What Happens When Iran Loses Control of Its Proxies?

RIYADH — Iraqi militias struck American bases twenty-one times in a single day last week, acting on no discernible order from Tehran. Hamas publicly urged Iran to stop bombing Gulf states that host millions of Palestinian workers. The Houthis, who spent two years terrorizing Red Sea shipping on Iran’s behalf, have gone conspicuously quiet since the war began. And Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy empire, is fighting an Israeli ground invasion in southern Lebanon with a leadership cadre decimated by assassination. Three weeks into the 2026 Iran war, the Axis of Resistance is not collapsing in unison — it is splintering into five separate conflicts, each driven by local logic rather than Iranian strategic direction. The fragmentation of Iran’s forty-year proxy network may prove more consequential for Saudi Arabia’s long-term security than the war itself.

Who Makes Up Iran’s Axis of Resistance?

Iran’s Axis of Resistance is an informal coalition of state and non-state actors bound by shared opposition to the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Built over four decades at an estimated cost exceeding $16 billion, according to the United States Institute of Peace, the network represents the most ambitious proxy warfare architecture assembled since the Soviet Union’s Cold War alliance system. It spans five countries, incorporates at least sixty-seven distinct armed factions, and at its peak commanded an estimated 200,000 fighters under varying degrees of Iranian influence.

The network’s principal components operate across a geographic arc that strategically encircles Saudi Arabia and Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon, founded in 1982 with direct IRGC assistance, grew into the most capable non-state military force in the world, with an estimated arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles before the 2024-2025 Israeli campaigns. Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, formally integrated into Iraq’s security apparatus after 2014, comprise roughly sixty-seven armed factions — nearly all pledging allegiance to Iran’s supreme leader rather than Baghdad. The Houthis, or Ansar Allah, consolidated control over northern Yemen and demonstrated intercontinental strike capability by targeting Red Sea shipping and launching missiles at Israel. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad provided Iran’s ideological anchor in the Palestinian territories. And until December 2024, the Assad regime in Syria functioned as the physical bridge connecting the entire network.

Understanding the Axis requires recognizing that it was never a monolith. The Quds Force, Iran’s external operations arm under the late Qasem Soleimani, managed relationships through a combination of weapons transfers, financial support, ideological solidarity, and personal relationships between commanders. The system depended on a central node — the supreme leader’s office — that arbitrated disputes, allocated resources, and provided strategic direction. With Khamenei dead and Mojtaba Khamenei leading from hiding, that central node has effectively ceased to function.

How Has the 2026 War Shattered Iran’s Proxy Command Structure?

The United States and Israel killed Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, decapitating the single figure who held ultimate authority over the Axis of Resistance. Within seventy-two hours, the coalition had also struck IRGC Quds Force command nodes, communication infrastructure linking Tehran to its proxies, and the logistics corridors through which weapons and orders flowed. The effect on proxy coordination was immediate and severe.

Chatham House described the resulting dynamic as Iran’s “forward defence” becoming a “strategic boomerang,” according to a March 2026 analysis. The strategy of projecting power through proxies was designed to keep conflict away from Iranian territory. Instead, the war brought overwhelming force directly to Iran while simultaneously degrading Tehran’s ability to direct the proxy forces that were supposed to provide deterrence.

Three structural failures explain the command breakdown. First, the Quds Force lost its ability to communicate securely with proxy leaders. Israeli strikes on Iranian telecommunications infrastructure in the opening hours of the campaign severed encrypted channels that connected Tehran to Beirut, Baghdad, and Sanaa. Second, the financial pipeline — estimated by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies at $700 million annually to Hezbollah alone and $100-200 million to the Houthis — has been disrupted by the destruction of Iranian banking infrastructure and the physical isolation of IRGC financial operatives. Third, the death and wounding of senior IRGC commanders, including the intelligence chief killed on March 18, eliminated the personal relationships through which proxy management functioned.

The result, as the American Enterprise Institute noted in a March 2026 analysis titled “The Deafening Silence of Iran’s Proxies,” is a network in which constituent groups are making autonomous decisions for the first time in their operational histories. Some have escalated beyond what Tehran would have ordered. Others have conspicuously refused to fight.

Why Did Hamas Tell Iran to Stop Bombing the Gulf?

On March 14, 2026, Hamas issued a statement that would have been unthinkable six months earlier. The Palestinian militant group publicly called on Iran to “avoid targeting neighbouring countries” in the Gulf, while simultaneously affirming Iran’s right to respond to American and Israeli aggression, Al Jazeera reported. The statement exposed a fault line that had been widening since October 7, 2023, but that the 2026 war cracked open irreversibly.

Hamas’s calculation was straightforward and self-interested. Approximately 400,000 Palestinians work in Gulf Cooperation Council countries, sending remittances that sustain families in Gaza and the West Bank. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar host Palestinian communities whose economic survival depends on Gulf stability. Iranian missile and drone attacks on Riyadh, Dubai, and Kuwait — targeting the very states that employ Palestinian workers — directly threatened Hamas’s constituency in ways that no amount of ideological solidarity with Tehran could offset.

The deeper rupture predated the 2026 war. Hamas had been quietly diversifying its diplomatic portfolio for years, engaging with Turkey, Qatar, and even exploring indirect channels with Saudi Arabia. The Gaza ceasefire agreed in October 2025 represented a political achievement that Hamas leadership was unwilling to sacrifice for Iran’s confrontation with the United States. When Israel closed all of Gaza’s borders after the war began, Hamas blamed the escalation cycle rather than rallying to Tehran’s cause.

The Hamas defection matters because it demonstrates that ideological alignment — resistance to Israel — does not automatically translate into operational solidarity when a patron state’s war threatens a proxy’s core interests. Iran built the Axis of Resistance on the assumption that shared enmity toward Israel and the United States would override local considerations. Hamas proved that assumption wrong.

The Proxy Autonomy Index

Mapping the fragmentation requires a structured assessment of each group’s current independence from Iranian direction. The following framework evaluates five dimensions: operational autonomy (the degree to which a group makes its own military decisions), financial independence (access to non-Iranian revenue), leadership survival (whether command structures remain intact), territorial control (physical territory held independently of Iranian support), and strategic divergence (the gap between the group’s interests and Tehran’s war aims).

The index reveals a critical pattern: the groups with the highest autonomy scores — the Houthis at 8.6 and Iraqi PMF factions at 7.2 — are precisely the ones making independent decisions that diverge most sharply from what Tehran would order. The Houthis have declined to escalate despite Iranian pressure. The Iraqi PMF has escalated beyond what serves Iran’s interests, attacking American bases at a rate that risks provoking a devastating US response against Iraq itself. Hamas, with a 6.6 score driven by high operational autonomy and extreme strategic divergence, has publicly broken with Tehran on targeting Gulf states.

Hezbollah’s relatively low score of 5.0 reflects its devastating leadership losses — the majority of its senior command has been killed since 2024 — and its continued financial dependence on Iranian funding, even as that funding becomes increasingly difficult to deliver. Paradoxically, Hezbollah is the group most likely to remain loyal to Tehran precisely because it lacks the independent capacity to pursue alternatives.

Hezbollah Without Tehran’s Leash

Hezbollah entered the 2026 war already diminished. The 2024-2025 Israeli campaign killed Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and the majority of the group’s senior military leadership. The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 eliminated Hezbollah’s strategic depth in Syria and severed the 1,574-kilometer land corridor through which Iran had transferred weapons for decades. By the time Mojtaba Khamenei’s IRGC ordered Hezbollah to resume rocket attacks on Israel in late February 2026, the group was a shadow of the force that had fought Israel to a standstill in 2006.

Hezbollah complied anyway. On March 13, the group fired 200 rockets at Israel in a coordinated strike with Iranian missile barrages. Israel responded by launching a ground invasion of southern Lebanon on March 16, aiming to seize the area south of the Litani River. By March 22, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported over 1,000 killed and more than one million displaced — devastating casualties for a country of six million people, according to Al Jazeera.

The critical question is whether Hezbollah is fighting Iran’s war or its own survival war. The Washington Post reported on March 18 that the group faces growing anger from even its most loyal Shia supporters in southern Lebanon, who blame Iran’s wider conflict for bringing Israeli ground forces back into their villages. Naim Qassem, Nasrallah’s successor, has been designated as a target for elimination by Israel, forcing him into hiding and further degrading command coherence.

The operational implications are stark. Hezbollah once maintained a unified command structure that could coordinate rocket launches, ground operations, intelligence gathering, and political messaging across all of Lebanon. That structure has been systematically dismantled. Unit commanders in southern Lebanon are now making tactical decisions without guidance from the central military council — a development that Israeli intelligence officers have described as both an opportunity and a risk. Autonomous units are less coordinated but also less predictable.

Without secure communication channels to Tehran, without the Syria logistics corridor, and without the financial pipeline that once delivered $700 million annually, Hezbollah is increasingly fighting on its own terms — which means fighting for survival in Lebanon rather than executing a coordinated strategy against Israel on Iran’s behalf. The group’s decision to fire rockets may have been the last act of obedience to a patron that can no longer enforce compliance.

What Are Iraqi Militias Doing While Iran Burns?

Iraq’s Iran-aligned militias have been the most aggressive actors in the proxy network since the war began — and the most operationally independent. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition umbrella for groups including Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, claimed sixty-seven drone and missile attacks in the war’s first three days alone, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. By March 22, Iraqi militias had struck US bases twenty-one times in a single twenty-four-hour period, a tempo that exceeds anything Tehran has historically sanctioned.

The escalation is driven by local dynamics as much as solidarity with Iran. Iraqi militia leaders embedded within the Popular Mobilization Forces — formally part of Iraq’s security apparatus but functionally answering to the supreme leader’s office — see the war as an opportunity to consolidate power within Iraq itself. With Baghdad’s government paralyzed between its dependence on Washington for security support and its vulnerability to Iranian-backed factions that control significant military and economic assets, militia commanders are positioning themselves as Iraq’s decisive power brokers.

The United States has responded with limited airstrikes against PMF targets, killing at least ten fighters in operations between late February and early March, according to ACLED data. But the strikes have not deterred escalation. Instead, they have provided militia leaders with a domestic political narrative — resistance to American occupation — that strengthens their position within Iraqi politics regardless of what serves Tehran’s strategic interests.

Baghdad declared force majeure on all foreign-operated oil fields on March 21, a decision driven partly by the physical threat of Iranian drone attacks but also by PMF pressure on the central government. The militias’ ability to compel government action independent of Iranian direction demonstrates how deeply they have embedded themselves in Iraq’s state structures — a degree of institutional penetration that will persist long after the Iran war ends.

The Iraqi dimension carries particular weight for Saudi Arabia. The two countries share an 814-kilometer border. Iraq’s trajectory under PMF influence directly affects Saudi security calculations. An Iraq dominated by autonomous, well-armed Shia factions that retain Iranian ideological sympathies but answer to no central authority represents a threat that cannot be addressed through the traditional Saudi diplomatic toolkit of engagement with Baghdad’s central government. The PMF’s institutional position within the Iraqi state — controlling an estimated 150,000 fighters on the government payroll — means these factions will retain both legitimacy and funding regardless of whether Iran can continue to supply them with advanced weapons.

Why Have the Houthis Gone Quiet?

The most unexpected development in the proxy fragmentation is the Houthis’ restraint. For two years, Ansar Allah disrupted global shipping through the Red Sea, launched ballistic missiles at Israel, and positioned themselves as the Axis of Resistance’s most operationally aggressive member. When the Iran war began on February 28, conventional analysis predicted the Houthis would immediately escalate — threatening the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and targeting Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea shipping corridor, the Kingdom’s only functioning oil export route after the Strait of Hormuz closure.

Instead, as previous analysis on this site noted, Sanaa stayed silent while Tehran burned. The National reported on March 17 a “mystery of no Houthi attacks on Red Sea ships three weeks into Iran war.” The Atlantic Council published an analysis asking whether the Houthis would join the war at all. The Soufan Center offered possible explanations on March 19, noting that Houthi leaders were calculating their movement’s interests independently of Tehran’s directives.

Three factors explain the restraint. First, the Houthis are engaged in a fragile peace process with Saudi Arabia that predated the Iran war. Attacking Saudi shipping or territory would destroy years of negotiation and invite a Saudi military response that the Houthis cannot afford while they simultaneously consolidate governance over northern Yemen’s twenty million people. Second, the Houthis derive significant revenue from controlling Yemeni ports and customs — approximately $1.8 billion annually, according to the United Nations Panel of Experts — making them financially independent of Iranian subsidies in ways that Hezbollah is not. Third, the Houthis’ ideological commitment to Iran’s cause, while real, has always been subordinate to their primary objective: securing permanent political control over Yemen.

The Houthis’ autonomy score of 8.6 on the Proxy Autonomy Index — the highest of any group — reflects this reality. They control territory, generate independent revenue, maintain intact leadership, and have strategic interests that diverge sharply from Iran’s war aims. As one Council on Foreign Relations analysis noted, the Houthis are better characterized as Iran’s “willing partners” than its proxies, a distinction that becomes operationally significant when the partnership’s cost-benefit calculation changes.

The Syria Corridor Is Dead

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 destroyed the physical infrastructure that held Iran’s proxy network together. Syria functioned as more than an ally — it was the transit corridor through which Iranian weapons, money, and personnel flowed to Hezbollah in Lebanon, the coordination space where Quds Force commanders met proxy leaders, and the training ground where fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan gained combat experience.

The corridor’s importance was quantifiable. The 1,574-kilometer land route from Iran’s western border through Iraq, across eastern Syria to the Lebanese border, constituted the primary weapons supply line for Hezbollah’s arsenal. Without it, as the Irregular Warfare Center assessed, Iran must rely on smuggling, maritime shipments, or airlift — all methods that are slower, smaller in volume, and vulnerable to Israeli interception.

US and Israeli airstrikes have intensified the problem. Since the war began, coalition aircraft have systematically targeted IRGC-linked logistics hubs along the Deir ez-Zor axis and the al-Bukamal border zone, according to Cyberwarzone reporting from March 19. These strikes aim to permanently sever whatever residual capability Iran retained to move material through Syrian territory after Assad’s fall.

Hezbollah has adapted by restructuring its smuggling networks to move arms in smaller shipments via Syria and Iraq, with some shipments disguised as humanitarian aid, according to the Jerusalem Post. But the throughput of a clandestine smuggling operation cannot replace the industrial-scale weapons transfers that sustained an arsenal of 150,000 rockets. Every Hezbollah missile fired at Israel in March 2026 represents irreplaceable inventory that Tehran can no longer resupply.

The corridor’s death has affected each proxy differently, accelerating the fragmentation. Hezbollah lost its primary resupply route and the geographic space where its commanders historically met IRGC officers to receive strategic guidance. Iraqi militias, which relied on the corridor less because of their direct border with Iran, have actually gained relative power — they now represent Tehran’s only accessible proxy force, a status that has emboldened their leadership to demand greater independence. The Houthis, separated from the corridor by a thousand kilometers of Saudi and Emirati-controlled airspace, were always the most logistically self-sufficient proxy. The corridor’s collapse merely confirmed what Sanaa’s leadership had already calculated: that the Houthis’ survival depended on indigenous arms production and smuggling through the Horn of Africa rather than overland transfers from Iran.

Syria itself has become a vacuum that accelerates proxy transformation. The transitional government in Damascus, preoccupied with consolidating authority over a fractured state, lacks the capacity to prevent remaining Iranian-linked cells from operating in eastern Syria. These cells — remnants of IRGC-affiliated militias that once numbered in the tens of thousands — are transitioning from organized proxy formations into decentralized networks that more closely resemble transnational criminal organizations than military forces. Their expertise in weapons smuggling, cross-border logistics, and clandestine finance makes them valuable assets for any actor willing to pay, whether that actor is a reconstituted IRGC, a competing regional power, or a non-state group with its own agenda.

Are Fragmented Proxies More Dangerous Than a Unified Axis?

Conventional wisdom holds that the destruction of Iran’s proxy command structure is an unqualified strategic victory for Saudi Arabia and its allies. A weakened Iran means weakened proxies, and weakened proxies mean a safer Gulf. This analysis is dangerously incomplete.

The contrarian reality is that a coordinated Axis of Resistance, for all its destructive capability, was also a controllable entity. When Saudi Arabia negotiated with Iran — as it did through the 2023 Beijing Agreement — it was negotiating with a single counterparty that could, in theory, restrain its proxies as part of a broader deal. Riyadh’s diplomatic line to Tehran, however frayed, provided a channel through which proxy behavior could be modulated. The Houthis reduced attacks on Saudi territory after the Beijing Agreement not because they independently chose peace, but because Tehran signaled that de-escalation served Iran’s interests.

Fragmentation eliminates that mechanism. Five autonomous armed groups, each pursuing its own strategic logic, each controlling significant military capability, and each embedded in states where they wield political power, present a more complex threat matrix than a single coordinated enemy. Saudi Arabia can negotiate with Iran over Houthi behavior. It cannot negotiate with a Houthi movement that no longer takes direction from Tehran.

The RAND Corporation’s March 2026 analysis of the Iran war identified this dynamic as one of the conflict’s most underappreciated risks. Proxy groups that lose their patron do not dissolve — they transform. They become warlord factions, political parties with militias, transnational criminal organizations, or ideological movements that franchise violence independently. The Islamic State emerged from the wreckage of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which itself grew from the chaos of the 2003 invasion. Every major proxy collapse in the Middle East has produced successor entities that were harder to predict and harder to deter than their predecessors.

For Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, this means the post-war security environment may require more resources and more sophisticated threat management than the pre-war period — even if Iran itself emerges weakened. The Saudi military’s capabilities were built to counter state threats and organized non-state actors. Fragmented, autonomous proxy groups that operate according to unpredictable local logic represent a different category of challenge.

What Does This Mean for Saudi Arabia’s Post-War Security?

Saudi Arabia faces a paradox that the war’s third week has only sharpened. The Kingdom entered the conflict as a non-belligerent that had spent three years pursuing détente with Iran and de-escalation with the Houthis. It now finds itself hosting American combat forces, having expelled Iranian diplomats, and absorbing daily drone and missile attacks — all while the proxy architecture that made Iran dangerous is fragmenting into entities that may prove harder to manage.

The immediate post-war threat landscape, based on the Proxy Autonomy Index analysis, presents five distinct security challenges rather than one. In Yemen, a Houthi movement that controls territory, generates independent revenue, and commands an estimated 30,000-40,000 fighters will pursue permanent sovereignty over northern Yemen regardless of Iran’s fate. In Iraq, PMF factions that have embedded themselves in the state security apparatus will use their enhanced position to influence Iraqi policy toward Saudi Arabia — potentially more aggressively than Tehran ever directed. In Lebanon, a degraded but desperate Hezbollah may seek to reconstitute by diversifying its patron base, potentially turning to Russia or pursuing deeper integration with Lebanese state institutions. In Gaza, a Hamas that has publicly broken with Iran on Gulf targeting will seek to rebuild its diplomatic relationships with Gulf states — a process that could either stabilize or complicate Saudi regional strategy. And across the network’s periphery, smaller groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Afghan Fatemiyoun Division, and the Pakistani Zainabiyoun Brigade face existential crises as Iranian funding evaporates.

The Kingdom’s defense establishment under Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman has already begun adjusting. The security pact with Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan, signed during the war’s third week, represents an acknowledgment that post-war Gulf security cannot depend solely on the American partnership. The wartime acceleration of domestic defense manufacturing through SAMI and GAMI reflects a parallel bet on reducing dependence on foreign arms suppliers who may prove unreliable when autonomous proxy groups test Saudi borders.

When Patron States Lose Control

History offers uncomfortable precedents for what happens when proxy networks outlive their patrons’ ability to control them. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 left behind a constellation of armed groups across Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, and Central America that had been trained, equipped, and directed by Moscow. Not one of them dissolved peacefully. The Afghan mujahedeen, freed from the discipline of superpower competition, fractured into warlord factions that produced the Taliban. Angolan proxy forces transformed into criminal enterprises that fueled decades of continued conflict. The contras in Nicaragua evolved into organized crime networks that still destabilize Central American governance.

The Ottoman Empire’s dissolution after World War I provides an even more relevant precedent. Ottoman-backed tribal militias across the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and the Levant — groups that had fought with varying degrees of loyalty to Constantinople — became the nuclei of new political movements when central authority vanished. Some, like the House of Saud itself, built states. Others became the armed factions that destabilized Iraq and Syria for generations.

Iran’s proxy network shares structural features with both precedents. Like Soviet proxies, the Axis of Resistance groups received weapons, training, and financial support that created military capabilities far exceeding what local economies could sustain. Like Ottoman tribal militias, they are deeply embedded in local social and political structures that will persist regardless of the patron’s fate. The combination means that Iran’s proxies will neither dissolve nor remain static — they will transform in ways that reflect local power dynamics rather than Iranian strategic direction.

The Stimson Center’s March 2026 analysis, “After Khamenei: Regional Reckoning and the Future of Iran’s Proxy Networks,” identified the most dangerous scenario as a “fragmented transition in which competing IRGC factions sponsor rival proxy groups.” If Mojtaba Khamenei’s hold on power weakens further, different IRGC commanders could attempt to maintain their own proxy relationships, creating a network that is not merely fragmented but actively competitive — with different Iranian factions backing different proxy groups against each other.

Tehran’s proxies are bruised and fragmented, but they are also more decentralized, more ideological, and less responsive to Iranian control. A fragmented transition in which competing IRGC factions sponsor rival proxy groups would accelerate the network’s weakening and pose a formidable challenge to its reconstitution.

Stimson Center, “After Khamenei: Regional Reckoning,” March 2026

The Irregular Warfare Center’s assessment went further, arguing in a paper titled “We Bombed the Wrong Target” that Operation Epic Fury’s focus on Iranian state military infrastructure may have been strategically misguided. Destroying Iran’s conventional military capability does not address the proxy network, which derives its power from local political legitimacy, embedded institutional positions, and autonomous revenue streams rather than from Iranian tanks and aircraft. The proxies, in this analysis, were always the more dangerous component of Iranian power — and they are the component that US and Israeli bombing cannot reach.

For Saudi Arabia, the lesson is that the end of the Iran war will not mean the end of the threats that Iran’s proxy network created. It will mean the beginning of a more complex, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous security environment in which the diplomacy required will be not one negotiation with Tehran but five separate engagements with five autonomous armed movements, each operating according to its own logic, each armed with Iranian weapons, and none answerable to a central authority that can be deterred, negotiated with, or defeated in conventional warfare.

The Kingdom’s air defense forces have already demonstrated the operational burden this creates. Intercepting sixty drones and three ballistic missiles in a single day requires the kind of sustained readiness that strains even the most well-funded military. When the threat comes not from a single state actor with identifiable launch sites but from multiple autonomous groups operating across four countries, the defensive challenge multiplies exponentially. The IRGC’s “mosaic defense” doctrine — distributing military capability across numerous small, dispersed units — was designed for Iran’s conventional forces, but it describes equally well the emerging proxy landscape that Saudi Arabia will face after the war ends.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Iran’s Axis of Resistance?

The Axis of Resistance is an Iranian-led informal coalition of armed groups across the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, and formerly the Assad regime in Syria. Built over forty years at an estimated cost exceeding $16 billion, the network was designed to project Iranian influence and deter attacks on Iran by threatening adversaries through proxy forces that encircle Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Why are Iran’s proxy groups fragmenting during the 2026 war?

The killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei, destruction of IRGC command infrastructure, severance of secure communications, disruption of financial pipelines estimated at $700 million annually to Hezbollah alone, and the prior collapse of the Syria logistics corridor have collectively eliminated Tehran’s ability to coordinate and direct proxy operations. Each group is now making autonomous decisions based on local interests rather than Iranian strategic direction.

Are the Houthis still allied with Iran?

The Houthis maintain ideological solidarity with Iran but have declined to escalate militarily during the 2026 war, prioritizing their peace process with Saudi Arabia and their consolidation of governance over northern Yemen. With an estimated $1.8 billion in annual revenue from port and customs control and intact leadership, the Houthis are the most operationally independent of Iran’s partners and are increasingly characterized by analysts as willing partners rather than directed proxies.

How does proxy fragmentation affect Saudi Arabia’s security?

Fragmentation replaces a single coordinated threat — manageable through diplomacy with Tehran — with five autonomous armed movements, each pursuing its own strategic logic. This creates a more complex security environment requiring simultaneous engagement with Houthi governance in Yemen, PMF-dominated Iraqi politics, a desperate Hezbollah in Lebanon, a diplomatically mobile Hamas, and potentially criminalized smaller factions across the network’s periphery.

What historical precedents exist for proxy network collapse?

The Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse left proxy forces in Afghanistan, Angola, and Central America that transformed into warlord factions, criminal enterprises, and insurgent movements rather than dissolving. The Afghan mujahedeen fractured into groups that produced the Taliban. The Ottoman Empire’s dissolution similarly left armed tribal militias that became the nuclei of new political movements, some building states and others destabilizing them for generations.

Could Iran rebuild its proxy network after the war?

Reconstitution is possible but would take a decade or more and require conditions that the war has made unlikely. Rebuilding would demand a stable Iranian government with surplus resources, restored logistics corridors through Syria or alternative routes, and proxy groups willing to accept renewed Iranian direction after experiencing operational independence. The Houthis and Iraqi PMF factions have demonstrated they can function — and in some cases thrive — without Tehran’s guidance, reducing their incentive to return to subordinate status. The most probable outcome is a permanently looser network in which Iran retains ideological influence but limited operational control.