enemy air defences.
“Under such conditions, some successful strikes were almost inevitable, despite the fact that air defence systems and radar coverage were oriented toward the threat and that attacks generally followed predictable approach vectors,” Nevola said.
“By contrast, Houthi and Iraqi militia attacks against the UAE, as well as Houthi attacks against Israel, succeeded despite the long distances involved, which should theoretically have provided sufficient time for air defences to detect and intercept the drones,” he added.
Flying at low altitudes and following “unusual approach vectors across vast territories” made this possible, as did the orientation of radar coverage eastward and its optimisation for ballistic missile defence. “This speaks to the emerging threat of asymmetric warfare, and can hardly be addressed in military terms,” Nevola said. Warning signs Horizon Engage’s Knights noted that, from the Houthis to the PMF, Iran-backed militias have long harboured a “particular hatred” for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
“From 2019 to 2022, this became more open, copying the Houthi example,” he said.
“The way Iraq’s PMF was granted huge tracts of government land right on the Saudi-Iraq border was an obvious threat that I flagged at the time in 2022, and this land was subsequently used in 2026 to bombard the Gulf.”
Nevola also believes earlier Houthi drone attacks and the devastating 14 September 2019 attack against Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure served as a forewarning for what was to come.
“The (2019) Abqaiq attack was an early warning sign, but the Houthis’ campaign in the Red Sea and against Israel has demonstrated the limited effectiveness of military responses against asymmetric threats and highly resilient actors such as the Houthis,” he said.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE already sought to address the issue politically by accepting a ceasefire agreement with the Houthis in April 2022. The Saudis kept diplomatic channels with the group open, which likely limited potential Houthi involvement in the latest war .
“A more confrontational approach would likely have prompted the Houthis to open an additional front in the conflict with Iran, further complicating interception efforts,” Nevola said. Plausible deniability Following the 17 May drone attacks, the Iraqi government claimed that “no information had been recorded” by its surveillance systems.
Nevola estimates that Iraq most likely only has a “partial capability” to “reliably detect and attribute low-altitude militia drone launches” throughout its territory, especially areas where militias operate “with substantial autonomy,” such as the border region flagged by Knights.
“Retaliatory strikes by Gulf countries against Iraqi militias are increasingly likely, as attacks originating from Iraq provide Gulf states with opportunities for calibrated responses that avoid the risks associated with direct escalation against Iran,” Nevola said.
“At the same time, such attacks tend to elicit limited responses from the Iraqi government, further lowering the political and strategic costs of retaliation.”
Knights recalled that most of those post-ceasefire attacks to date originated from Iraq, which gives Iran a degree of plausible deniability.
“The logic is that this does not constitute an Iranian violation of the ceasefire,” he said. “But Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are likely to retaliate in Iraq, and perhaps Iran is happy to create new tensions between Iraq and the Arab world.”
Saudi fighter jets already bombed militia targets in Iraq before the current ceasefire.
“Iraq’s new government is on the verge of taking more robust action against the groups that have struck the Gulf,” Knights said. “The current situation is untenable.” Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist based in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, who writes about Middle East affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @pauliddon Edited by Charlie Hoyle