On a recent afternoon, I was driving across Baghdad, resigned to the whims of my city’s traffic. An old woman in the backseat of the car beside mine sat with her lips sealed, her face catching the afternoon sun with the patient gravity of a pieta. Her gaze had settled on a child, lonesome and thin, working the edge of a roadside garbage dump. In a beige tracksuit, he was nearly invisible, almost dissolving into the place. He picked up a gunny sack, flipped it upside down, and mumbled something. He rummaged until his small hand landed on a pack of crisps—purple, apparently intact—and held it like a prize.

Iraq’s oil sales fueled much of its $94 billion in revenues in 2025, yet little trickles down to the millions who eke out in a precarious informal sector, with little protection and meager pay. The country is yet to fully emerge from the wreckage of its own wars, and the war the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran in February has already spilled over into Iraq. Several Shia armed groups that are allied with Tehran launched rocket and drone strikes targeting the U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad, NATO troops stationed across the country, against Iranian-Kurdish militias sheltering in Kurdistan, and in the Gulf Arab countries to the south.

In Baghdad, a drone struck the headquarters of Iraqi Intelligence, which the militias accuse of collaborating with Emirati and Jordanian intelligence, killing a young officer. Another drone targeted the residence of Nechirvan Barzani, President of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region, only days after rocket attacks killed six Peshmerga fighters. After the attack, the Popular Mobilization Forces, the institutionalized constellation of Shia militias in Iraq, claimed that American and Israeli airstrikes killed three of its fighters in Kirkuk in northern Iraq. An American air strike on a PMF command headquarters in al-Anbar province killed 15 fighters; and another strike on an adjacent military base in al-Habbaniyah, which also houses a paramilitary camp, killed seven soldiers and wounded 13. The PMF claimed to have lost 80 members to American and Israeli airstrikes.

Several commanders of Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Shia militia, were assassinated in the capital in unidentified airstrikes on residential areas. Yet not all the Shia militias have been eager to join the fight. Many Shia elites, including paramilitary leaders, showed no desire to abandon their second lives of comfort and state largesse, even as Iran was being bombed during the 12-Day War in June 2025.

That afternoon, I emerged from traffic onto a crossroads in al-Mansour, a district that had once been prosperous. I found myself beholding a billboard commemorating Qasem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander; Sayid Hasan Nasrullah, the leader of Hezbollah; Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of Kataib Hezbollah, and several fighters of his militia. A parade of martyrs killed in American or Israeli air strikes, assembled like a defeated football side making one last appearance. “Our weapons,” a quote on the billboard read, “we owe the Imam al-Hujjah,” alluding to the disappeared and awaited Shia redeemer, Imam al-Mahdi. In........

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