American weapons initially delivered to the Iraqi government are falling into the hands of Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq according to a report for Bloomberg View Thursday by Eli Lake and Josh Rogin.

U.S. weapons intended for Iraq’s beleaguered military are winding up in the possession of the country’s Shiite militias, according to U.S. lawmakers and senior officials in the Barack Obama administration. These sources say that the Baghdad government, which was granted $1.2 billion in training and equipment aid in the omnibus spending bill passed last month, is turning hardware over to Shiite militias that are heavily influenced by Iran and have been guilty of gross human-rights violations.

The problem isn’t only that the Iraqi government is lax in its tracking of the weapons, but also that the Iranian backed militias have close ties to elements in the Iraqi government. Mohammed al-Ghabban, Iraq’s recently appointed interior minister, “was a senior official in Iraq’s Badr militia, an organization U.S. officials have privately suspected of launching attacks on hundreds of Sunni Iraqis over last decade.”

Lake and Rogin quoted Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who stated:

“The Iraqi military is a long way from being prepared to act in an impactful fashion, meanwhile the vacuum is being filled by Shia militias that are Iranian backed. And I was told […] that some of those arms came from the United States of America. […] The Iranians are now, to a large degree, through the Shia militias, in the absence of a capable Iraqi military, doing most of the fighting against ISIS. That cannot be in the U.S. interest.”

The close ties between Iran and Iraq’s Shiite militias was recently documented by Matthew Levitt and Phillip Smyth.

In How Iraq Became a Proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, published in the December 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Jonathan Spyer and Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi analyzed how the Iranian-backed Shiite militias became so powerful:

The Shia militias, backed and coordinated by Iran, are now filling the vacuum left behind by the regular army. This phenomenon was rapidly if unintentionally bolstered by a fatwa from Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, Ayatollah Sistani, on the obligation to defend the country in the face of the I.S. threat. While Sistani had intended to encourage people to enlist in the official security forces, in practice his fatwa midwifed the broad umbrella of Shia militias conventionally dubbed al-hashad al-sha’abi (“the popular mobilization”) in the Iraqi press. The militias themselves, however, like to call themselves, somewhat ominously, al-muqawama al-islamiya (“the Islamic resistance”).

Due to the wave of enlistment set off by Sistani and the weakness of the official security forces, there is scarcely a single area in which at least some of the Shia militias are not operating. In many cases, such as the recent successful offensive to clear the I.S. out of Jurf al-Sakhr—a predominantly Sunni area of Babil province, south of Baghdad—and the ongoing fighting to dislodge the I.S. from al-Muqdadiya in Diyala province, it is clear that the fighting has been or is being led by Shia militias.

The growing importance of the Shia militias’ resistance to the I.S. in Iraq is not simply the result of their own combat skills. It is very much a product of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iranian regime’s elite paramilitary force, whose role in regional conflicts—and, it should be noted, terrorism—is large and expanding. The Shia’s success in Iraq reflects the effectiveness of IRGC doctrine regarding the construction, support, and use of sectarian political and military proxies as a central tool—sometimes the central tool—of Iranian policy in the region.

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