The Iraqi militias are copying their overmighty cousins in Iran

Agaggle of Western tourists sun themselves on a crowded café pavement in the heart of Baghdad. Hotel lobbies bustle with businessmen from China. Spectators pack the reopened horse racecourse. After a 20-year hiatus, cranes are in action building malls and housing estates. Normality, or at least a version of it, is returning to Iraq. What is less normal is that many of the bulldozers and tractors bear the rifle-and-bullet insignia of the Hashd al-Shaabi, an umbrella group of government-funded, Iran-backed Shia militias.

In 2014 Iraq’s government of the day launched the Hashd, or people’s mobilisation force, to counter Islamic State (IS), a movement of Sunni jihadists who had conquered Mosul, the country’s main northern city, and were sweeping menacingly south towards Baghdad. But after IS was defeated and a modicum of calm returned, the Hashd found a new role. Though the political coalition it backed came sixth in last year’s general election, the Hashd has managed to wrest control of government, parliament and Iraq’s finances.