“Iraq’s negotiations with the Americans will never cause a decline in efforts by the Islamic resistance against the outsiders and they will even cause us to pile more pressure on the occupiers,” the anonymous “commander” reportedly said.

“Nujaba and other groups in Iraq, which operate under the umbrella organization of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), have repeatedly said attacks on US positions in Iraq and Syria will continue until Israel ends its genocidal war on Gaza,” PressTV added.

Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba is one of a large number of militias active in Iraq with Iranian backing, and considered “perhaps the most aggressive anti-American Iran-backed militia in Iraq.” It gained notoriety in the jihadi world by releasing a nasheed, or jihadi war song, honoring Iranian terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani. Former President Donald Trump eliminated Soleimani from the battlefield with a targeted airstrike on January 3, 2020, while he was in Iraq coordinating attacks on U.S. forces with Iran’s allied militias there.

The “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” is considered to be made up mostly of those militias, though it appears to be intentionally unclear exactly which of the militias are involved in it or to what extent it is an established organization. The jihadists started using the term to refer to terrorist attacks against America and its allies in Iraq following the October 7 atrocities and has never defined itself or its members publicly.

Many of its members are believed to also be part of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of majority Iran-backed, Shiite militias who became a formal arm of the Iraqi armed forces during the war to uproot the Islamic State “caliphate” in the country. The PMF took credit for fighting the Islamic State despite the Kurdish Peshmerga forces and U.S. troops doing most of the work. American military leaders praised the PMF for their “professional” work at the time.