Iran Update March 20, 2025
Katherine Wells, Carolyn Moorman, Ben Rezaei, Johanna Moorman, Siddhant Kishore, Kelly Campa, Avery Borens, and Annika Ganzeveld
Information Cutoff 2:00 pm ET
The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) publish the Iran Update, which provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. CTP-ISW publishes the Iran Update every weekday.
Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations, and here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of the ongoing opposition offensive in Syria. These maps are updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
A senior official from Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba implicitly warned on March 20 that Iranian-backed Iraqi militias would resume attacks targeting US forces in Iraq and Syria if US forces do not withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2025.[1] The official suggested that Iranian-backed Iraqi militias would conduct “advanced and modern strikes” targeting US forces if US forces do not withdraw from Iraq by this date. The United States and Iraq agreed in September 2024 that hundreds of US-led international coalition forces would withdraw from Iraq by September 2025 and that remaining forces would withdraw by the end of 2026.[2] The Iraqi federal government has reportedly considered postponing the withdrawal of US forces in recent months due to the security threat it perceives that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria poses to Iraq, however.[3] The removal of US forces from Iraq and Syria is a long-standing Iranian objective and Iranian-backed Iraqi militias frequently conducted attacks targeting US forces in Iraq and Syria between October 2023 and January 2024.[4]Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba previously resisted Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force Commander Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani’s order to halt attacks targeting US forces in early January 2024.[5] Ghaani recently met with Iranian-backed Iraqi militia leaders in Baghdad on March 19 and may have discussed efforts to remove US forces from Iraq with these leaders.[6]
Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and the Houthis are increasingly sharing military knowledge, which could increase both groups’ ability to threaten US and allied interests in the region. The Houthis have extensive experience in drone warfare and have shared this experience with Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, as evidenced by the death of a Houthi drone expert in a US airstrike south of Baghdad in July 2024.[7] The Houthis also reportedly operate three offices across Iraq and a training camp in a town controlled by Kataib Hezbollah in Diyala Province, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).[8] RUSI reported on March 19 that Iranian-backed fighters in the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) have reportedly deployed to Yemen in recent months to train Houthi fighters in combat technology, including drones and improvised explos...
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