Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has quietly assembled a new kind of weapon in Iraq. Not a militia. Not a proxy force with its own political ambitions and loose chain of command. Something leaner, more deniable, and reporting directly to Tehran.
According to Reuters, the IRGC now operates three to four covert cells in Iraq, each composed of roughly 10 elite Iraqi Shi’ite fighters. Between April 20 and May 17, 2026, these units carried out at least seven drone attacks from southern Iraq targeting US-allied Gulf states: at least three strikes hit Kuwait, at least two struck Saudi Arabia, and at least two targeted the UAE.
A new playbook for plausible deniability
These new cells deliberately sidestep Iran’s existing militia infrastructure, including groups like Kata’ib Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. Iran built a parallel attack network specifically so it could hit Gulf neighbors without the fingerprints of any known militia group showing up at the scene.
The launches originated from areas near Basra and Samawa in southern Iraq, according to Iraqi security sources cited by Reuters. Iraqi security sources confirmed that these cells operate under direct IRGC oversight, not through the traditional intermediary structure that has defined Iran’s proxy warfare model for years.
