From the Editors
In our cover article this month, Michael Knights, Alex Almeida, and Crispin Smith examine the “unprecedented” involvement of Iran-backed militias in Iraq (muqawama) in the current conflict between the United States and Iran. “The current Iran/U.S.-Israel war has exposed a far broader and deeper pattern of PMF [Popular Mobilization Forces] complicity in terrorist actions against Iraqis, U.S. persons, and nations in the Arab world and Europe,” they find. While the Iranian proxy Lebanese Hezbollah recovers from significant losses and the Iran-backed Houthis stay largely out of the current fight, “the 2026 conflict has shown a different side of the Iraqi muqawama,” the authors write, “a tougher, more risk-acceptant side that has seen the Iraqi groups claim to have undertaken their most intensive ever series of attacks against the United States, Kurdistan, and the Gulf States.”
Our interview is with Brigadier General Matthew Ross, the director of Joint Interagency Task Force 401, which is tasked with consolidating and enhancing the U.S. military’s response to the drone threat at home and abroad. “I do think that drones are changing the character of modern combat, but they’re not changing the nature of combat,” BG Ross remarks. “Victory still belongs to those who adapt fastest, those who strike the hardest and endure the longest, and so countering drones is key to force protection, mission success, and survival on the modern battlefield.”
Finally, Marc-André Argentino and Angus Lindsay situate 764 and The Com Network within the broader nihilistic violent extremist landscape. Drawing on case studies and an arrest dataset of 295 Com Network-linked offenders across 33 countries, they explore how “764 and adjacent groups combine sadistic online exploitation, cybercrime, self-directed violence, animal abuse, school-violence threats, and terrorist or violent-extremist conduct.” They find that “what unifies these cases is not a shared ideology but a shared ecosystem, a shared status economy in which standing is earned by producing and circulating harm, a shared behavioral orientation in anomie, nihilism, and misanthropy, and a shared reliance on sadistic online exploitation and coercive control as the means through which that harm is enacted.”
Don Rassler and Kristina Hummel, Editors-in-Chief
