The, who are these organizations? Who are these, uh, fighters? Where do they come from? And, you know, what do we need to know about them before we get into the details?

Absolutely, and, I mean, we see it very much now in the news coverage with, uh, the so-called deadline for the disarmament of the resistance faction in Iraq.

And in a lot of the interviews, I'm being asked to comment on the demobilization of the pro-Iranian, and in some context, they even call them Iranian militias.

And then I really try to, uh, highlight the paradox that we have here.

So on the one hand, there is the Popular Mobilization Forces, which by law is part and parcel of the Iraqi security architecture.

By law, they're recognized as an official pillar of the Iraqi Armed Forces, and the paradox stems from the fact that the law that, um, institutionalized their mandate within the Iraqi security sector, in a way described them as part of the armed forces, but also as an independent entity, and this law never really delineated what this independence entails in a way.

Um, the problem also stems from the fact that the PMF is not a unitary actor.

Right