TEHRAN, Iran, June 19 (World Daily Times) — Reuters reported, citing eight Iraqi sources, that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps created secret cells in Iraq to launch drone attacks against Gulf states that host American forces. The allegation points to a more hidden and harder-to-track model of proxy activity: the sources said the IRGC built new groups to bypass established militia networks and avoid detection.
According to the Iraqi sources cited by Reuters, the cells were organized as three or four units of about 10 elite Shi’ite fighters each. The sources said some members came from Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella network of hardline Shi’ite factions, but the new cells answered directly to the IRGC rather than to that command structure. Iraqi officials cited in the report said that separation was meant to preserve plausible deniability, shift blame away from the larger Iran-backed groups, and reduce U.S. pressure on Baghdad to disarm them.
Three Iraqi security sources told Reuters the cells carried out at least seven drone attacks from desert locations near Basra and Samawa in southern Iraq between April 20 and May 17. The targets were said to be sites in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The sources said they relied on human intelligence, intercepted communications and evidence gathered from the launch sites.
If the allegations are accurate, they would matter beyond Iraq because they suggest a shift toward smaller covert units designed to be deniable from the start. That can make it harder for neighboring governments to assign responsibility quickly, and it complicates the broader effort to contain armed groups operating inside Iraq while regional tensions remain high.
The report does not identify anyone arrested or publicly charged, and it does not include responses from the IRGC or the governments named in the allegations. For now, the claims remain at the level of sourced reporting, but the pattern described by the Iraqi sources fits a long-running regional security problem: attacks launched from Iraqi territory that are difficult to trace cleanly to a single sponsor.
