TEHRAN, Iran, June 19 (World Daily Times) — The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has allegedly shifted part of its pressure campaign in the Gulf to small, hard-to-track teams inside Iraq, a move that would matter because it suggests Iran is trying to keep the threat alive while making it harder to pin attacks on its main proxy forces.
Reuters, citing eight Iraqi sources including military officials, a security official and local militia commanders, reported that the IRGC set up secretive new cells in Iraq to carry out attacks on Gulf countries that host American forces. The sources said the cells were created to bypass established militia networks and avoid detection.
According to the Iraqi sources cited by Reuters, the new groups were split into three or four cells of about 10 elite Iraqi Shi’ite Muslim fighters each. Some members were said to come from Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of hardline Shi’ite factions, but the new cells were described as operating outside that group’s command structure and reporting directly to the IRGC.
That distinction matters. Iraqi officials cited by Reuters said the IRGC’s use of separate cells was meant to preserve plausible deniability, shift blame away from the best-known Iran-backed groups, and ease U.S. pressure on Baghdad to disarm them. If those accounts are accurate, they point to a more compartmentalized network designed to make regional attacks harder to trace and harder to deter.
Three Iraqi security sources told Reuters the cells launched at least seven drone attacks from desert areas near Basra and Samawa in southern Iraq. The sources said they relied on human intelligence, intercepted communications and evidence gathered at launch sites. They said the attacks, which ran from April 20 to May 17, targeted sites in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The report fits a broader pattern of Gulf security fears over drones and other cross-border attacks launched from Iraqi territory. It also shows why such allegations carry weight beyond Iraq: the reported targets are states that host American forces, so any attack linked to Iran-backed actors can quickly become a regional and U.S. security issue. The material provided with the Reuters report did not include a response from the IRGC, the Iraqi government or the three Gulf states named as targets.
