Head of Iraqi armed group says it suffered over 100 strikes, lost dozens of fighters

Falih al-Fayadh, head of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), has said that the umbrella organisation for armed groups in Iraq suffered more than 100 attacks on its headquarters and lost about 100 fighters since the US-Israel war on Iran began, with dozens more wounded.

In an interview on Al Sharqiya TV, al-Fayadh said the PMF was the party most affected in Iraq by the strikes. He described the attacks as coming from varying sources, saying they were “sometimes American, sometimes American-suspected to be Israeli”.

Al-Fayadh attributed the targeting partly to overlap between PMF facilities and sites used by allied armed factions, but said the attacks were ultimately aimed at pressuring the PMF to rein in those factions.

He said the PMF did not fire a single shot during the recent US-Iran war, and that the group acted strictly under the authority of Iraq’s commander-in-chief of the armed forces rather than making its own decisions on war. “If the state is not officially part of the war, we do not fire a single shot,” he said.

Al-Fayadh denied any intention to transform the PMF into an Iraqi version of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and said he did not expect clashes over disarmament following a US troop withdrawal.