Iraq's air defense void: How US vetoes, and Russian limits leave Baghdad exposed

Shafaq News

Iraq is caught between two forces it cannot confront: the
airpower of its nominal protector, and the political cost of seeking protection
elsewhere. As American and Israeli strikes against Iran-aligned targets inside
Iraqi territory multiply, Baghdad’s air defense vacuum has shifted from a
long-acknowledged liability into an acute national security emergency —one
whose resolution is blocked, analysts say, by the very alliance architecture
meant to guarantee Iraqi sovereignty.

On Wednesday, Iraq’s Ministry of Defense confirmed that a
strike on the Habbaniyah military clinic and an engineering unit left seven
soldiers dead and thirteen wounded —the latest in a pattern of aerial attacks
that have hit Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) positions across al-Anbar,
Baghdad, Babil, Kirkuk, Nineveh, Diyala, and Saladin provinces since
hostilities between the United States, Israel, and Iran erupted on February 28.
Dozens of casualties have accumulated. And on the ground, a second threat is
stirring in the space the strikes have opened.

A Structural Defense Deficit

Retired Major General Jawad al-Dahlaki, a Baghdad-based
security and strategic analyst, frames Iraq’s predicament with unusual
bluntness. “Iraq has no air control and no effective ground-based
defenses,” he told Shafaq News, a deficit he traces not to negligence but
to architecture.

The first jaw of the trap is contractual. Iraq’s
Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) with the United States and the Global
Coalition was designed, in part, to guarantee Iraqi sovereignty and security
cooperation, but it does not constitute a formal air defense support. That
guarantee has become a legal and political paradox: the threat now comes from
the guarantors themselves.

The second jaw is technological. Iraq’s air defense corps
has submitted detailed proposals for early warning systems and advanced missile
batteries. Washington has blocked them according to a military official who
spoke to Shafaq News anonymously, including requests routed through South Korea, a US ally, to reduce the political friction of a direct American sale.
The reasoning, al-Dahlaki explained, is twofold: fear that sophisticated air
defense technology could fall into the hands of Iran-aligned factions operating
inside Iraq, and concern that effective Iraqi air defenses would shield Iranian
assets during periods of American-Israeli escalation against Tehran.

The logic is coherent from Washington’s perspective. From
Baghdad’s, it is a structural veto on sovereignty.

ISIS and the Security Vacuum

The military consequences of this vacuum extend beyond
the strikes themselves. Al-Dahlaki warned that ISIS fighters have begun moving
in western Iraq, exploiting the repositioning of security forces displaced by
repeated aerial bombardment —an assessment aligns with broader patterns
reporting on ISIS opportunism in ungoverned spaces. Attempts to strike Baghdad
prisons holding senior ISIS leadership —with the apparent aim of freeing them—
have also been reported.

This is the understated dimension of the current crisis:
the degradation of Iraq’s fixed security infrastructure by airstrikes is
creating operational freedom for a third actor that neither Washington nor
Tehran wants discussed in this context. The air war, in other words, has a
ground dividend and ISIS is collecting it.

The Cost Equation and the Alternatives

The financial architecture of modern air defense makes
Iraq’s position even more precarious. Intercepting a drone that costs a few
thousand dollars requires a missile like the PAC-3 MSE, priced at $4.1 million
per round. The math of attrition favors the attacker at every exchange ratio.

Cheaper alternatives exist and have been documented.
Germany’s IRIS-T SLM system runs between 150 and 200 million euros per battery
—expensive, but within reach for a state managing substantial oil revenues.
South Korea’s Cheongung-2 (M-SAM) offers interceptors at one to two million
dollars each, providing credible low-tier coverage against drones and
short-range missiles. The heavy American systems —THAAD and Patriot— remain
necessary for protecting large strategic assets but are neither politically
available nor economically viable as Iraq’s primary defense layer.

The options exist. The access does not.

Moscow and Beijing: The Corridor Washington Is Closing

Inside the Iraqi parliament, a faction of legislators
tied to the Shiite Coordination Framework— the dominant political bloc
governing Baghdad— has concluded that the answer lies east. Mukhtar al-Mousawi,
a senior member of the Badr Organization led by Hadi al-Amiri and a key figure
within the Framework, put the position directly: “It is illogical to
import defense systems from the United States to target its own aircraft. We
must turn toward the Russian or Chinese axis.” He acknowledged immediately
that “Washington is placing a veto on this path.”

The statement is politically significant less for what it
proposes than for what it reveals: that Iraq’s governing coalition —not its
opposition— is openly articulating alignment with Moscow and Beijing as a
national security necessity.

Iraqi lawmaker Miqdad al-Khafaji of the Hoqooq bloc, the
political wing of Kataib Hezbollah, revealed last week that legislators are
gathering signatures to summon caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani
and his security ministers for an emergency session, framing the current
situation as “a real state of war with America and Israel.” A
separate legislative initiative is advancing to pass a law specifically funding
air defense procurement —a mechanism designed to create statutory pressure for
action that executive negotiations have failed to produce.

Whether these maneuvers translate into actual procurement
is a different equation. Russia’s calculus, according to Asif Melhem, director
of the JSM Research Center in Moscow, is more constrained than Baghdad’s
parliamentary rhetoric suggests.

Moscow’s Arithmetic

Melhem argues that the current conflict —which he frames
as targeting Iranian and by extension Russian-Chinese regional influence— has
concentrated Russian strategic attention on Iraq as “the gateway to West
Asia.” But Russian willingness to arm Baghdad has hard limits.
“Russia can offer a great deal,” he told Shafaq News, “but
within a precise equation: it cannot provide weapons that constitute a direct
strategic threat to America in Iraq right now. What it can offer is defensive
deterrence.”

That means systems like the S-400, which are capable
enough to constrain American air operations, are off the table, at least
publicly, because Moscow cannot absorb the diplomatic cost with Gulf states and
Turkiye, whose relationships Russia has carefully maintained throughout the
Ukraine war and its regional spillovers. Electronic warfare systems and
defensive missile batteries occupy a middle ground where Russian engagement is
possible, but only if packaged in a way that does not visibly antagonize
Riyadh, Ankara, or Abu Dhabi.

The corridor toward Moscow is real. It is also narrow,
conditioned, and subject to Russian interests that do not perfectly align with
Iraqi ones.

Washington’s Conditional Offer

The American position is neither purely permissive nor
simply obstructionist — it is conditional, and Baghdad finds the conditions
equally unsatisfying. Retired Colonel Myles B. Caggins, former senior
spokesperson for the Global Coalition, confirmed to Shafaq News that the
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 includes provisions
studying the deployment of air defense systems in Iraq, alongside $212.5
million earmarked for Iraqi force training and equipping.

Caggins directed his sharpest language not at Baghdad’s
procurement gaps but at the factions creating the threat environment:
“Iran-aligned militias operating outside the law continue to launch
repeated attacks, keeping civilians in constant fear.” He noted that the
Kurdistan Region alone has absorbed more than 400 rockets and drones since the
conflict began, causing an estimated one billion dollars in lost oil revenues
and millions more in infrastructure damage, and called on Congress to
immediately fund anti-drone and missile defense technology sales to the
Kurdistan Region specifically.

Washington’s emerging posture appears to differentiate
between the Iraqi state and Iraq’s Iran-aligned armed factions as it is
offering defensive support to one while continuing to strike the other. For a
government in Baghdad that cannot operationally or politically separate itself
from the PMF, this distinction offers little practical relief.

A Sovereignty Bind without an Answer

What emerges from the accumulated positions of
al-Dahlaki, Melhem, Caggins, and the parliamentary voices represents a
sovereignty crisis with no visible exit. Iraq cannot accept American air
defense terms without legitimizing the strikes. It cannot turn to Russia
without triggering American countermeasures and regional complications. It
cannot legislate its way to air cover. And it cannot leave its skies open
without watching ISIS reconstitute in the security gaps the bombardment
creates.

The strategic trap al-Dahlaki describes is, at its core,
a trap of alignment —the price Iraq pays for being simultaneously the host of
American forces, the political home of Iranian-backed factions, and the
geographic center of a regional war it did not choose and cannot exit. Every
weapons decision Baghdad faces is also a declaration of whose side it is on.

That is a paradox Iraqi politics has spent two decades
refusing to answer cleanly. The open sky above Habbaniyah suggests the cost of
ambiguity is rising.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq’s air defense void: How US vetoes, and Russian limits leave Baghdad exposed

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