TEHRAN, Iran, June 19 (World Daily Times) — Iraq is being pulled deeper into the region’s shadow conflict, according to Reuters reporting that says the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps created covert new cells inside Iraq to carry out drone attacks on Gulf states that host American forces.
Reuters said eight Iraqi sources, including two military officials, a security official and five local militia commanders, described the cells as a way to bypass established militia networks and avoid detection. The sources said the groups were small — three or four cells with about 10 elite Iraqi Shi’ite fighters in each — and that they operated outside the command structure of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of hardline Shi’ite factions.
The sources told Reuters the cells carried out at least seven drone attacks from desert areas near Basra and Samawa in southern Iraq between April 20 and May 17. Those attacks were said to target sites in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Iraqi officials cited by Reuters said the alleged shift to smaller, separate cells would give the IRGC plausible deniability, making it harder to pin attacks on the main Iran-backed militia networks and easing pressure on Baghdad to disarm them. If that account is accurate, it would mark a more fragmented and harder-to-track threat pattern, with launches coming from remote Iraqi desert terrain rather than from openly identified militia positions.
The report did not name any people arrested or charged, and the supplied material did not include court records, official charges or public responses from the IRGC, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or the UAE. That leaves the allegations untested in public, but the reporting points to a wider regional risk: small covert units operating across borders can be harder to attribute, harder to deter and more likely to deepen tensions between Tehran, Baghdad and the Gulf capitals.
