Iran just fought a punishing war with Israel. Why its allies stayed away.
| Amman, Jordan
An Israel-Iran war has come and gone, for now.
Yet the conflict, which culminated in weekend U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and an Iranian missile barrage lobbed at a U.S. base in Qatar Monday, was marked by a noticeable absence.
Iran’s network of militant groups, which Tehran spent two decades building up across Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Levant, were nowhere to be seen.
Why We Wrote This
Iran trained and armed a network of regional proxies to help it stand up to Israel and the United States. But they were absent from the costly war Iran just fought. One key reason, say analysts, was a preoccupation with their own survival.
Analysts and policymakers had long pointed to Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” against Israeli and American influence in the Middle East as a serious deterrent to any military action against Tehran. Yet it remained on the sidelines throughout the two-week conflict.
Warnings that the alliance of well-armed proxies would instantly target U.S. interests and set the region afire went unfulfilled.
The Iran-backed groups’ lack of response, observers say, signals a changed regional geopolitical landscape and mounting domestic pressures of their own. These diverse groups are now prioritizing their own survival above the defense of their patron, which risked retaliation by the United States and Israel.
They are looking to live another day.
“These groups are in varying degrees looking to survive but also focusing on how to reconstitute themselves and keep the local power they have intact. They have seen the wrath of U.S. and Israel and military superiority,” says Renad Mansour, senior research fellow at London-based Chatham House.
“While the transnational resistance is important, I think they are proving also at this moment to be quite inclined to make sure that their home base is secure.”
Whither Hezbollah?
The most glaring absentee throughout the war was the powerful Shiite militia in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which did no more than issue statements in support of Iran as Israel bombed Tehran.
A series of punishing Israeli missile strikes and an offensive against Hezbollah last autumn killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and other senior leaders and is believed by some experts to have weakened the movement militarily.
Hezbollah maintains a tenuous ceasefire with Israel that was sealed in November 2024.
While Hezbollah is Iran’s strongest proxy, experts point out it was designed as a deterrent against direct threats to Iran, not a retaliatory agent to engage in a full-scale military confrontation if Iran were threatened.
“There was never any suggestion that because Iran was being hit by the Israelis, Hezbollah would join in,” notes Nicholas Blanford, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Hezbollah expert. “The Iranians have not called upon them to fight” as “this is not the nature of deterrence.”
Facing popular pressure to disarm at home, and bound by a ceasefire with Israel, Hezbollah has had to deal with a newly ascendant government in Beirut re-asserting its control over Lebanon and the use of force within its borders.
Despite Israeli missile strikes on Hezbollah military infrastructure, including strikes in southern Lebanon on Sunday, Mr. Blanford says Hezbollah’s military capabilities remain largely intact, but “political pressures within Lebanon have forced Hezbollah to give up military action.”
Eyes on Iraq
There has also been silence from Iraq, where Iran has financed and trained several militant groups that have carried out low-level attacks on American soldiers since the Israel-Hamas war broke out in 2023.
Most notable among them has been the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an Iran-backed network that in late January 2024 carried out a drone attack on a U.S. outpost at the northeast edge of Jordan, killing three American soldiers and wounding 47 others. The attack triggered U.S. airstrikes against these groups, and assassinations.
Yet as Israeli and American missiles and bombs fell on Iran these past two weeks, Iran’s allies did not stir.
One reason Iran-backed groups in Iraq remain on the sidelines now, analysts say, is that they find themselves more embroiled in local politics and business than in “resistance” and are profiting from Iraq’s tenuous peace and stability under Iraqi Prime Minister Muhammed al-Sudani.
Armed militias such as the Popular Mobilization Forces now have members in the central government, the cabinet, and in parliament, and are benefiting from juicy construction and oil deals, experts say.
“They are in a different position with so much control over the Iraqi state,” Mr. Mansour notes. “The Iraqi economy has been doing really well the last few years, and this conflict is bad for business.”
“As they become stewards of the state, these groups are facing difficult questions: Pursue this transnational fight against the Goliath of Israel and the U.S., or keep their heads down and stay out of it? For the most part, they chose the latter.”
Yemen’s Houthis
The Houthis, the militant-political group that rules much of Yemen, and which survived a battle with the United States which ended in a May truce, was the only Iran-backed group to declare its willingness to fight the U.S. It warned Washington it would attack U.S. and other international vessels in the Red Sea in retaliation for America’s role in Israel’s war on Iran.
Sunday, hours after the U.S. attack, the group promised a response “soon” and its political arm underlined its previous warning, reaffirming “the Republic of Yemen’s commitment to the armed forces’ declaration that they were ready to target U.S. ships and warships in the Red Sea.”
Yet that declaration was a dead letter. Red Sea traffic, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, continued as normal.
The Houthis reportedly were itching for a military rematch with the U.S., with some individual leaders declaring their ceasefire “over.” But Iran likely told them to stand down, observers say, thus preventing Red Sea attacks that might escalate Tehran’s war with the U.S. and Israel.
“It seems that Iran itself either didn’t ask the Houthis to get involved or ordered them to stand down,” says Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, senior researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies and an expert on the Houthi movement. “I think they were ready to do something, they are capable militarily, but it seems that Iran in its calculations didn’t prefer that, to prevent greater American intervention.”
While Iraqi militias engage in local governance and business, and Hezbollah is bound by Lebanese public opinion, expert say the Houthis remain potent. They have sophisticated military capabilities at their disposal, along with the resources of a state.
“The Houthis can recruit locally, they have local dominance, they control a large geographic area, and it seems they are in a better situation even than Hezbollah before it was weakened by Israel,” notes Ms. Shuja al-Deen.
While the Houthis have shown no signs of abandoning their fight against Israel, “for the foreseeable future, they are not going to break the ceasefire with the Americans,” says Ms. Shuja al-Deen, unless Iran finds itself in a tight enough corner to activate them. “They are committed to the ceasefire in the Red Sea,” she says.
Ethan Schroyer contributed to this report from Istanbul.
