Majority of attacks on Saudi Arabia carried out by pro-Iran militias in Iraq

Saudi Arabia announced on Sunday that it had intercepted three drones after they entered its airspace from neighboring Iraq.

Saudi Defense Ministry spokesperson Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki said that Riyadh would take the necessary measures in response to any attempt to violate the kingdom's security and sovereignty.

Iraq’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday that it was investigating the claim, but that Iraqi air defenses had not detected any drones launched within the country’s airspace.

Yet the drone attacks on Saudi Arabia fit a broader pattern, according to regional officials and diplomats.

Since the start of the Iran conflict on Feb. 28, the bulk of attacks on the kingdom have come from Iraq, ostensibly carried out by Iran-backed Shiite militias, according to two diplomats based in the region and a senior Iraqi official who spoke exclusively to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity.

“The Saudi government believes almost all the drone and missile attacks originated from Iraq, not Iran,” one of the officials said. That assessment is shared by the Trump administration, the official added. “Around 50% of all drone attacks launched on Gulf countries since the war began came from Iraq,” the Iraqi official said.

Iran has long relied on its proxies in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon to strike its enemies.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, the Jewish state has responded forcefully, targeting many of Iran’s top leaders as well as its allies across the so-called Shiite Crescent. However, despite sustained US strikes since the start of the Iran war this year, militias in Iraq have continued to target US interests in Iraq and its allies in the Gulf on Iran’s behalf.

Despite the huge setbacks it has suffered, Iran is “showing that the proxy threat still has currency, and that’s so classic — hitting an American embassy with a proxy,” James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Iraq and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Al-Monitor. At the same time, Iran views the Gulf states as an existential threat to its own theocratic model, Jeffrey noted, and is determined to “remind the Gulf Cooperation Council states that our goal in life is to make you subservient.”

Like many observers, Jeffrey believes that military retaliation by the Gulf states is little more than a pinprick for Iran, which suffered far greater misery during its war with Iraq in the 1980s. “They have suffered tremendous devastation, so they can suck it up,” Jeffrey said.

Rapprochement reversed

Sunday’s statement marks the first time the kingdom has called out Iraq by name in an official statement. On April 12, its Foreign Ministry summoned the Iraqi ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Safia Taleb al-Souhail, and warned against further attacks against the kingdom from Iraqi territory, Saudi news outlets reported.

Iraq and Saudi Arabia have remained at odds due to Iran’s outsized influence over Baghdad. But tensions began subsiding in 2015 with the exchange of ambassadors and the reopening of the Arar border crossing in 2020. The rapprochement accelerated following a Chinese-brokered deal between Tehran and Riyadh in 2023 that saw the two countries restore diplomatic ties.

The Iran conflict has reversed the trend.

Reuters reported on May 13 that Saudi Arabia had bombed targets linked to Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq during the course of the war, with some of the strikes by Saudi Air Force jets occurring around the time of the April 8 US-Iran ceasefire. Reuters reported earlier that the kingdom had also directly targeted Iran in retaliation for its strike on Saudi Arabia. The East-West pipeline, the kingdom’s sole remaining outlet for exporting oil since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, was hit just hours after the ceasefire was announced. The same pipeline was struck in 2019 by drones originating from Iraq.

Two of the officials said there was a high degree of probability that the March 3 drone attack on the US Embassy in Riyadh had also originated from Iraq. A fourth official said that the evidence remained inconclusive, but agreed that the source was likely Iraq.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Saudi-Iranian diplomatic backchannel talks are continuing “intensively,” one of the officials said. Riyadh has reportedly discussed the idea of a non-aggression pact between Iran and several Middle Eastern states, the Financial Times reported on May 14, in a bid to avert further attacks by Iran.

Michael Knights is head of reearch at Horizon Engage, a geopolitical consultancy. One of the reasons attacks on Saudi Arabia come from Iraq rather than Iran is because the Iraq-Saudi border is not as well defended as the Gulf littoral, he told Al-Monitor. 

Hostilities linked to the Iran conflict have largely subsided since President Donald Trump announced in April that he was halting the fighting to pursue a deal with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, secure Iran’s effective renunciation of its nuclear program and transfer its enriched uranium stockpile. Iran is said to have rejected the terms of the United States’ most recent proposal to end the conflict. The talks are being facilitated by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia’s top military ally and the world’s only Muslim-majority country with nuclear weapons.

Regional officials and diplomats say Pakistan would not have assumed the role without Saudi approval. Pakistan is believed to have deployed around 8,000 troops, a squadron of fighter jets and an air defense system to Saudi Arabia under the terms of a mutual defense pact, Reuters reported on Monday.

Gulf rift

The kingdom’s backing for a diplomatic solution has deepened existing divisions with the United Arab Emirates, which has emerged as the most hawkish among the Gulf nations and the one with the closest ties to Israel.

The UAE reportedly secretly carried out multiple strikes on Iran, much like the Saudis, the Wall Street Journal reported. Last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi asserted in a Telegram post that the UAE was “an active partner in this aggression, and there is no doubt about it.” No such invective has been directed at Riyadh so far.

Soon after Sunday’s attacks on the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Trump warned via Truth Social that his patience was wearing thin. “For Iran, the clock is ticking and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them,” Trump wrote.

Iran said Monday that it had submitted a revised response to the United States but provided no further details.

Trump’s ultimatum came hours after the attempted strikes on Saudi Arabia and another on a nuclear power plant in the UAE. Emirati officials said the fire just outside the Barakah nuclear plant was caused by a drone launched by Iran or one of its proxies. Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash called it a “dangerous escalation” in a post on X, “whether carried out by the principal perpetrator or through one of its agents.”

The attack was likely a message to the United States and the UAE that “if you touch our energy infrastructure, your nuclear infrastructure will go kaput,” one of the officials contended.

Using proxies gives Iran more wiggle room to deny direct involvement. “If Iran were to carry out the attack, it would be breaching the ceasefire,” Knights said, adding that he sees a link between Sunday’s attacks and last week’s news that a top commander in Kataib Hezbollah, the US-designated Iraqi Shiite militia seen as Iran’s top asset in Iraq, had been arrested and charged by federal authorities in connection with coordinating and planning at least 18 terrorist attacks in Europe and Canada targeting Americans and Jews. Mohammed Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi was planning attacks in the United States as well as revenge for the war against Iran, prosecutors said. He was carrying a special-issue Iraqi passport.

Kataib Hezbollah was the group behind the kidnappings of Russian-Israeli researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was released in September 2025 after nearly two and a half years in captivity, and US journalist Shelly Kittleson, who was freed on April 7 after a week in captivity.

Successive Iraqi governments have had little appetite for or success in reining in the Shiite militias, which compete with one another to curry favor with Tehran, Jeffrey observed. Ali al-Zaidi, who was sworn in as Iraq’s prime minister last week after months of deadlock, will face immediate pressure from the United States to take action against them. Knights concluded that Zaidi may well be telling himself, “I might actually have to do something about these guys and take some risk because they have not just been messing around in Iraq. They have now been proven to be involved in external operations against the United States, Europe and the Gulf.”