While the US sought to create an Iraqi army to serve as the institution that holds the monopoly on the use of legitimate force in Iraq, such a Weberian rubric has proved elusive. Rather, an oligopoly on violence, characterised by hybridity and plurality, represents a decentralisation of warmaking and warfare in Iraq’s security sector since 2003. This article primarily focuses on the organisations and institutions responsible for warmaking in Iraq in light of the American decision to disband the Iraqi armed forces and concludes with what this transformation means for methods of projecting war, by both Iraqi actors and the US.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is Associate Professor of Middle East history at California State University San Marcos and an advisory board member of the International Security and Conflict Resolution programme at San Diego State University. He obtained his doctorate in Modern History at University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, part of which was plagiarised by the British government prior to the 2003 Iraq War, otherwise known as the “Dodgy Dossier.” He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008), The Modern History of Iraq (Routledge 2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (Routledge, 2018).