Days before he died, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis stood before a crowd of supporters in Iraq and told them the Americans should not imagine they could keep their bases. A US strike then killed him alongside Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian whose interests he had served for years. The Guardian reported the death on January 3, 2020.
Muhandis, born Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ebrahimi, had founded Kata’ib Hezbollah. The militia he left behind shows how Tehran put together its proxy force inside Iraq. Researcher Phillip Smyth, who tracks Shia armed groups from the United States, put it this way: “Muhandis was demonstrative of how Iran built its network of proxies in Iraq.”
A founder with a long record
Muhandis was born in Basra in 1953. His father was Iraqi, his mother Iranian. As a schoolboy he joined the Dawa party, a Shia opposition movement, and in 1980 he fled the country. Kuwait handed him a death sentence for his part in the 1983 bombings of the American and French embassies there. Abroad he rose to commander in the Badr force, Iraqi exiles who fought on Iran’s side, and stayed until the late 1990s. He returned in 2003, once the American-led invasion had toppled Saddam.
The Mapping Militants Project at Rice University says he set up Kata’ib Hezbollah that year as an umbrella over five smaller militias, among them Kata’ib Karbala and Kata’ib al-Sajjad. The group took its centralised form in 2007, when those five merged. The name, in English, is Hezbollah Brigades or Party of God Brigades.
Lebanese Hezbollah supplied early recruits with guerrilla training and weapons, the researchers write, and many analysts believe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had a direct hand in the formation. Under Muhandis, smuggling networks carried Iranian weapons and equipment into Iraq.
Attacks on American forces
The group’s first recorded attack came on February 19, 2008. It fired an improvised rocket-assisted munition at a US base southeast of Baghdad and killed one American civilian. Between 2008 and 2011 most of its attacks were aimed at coalition forces. Washington put it on its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations on July 2, 2009. After American troops left Iraq in 2011, a large number of its fighters went to Syria to back the Assad government.
The role changed again in 2014. Kata’ib Hezbollah joined the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella of roughly fifty mostly Shia militias assembled to fight the Islamic State. In 2016 Iraq’s parliament wrote that body into the machinery of the state. Muhandis co-founded it and became its de facto head, and Kata’ib Hezbollah staffs its 45th, 46th and 47th brigades. Once the Islamic State was broadly defeated in 2017, the group returned to targeting US forces. Its fighters have sworn loyalty to Ayatollah Khamenei.
The road to January 2020
NPR’s timeline starts with a rocket attack on the K1 base near Kirkuk. An American contractor died and several American and Iraqi personnel were wounded. The militia has ties to Iran and denied orchestrating the attack.
Washington hit back from the air. At a short briefing at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 29, 2019, Defense Secretary Mark Esper named five targets across the Iraqi west and the Syrian east and said more action would follow “as necessary”. The Guardian reported that those strikes killed two dozen members of Muhandis’s militia. Then, on a Tuesday morning, Iraqi supporters of Kata’ib Hezbollah began storming the US embassy in Baghdad, starting fires and damaging a reception area.
The drone strike that killed the 66-year-old Muhandis and Suleimani hit at Baghdad International Airport in the early hours of Jan. 3, 2020.
Ahmad al-Hamidawi has led the group since August 2020. It has not gone quiet. Mapping Militants lists a suspected drone strike on the US al-Asad base in Anbar province on April 22, 2024, with no casualties reported. Analysts note that attacks on that base are “almost exclusively associated with” Kata’ib Hezbollah, one of the few Iraqi groups with real expertise in drone warfare.
Sources
- Kata'ib Hezbollah – Mapping Militants Project
- Timeline: How The U.S. Came To Strike And Kill A Top Iranian General
- Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis: Iraqi killed in US strike was key militia figure
