The Shia Armed Groups and the Future of Iraq

Abstract: The rising and acceleration of the Shia armed group in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon require a deep understanding of the root of the multi-dimensional conflicts in the Middle East. An appropriate and sufficient approach to the research about these militias would be from a viewpoint of an internal conflict rather than an external conflict. The legitimization of the existence of the majority of these militias, if not all of them, is the fight and the struggle against an entity which is the Sunni sect, that would assimilate them rather than integrating them peacefully. In this article, we try to identify the impact of the Shia militias in Iraq on the formation of the future of this country. We maintain that these armed groups will be a destabilizing factor for Iraq and its neighbors, and they will worsen and deepen the sectarian division in the Middle East. We assess these different groups from different perspectives, for example, using the Weberian theory that the state is the only entity that has a monopoly of violence; Ariel Ahram’s model of state-sponsored and government-sponsored militias; and finally the devolution of violence to these armed groups.