How the Hezbollah model has helped Iran reshape the Middle East

Monday, 27 July 2026

Hezbollah fighters take part in a training exercise in Southern Lebanon in May 2023.

Hiba Abdulwahhab is an Iraqi researcher and analyst focused on Iraq’s governance, armed factions, Iranian influence in the region, and questions of Iraqi national identity, alongside broader themes in Middle East politics and security.

Mireille Rebeiz is the director of Dickinson College’s Dickinson in New Zealand programme and associate professor of politics at the University of Otago. She has specialist interest in international law and among numerous publications is the author of Hezbollah in International Law.

OPINION: Hezbollah, which means “party of God” in Arabic, was born during the Lebanese Civil War when Israel invaded Beirut in 1982 and occupied the south.

Officially, the group was born in 1985 with the publication of a manifesto that details its plans for Lebanon and the region. The manifesto, which was revised in 2009, adopted the guidelines of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and pledged allegiance to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.

The civil war ended in Lebanon in 1991 with the signing of the Taif Agreement, which called for the disarmament of all militia groups in Lebanon. However, Hezbollah was not disarmed. Since Israel was occupying south Lebanon, Hezbollah was considered a legitimate armed resistance fighting for Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Therefore, Lebanon indirectly legalised Hezbollah as an armed group, one that shares the use of force with the state.

In addition to its armed presence, Hezbollah developed a political wing. Aware of the changes in the region, Hezbollah ran for national elections in 1992 and won 12 out of 128 parliamentary seats.

Hezbollah supporters hang portraits of Hezbollah fighters killed in Israeli airstrikes, in Lebanon in April.

This marks the beginning of Hezbollah’s infiltration in the Lebanese parliament then government. Some political parties - including Christian Maronites - aligned themselves with Hezbollah.

Hezbollah’s political wing controlled the country and vetoed any decision that would not benefit its agenda; it caused three presidential vacuums and last one ended in 2025 with the election of President Joseph Aoun. Also, Hezbollah eliminated political opposition and was considered responsible for several political assassinations starting with Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005.

Over time, Hezbollah purposely eroded Lebanon's statehood.

In March 2026, the Lebanese government formally banned all of Hezbollah's military activities. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam declared the group's armed wing illegal and restricted Hezbollah strictly to the political sphere. However, Hezbollah continues to ignore the state’s demands to surrender their weapons, effectively undermining the state’s role and dragging the Lebanese people into continuous wars.

The Iraqi adaptation

Iraq offered Iran the chance to transfer a tested model into a far more favourable environment.

Following the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State in June 2014, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling on Iraqis to defend their country, and the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) were established as the vehicle for that mobilisation.

The coffin of the late Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is carried by mourners to the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, Iraq, during his July funeral commemorations.

The fatwa called for civic defence through the state’s own institutions, not for independent armed structures. However, Iran-aligned factions, with Qasem Soleimani personally overseeing the PMF’s formation, redirected that popular legitimacy into a permanent foothold.

What began as an emergency mobilisation hardened over the following decade into a parallel power that now rivals the Iraqi state itself.

Believers and contractors

With the fall of the Assad regime, Iran lost its control over Syria. However, it continues to control non-state actors in Iraq and Lebanon.

As a result, we see weak states and weak military forces in both Iraq and Lebanon, as well as sectarian violence and foreign interference.

However, while Iraq and Lebanon share similarities - mainly Iran’s hegemony - they differ in the way Iranian control appears on the ground.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah is the one dominant actor in Lebanese politics. It is the only entity that operates as a state within the state of Lebanon.

Iraq and Iran have a shared border, religious networks, economic interdependence and deep social and cultural ties linking the two countries. These conditions allowed Iran to choose numerous proxies in Iraq. Instead of relying on a single dominant actor like in Lebanon, Tehran cultivated a network of factions whose influence extends across the military, political and economic spheres, creating a model of influence that is broader, more diffuse and ultimately more difficult to dismantle.

And Iraq’s proximity turned it into a conduit for oil smuggling and sanctions evasion that no other theatre could match.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministe,r Fouad Hussein, right, shakes hands with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi, in Baghdad in June.

This is the heart of the matter. In Lebanon, Hezbollah follows Iran’s ideology, but the Iraqi factions are tied to Iran by interest; their conduct obeys the logic of self-preservation rather than shared ideology. They behave like contractors, rather than believers.

The clearest evidence is their conspicuous silence over reports of Israeli bases on Iraqi soil, an affront that “resistance” doctrine demanded they answer, met instead with calculated quiet, because open confrontation would jeopardise the seats, ministries, and economic networks they have spent a decade amassing. Where Hezbollah fights for a creed, Iraq’s factions increasingly behave like mercenaries guarding a franchise.

The implication is sobering. Hezbollah’s power, anchored in ideology, remains at least vulnerable to ideological and military defeat. The Iraqi factions’ power is woven into the state’s own institutions and economy, which makes it far harder to extract. Disarmament alone will not solve it; the deeper entrenchment is financial and political, and no weapons handover can reverse it.

A bet Iran doesn’t lose

The Iraqi case did not simply replicate the Hezbollah model. Rather, it adapted and transformed it. If Hezbollah created a “state within a state” in Lebanon, Iraqi factions followed a different path by embedding themselves within state institutions and reshaping parts of the state from within.

The current negotiations expose the difference between the two arms more sharply than any battlefield. In its talks with Washington, Iran defended Hezbollah openly, treating Lebanon as a file it would not surrender. However, the US-Iran Agreement (which is now collapsing) said nothing about Iraq.

By keeping the Iraqi factions off the table rather than on it, Iran preserves them in whatever form survives. If they endure as armed groups, Iran keeps its military leverage; if pressure forces them to shed their weapons and continue as parliamentary blocs, Iran keeps its political leverage. Either way, Tehran won. The survival of Iran’s Iraqi arm in any shape it takes is, in the end, a victory for Iran.