Washington Institute exposes Shiite militia mapping project

Robert Al-Faris

Armed Shiite groups have changed the social, political, and military scene in the Middle East, since 2019, more than 100 different Shiite groups have operated in Iraq, Lebanon in Syria, which served as the main arms for Iranian influence in the region.

A report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has said Iran remains the principal creator and backer of Shiite militias throughout the Middle East.

As the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy noted, “Iran is competing with its neighbors, asserting an arc of influence and instability while vying for regional hegemony, using state-sponsored terrorist activities, a growing network of proxies, and its missile program to achieve its objectives.”

Moreover, The 2019 U.S. Worldwide Threat Assessment added that Iran “probably wants to maintain a network of Shia foreign fighters” in Syria.

Its existing proxies there, in Iraq, and in Lebanon have contributed to myriad terrorist activities while maintaining stances that are violently opposed to the United States and its regional allies.

At the same time, not every Shiite armed group is a proxy of Tehran, according to the report; as conflicts between Shiite militias over ideological, political, and commercial interests are plentiful, and tracking these tensions can help expose key vulnerabilities and trends.

Mapping these militias has become especially important since the Iraqi government’s 2014 creation of al-Hashd al-Shabi (the Popular Mobilization Forces), an umbrella group of mostly Shiite militias dominated by Iranian-backed groups.

The rise of the PMF has further obfuscated who is actually doing the fighting on the ground and which areas have a significant militia presence. Some of the most powerful PMF elements are also fighting in Syria, while many have established significant political power within the Iraqi government.

The report, written by Phillip Smyth, said the maps presented within the report have been compiled mainly from primary source data, including contacts within Shia militia circles and social media analysis collected for nearly ten years.

More specifically, the project relies on interviews with a host of Shia fighters, observation of social media accounts belonging to around 200 formal organizations and unofficial fighter networks, messenger app accounts linked with Shia militant groups, Arabic- and Persian-language news sources, and reports issued by organizations that oppose Shia militias (e.g., Daesh). The Google Maps platform has been used due to its ubiquity.

The project’s methods include seeking out mappable data closest to where social media and messenger posts claim a given activity occurred. When posts lack specific place names, the information in question can often be traced to general locations with reasonable accuracy based on other data or methods.

Shiite groups are focus on in the report (e.g., Quwat Sahel al-Ninewa, or the Nineveh Plains Forces, whose members hail from Iraq’s Shabak minority but practice Shia Islam).

The majority of groups covered are influenced or controlled by Iran, including PMF groups (whether official or claimed), Lebanese Hezbollah, Syrian Shiite groups organized on the Hezbollah model, Shiite militias that claim alignment with the Syrian army, Muqtada al-Sadr’s groups Saraya al-Salam and Liwa al-Youm al-Mawud, groups that identify as part of a larger camp under the control of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Militias with majority Ismaili (or Sevener Shia) membership, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force and its subunits, including the Pakistani Shia group Liwa Zainabiyoun and the Afghan Shia group Liwa Fatemiyoun.

The report further adds that activities by specific Shiite militias are denoted by each organization’s logo or a surrogate symbol placed on the map. The accompanying description includes an exact or approximate date for the activity. If photographs of the incident are available, they are included as well.

Many communities overlap and can be quite diverse. As a result, the maps are designed to give a general overview of where significant Shiite population centers, zones of influence, and points of interest are located.

This includes holy sites, or what can be described as  “shrines,” these special sites normally serve as places of worship and veneration for Shia Muslims. For a number of Shia militias, however, claims of defending such sites constitute the core of their armed activities.

In Syria, the “Defense of Sayyeda Zainab”—referring to the mosque and shrine south of Damascus—was used as the casus belli for Iranian-directed Shiite groups beginning in 2012. In Iraq, images from the 2006 bombing of al-Askari shrine in Samarra were used to rally Shiite fighters into the ranks of many militias. These mosques, shrines, and similar sites are marked and explained on the maps.