‘Axis of Resistance’: How useful have proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis been to Iran?

Houthi fighters march during a campaign to mobilise more fighters amid an offensive against Saudi-backed government troops, in Sana'a, Yemen, on Sept 10.

ISTANBUL - In Yemen, Iran’s Houthi allies this week consolidated their control over a crucial global waterway and bombed Saudi oil facilities. In Lebanon, Hezbollah, a de facto arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, have bogged down Israeli forces in a war of attrition. And in Iraq, Iran’s Shi’ite militia proxy forces contributed to the hasty departure of US and other Western forces, while continuing to menace remaining American outposts and Saudi energy facilities with drones and rockets.

Widely believed to have been severely degraded or neutered by the US and Israel in recent years, Iran’s allied non-state forces have shown their value to Tehran in the ongoing conflict, but perhaps not in the way they were intended.

Iran trained and positioned its allied forces in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and even the Palestinian territories as a deterrent. They were meant to frighten off any major US or Israeli action against Iran. But they didn't, even though both sides feared each other.

“You had this assumption of a mutual balance of terror,” said Thomas Juneau, a professor of the Middle East at the University of Ottawa, who specialises in Iran and Yemen.

“What have we actually seen, though, in the last two years? The US and Israel were not deterred from launching war against the non-state actors that Iran supports throughout the region. Not only that, but Hamas and Hezbollah have been significantly weakened.”

In the ongoing war, Iran’s proxies have often served as extensions of Iran – copying its asymmetric strategies and deploying its inexpensive conventional military hardware from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, from Mesopotamia to the Arabian Peninsula. I spent years reporting on these forces, sometimes embedding with them in training exercises and during their operations against ISIS in Iraq. I interviewed dozens of men who were recruited, trained, and equipped by Iran to fight as part of a coalition which described itself as the “Axis of Resistance”.

These forces began in the 1980s with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Badr Brigades, both founded and trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. That network expanded to include Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories, Yemen’s Houthis, and a plethora of armed groups in Iraq that emerged following the 2003 US toppling of Saddam Hussein, then president of Iraq.

Their ties to Iran are palpable. In Baghdad some years ago, a ranking leader of a Shi’ite militia group, Asaheb Ahl-Haq, held up the screensaver on his phone and smiled. It was a photograph of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. In Beirut, around the same time, a Hezbollah fighter described the Islamic Republic as “the mother”. Several times, Shi’ite militiamen in both Iraq and Lebanon revealed to me that they had gone on repeated training excursions to Iran.

Since the Oct 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, Israel and the US have made repeated efforts to weaken and crush these extensions of Iran. The attacks have included the 2024 pager attacks and airstrikes on Hezbollah’s leadership and a months-long 2025 bombing campaign against the Houthis, who are also known as Ansar Allah.

Yet the forces have proven their value in the war ignited by the US and Israeli attack against Iran more than six months ago. Iran has insisted on protecting Hezbollah and the Houthis in several rounds of indirect negotiations with the US.

“Israel needed to first defeat Hezbollah because that was Iran’s first line of defence before they went at Iran itself,” said Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank. “And now, having come out of this war successfully to a certain extent, the Iranis are trying to re-establish the forward defence.”

Often trained by seasoned, Arabic-speaking Hezbollah commanders, the groups operated in Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen, and until 2024, Syria. They also included recruits from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bahrain, and elsewhere.

But while they were part of Iran’s self-described “Axis of Resistance” to US and Israeli dominance of the Middle East, the groups are also rooted in local aspirations and grievances. They agitate politically as well as militarily for the rights of their own communities.

In Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestinian territories, Iran’s partners and proxies hold seats in Parliament, dominate governments, fight against locals, and build up businesses. In Iraq, Iranian-backed militias have been implicated in networks of front companies, money laundering, and smuggling. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has allegedly been involved in the cannabis trade to finance its activities.

The US State Department has estimated that Iran spends over US$1 billion (S$1.27 billion) a year on its proxies, with perhaps US$100 million of that dedicated to Palestinian groups, but Iran provides no information on its expenditures.

“When an armed organisation acquires political and economic influence as well, it can begin to build a parallel economy alongside the state,” Ahmad al-Alwan, an Iraqi political leader and former member of parliament, told The Straits Times. This is particularly dangerous because when an armed group combines weapons, money and political influence, its ability to compete with – and ultimately weaken – the state becomes far greater.”

However, Iran’s allies’ local political actions also create diplomatic headaches for Tehran. In Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories, the actions of Iran’s allies have generated tremendous blowback. Iraqis and Lebanese accuse Iran’s armed proxies of dragging their country into Iran’s war.

“There was very little enthusiasm for seeing the country dragged again into an ill-timed geopolitical escalation, and in a way, seeing the Iraqi people paying the price for whatever score-settling process is going on,” Inna Rudolf, an expert on Iraq’s militias at King’s College London, told me in an interview.

Hamas and other allied groups’ operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct 7 targeted civilians and was apparently carried out without Iranian approval. It bolstered the beleaguered government of Benjamin Netanyahu, initially brought global sympathy for Israel, and set it off on a regional rampage that drew in the US.

Building up independent economic power and political agendas gives Iran’s armed allies a measure of autonomy. Experts are divided over how much operational control Iran exercises over the network of armed forces it has built, and most believe it varies by group and circumstance.

Hezbollah, for example, jumped into the war mere days after the US and Israel attacked Iran on Feb 28. During the most intense phase of the war by Israel and the US against Iran, Hezbollah launched missiles and drones into northern Israel. This action diverted some of Israel’s forces and attention into a war of attrition in southern Lebanon, which remains unresolved to this day.

Iraq’s militias targeted US bases in the country and Kurdish militias alleged to be collaborating with Israel sparingly and with a measure or restraint given their resources and geographic breadth.

Meanwhile, the Houthis have begun to escalate six months into the conflict, launching a ferocious ground offensive into part of the country controlled by Saudi-backed forces while targeting several crucial pieces of Saudi energy infrastructure. On Sept 10, Houthi forces took control of the Yemeni port city of Mokha, bringing them closer to consolidating control over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a vital waterway through which 10 per cent to 12 per cent of the world’s maritime traffic passes. It remained unclear to many whether they were acting on Iran’s behalf or using the disorder created by the war to pursue their own agenda.

“It surprised many how long it took the Houthis to mobilise and get involved,” said Nader Cyrus Itiyami, a Middle East analyst at Argus Media, an energy industry news platform. “The Houthis are trying their best to try and make a distinction between Iran and Yemen. They want to make sure there’s a separation to make clear that their issue, their beef, is with the Saudis.”

Juneau said the spotty performance and political vulnerabilities of Iran’s armed proxies and partners may cause it to think twice about investing in them in the future. While Iran will continue to support its militias, they may be downgraded in importance.

“One of the lessons of the war of 2026 is that Iran’s most useful tools of deterrence are inside the country, not outside the country,” he said.

“They are not the proxies or the non-state armed groups that it supports in the region. They are the direct attacks with Iranian missiles and drones and naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, on Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and on American military bases. The priority from Iran’s perspective will be to rebuild and invest in its own missiles and drones and other assets like naval mines, because that has proven by far the most useful element of its strategy.”

Borzou Daragahi, who is based in Istanbul and Paris, is a long-time foreign correspondent and founder of badlands, a global affairs newsletter.