GCC Secretary-General Jassim Mohammed Al-Badawi landed in Baghdad last Tuesday with a single operational priority: persuading Iraqi officials to stop Iranian-backed militias from using Iraqi territory as a launch point for attacks on Gulf states. Whether he left with anything concrete remains unclear.
Al-Badawi’s arrival coincided with a particularly charged moment. Iran was staging a show of force in Iraq that same week, following the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali al-Khamenei, while Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi was simultaneously pressing militias to surrender their weapons. The overlapping pressures compressed the diplomatic space considerably.
Sources who spoke to Shafaq News said Al-Badawi planned to meet Iraqi officials to discuss regional developments and announce Gulf states’ support for Iraq across various sectors. The core concern, though, was narrower: keeping Iraqi soil off the battlefield, as it had not always been in the past.
The official meetings produced little in the way of public outcomes. On Wednesday, Judge Faiq Zidan, President of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, received Al-Badawi and his delegation. The two sides discussed enhancing cooperation in judicial and legal fields, according to the Iraqi News Agency. Iraq’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Safia al-Suhail, attended. Beyond that general statement, no substantive results were announced.
The problem driving the visit is concrete. Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq have increasingly used the country as a staging ground for drone and missile attacks on Gulf states. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait have all experienced strikes. Many of these groups maintain links to the Popular Mobilization Forces and have historically targeted US forces and the Kurdistan Region. Their recent expansion southward toward the Gulf represents a shift in operational scope, one that appears tied to a broader Iranian strategy of activating multiple fronts under international pressure.
Iraq’s geography makes it central to this calculus. Militias based there can simultaneously threaten Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE while also pressuring Baghdad and the Kurdistan Region. The drone threat carries particular weight because unmanned systems are cheap to produce, difficult to attribute, and capable of striking energy infrastructure, airports, and other critical facilities across the Gulf.
The GCC’s approach relies on persuasion and the promise of economic and political support. Al-Badawi’s visit was designed to reinforce to Iraqi leadership that reining in militia activity serves Iraqi interests as much as Gulf ones. The organization wants reduced regional tensions and a quieter operating environment.
By contrast, the visit offered no visible enforcement mechanism, no stated consequence for non-compliance. Iraqi officials face their own constraints: armed groups that operate with varying degrees of autonomy and Iranian backing are not easily ordered to stand down. The GCC, for its part, must now weigh whether dialogue alone can produce the security outcome it came to Baghdad to secure.
The harder question, left open by Al-Badawi’s departure, is whether economic incentives can translate into actual changes in militia behavior on the ground, or whether the gap between diplomatic promise and operational reality will simply persist.