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In Beirut, Baghdad, and across the Middle East, the same pattern repeats: a leader is killed, a funeral fills the streets, and within weeks someone new is giving orders.
Indeed, despite the setbacks faced by the regional network of armed groups aligned with Iran that calls itself the “axis of resistance,” it has not disappeared. U.S. forces have struck several groups linked to the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, while Israel has sustained operations against Hizballah across southern Lebanon and Beirut. In response to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Hizballah launched a series of rockets and drones into northern Israel. An attack on a British air base in Cyprus also allegedly came from Lebanon. In Iraq, axis groups fired drones toward Erbil’s airport and towards U.S. bases or interests in neighboring Kuwait and Jordan, and demonstrators in Baghdad pushed toward the U.S. embassy. In Yemen, the axis-aligned Houthis issued strong statements of solidarity with Iran, condemning U.S. and Israeli actions.
While the scale of their actions is limited, constrained both by capabilities and by calibration, their very occurrence has left many puzzled: After years of intense Israeli and U.S. pressure, decapitation strikes including the Jan. 2020 killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and intensifying after Oct. 2023, infrastructure degradation, economic sanctions, and political isolation, why do these groups still retain the capacity to act at all?
The answer lies in how the groups adapt. Rather than eliminating these movements, sustained decapitation campaigns have fragmented their leadership and decision-making structures. As the limited coherence that once underpinned Iran’s model of coordinated regional expansion has eroded, and as Tehran engages in confrontations directly on its own, these groups must navigate a more uncertain regional landscape and pursue their own logics of survival.
Yet the logic of survival is not understood in uniform ways. Actors more embedded within state institutions have strong incentives to avoid destabilizing escalation that could jeopardize their domestic political gains, and their tolerance for risk is therefore lower. By contrast, a smaller set of factions, with fewer institutional stakes and stronger transnational commitments, view confrontation as necessary to maintain their political, economic, and ideological authority. This helps explain consequential actions that seem strategically irrational, such as Hizballah’s attacks following Operation Epic Fury or Iraqi armed groups targeting U.S. bases despite the expectation of far stronger retaliation. The result is a network divided over how far to go.
Decapitation campaigns may demonstrate military superiority, but they rarely eliminate movements embedded in local political orders. Instead, they fragment decision-making structures and produce adversaries that are weaker as coordinated alliances yet more adaptive, less predictable, and ultimately destabilizing.
Different Logics of Survival
Since Oct. 7, Israel and the United States have explicitly sought not just to eliminate individual members of the axis, but to dismantle the network as a whole and shift the locus of confrontation toward Iran itself. The June 2025 12-day war marked an inflection point: Rather than mobilizing the axis for a coordinated regional response, Iranian officials signaled a new posture: This time, Iran would act directly and alone. Tehran appeared to be reassessing its security doctrine, and with it, the extent to which it wanted to rely on its partners under conditions of direct state-to-state escalation. The message suggested both a weakened axis and Iran’s shift away from its long-standing forward-defense model.
For many axis groups, the operating logic has increasingly become one of survival, rooted above all in local empowerment. In Lebanon, the technocratic government led by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun, a former commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, has stated its ambitions to consolidate the government’s authority and disarm Hizballah. Yet little tangible progress has been made. Hizballah remains embedded in Lebanon’s political and security landscape. Although the group has suffered significant military losses and its once-dominant position within the political system has been weakened, it has not been dismantled and continues to claim representation of the country’s majority Shiite population. Recent analysis has argued that these losses and leadership decapitation have reduced the group’s strategic utility to Iran in a broader confrontation.
At the same time, years of decapitation strikes have contributed to greater internal fragmentation, particularly following the loss of Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several other senior leaders. Some within the leadership prioritize preserving Hizballah’s domestic position and shielding Lebanon from a devastating escalation with Israel. Others, who believe their power derives from armed resistance and their transnational relations with Iran and the axis, seem more inclined to demonstrate continued confrontation. Reports suggest these divisions reflect two broad tendencies: One camp, often associated with Secretary-General Naem Qassem, seeks to prioritize domestic political survival, while a more hardline current views Hizballah’s future as inseparable from the survival of Iran’s regional project. The decision to launch drones and rockets into Israel following the killing of Khamenei appears to have emerged from this latter camp. While such actions risk undermining Hizballah’s domestic position and exposing Lebanese civilians to further violence, they reflect how fragmentation within a movement operating in survival mode can produce more volatile and less predictable behavior.
The Popular Mobilization Forces, also subject to sustained decapitation campaigns since the United States killed its leader, Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis, in Jan. 2020, are therefore similarly fragmented. Many groups now retain significant political power within the Iraqi state. In last November’s national elections, the largest Shiite political party to secure the most seats was Sadiqoon, led by Qais al Khazali, head of Asaib Ahl al-Haq.
Over the past several years, many armed groups have transitioned from primarily armed actors into institutional stakeholders, embedding themselves within Iraq’s political, economic, and security state structures. Iraq’s oil-funded state, with annual budgets exceeding $100 billion, offers substantial opportunities for political and economic empowerment.
Washington has continued to press Baghdad to integrate the Popular Mobilization Forces more fully into formal state structures. Yet as one senior resistance leader recently remarked, “We are already the state. Telling us to integrate would mean taking the weapon from this hand and placing it in the other.” For many of these groups, survival increasingly means insulating these gains from destabilizing escalation, even if that results in a more muted response to conflicts involving Iran.
This logic, however, does not apply consistently throughout Iraq’s armed groups. Factions with fewer domestic stakes are more willing to push the transnational confrontation forward. Elements of Kataib Hizballah, for instance, function as more mobile vanguard networks capable of operating under shifting organizational names while continuing to deploy drones and rockets.
Harakat Hizballah al-Nujaba represents another example. Its leader, Sheikh Akram al Kaabi, has repeatedly emphasized the group’s close alignment with Iran. Compared to more institutionalized groups, these factions are less embedded within the Iraqi state. Their financial networks are more transnational, their weapons and training more directly tied to Iran, and their ideological orientation remains rooted in the doctrine of Shiite armed resistance. For them, survival is about sustaining the broader axis of resistance.
The Houthis present a somewhat different configuration. Unlike Hizballah or the Iraqi groups, their survival is not primarily tied to power-sharing within an existing state but to their ability to govern their own state. The movement continues to control much of northern Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, where it has consolidated political authority, taxation systems, and security institutions. Years of Gulf and U.S. air campaigns have degraded some capabilities but have not dismantled the movement’s governing apparatus. Under the leadership of Abdul Malik al Houthi, the group derives legitimacy both from its role as a governing authority and from its continued participation in the broader axis of resistance.
Crucially, unlike Hizballah and the Iraqi groups, the Houthis have not faced the same degree of sustained disruption to their senior leadership. As a result, their decision-making structures remain more centralized and coherent. While the movement calibrates its actions to avoid overwhelming retaliation, the relative unity of its leadership enables a more deliberate strategy of survival through territorial control and regional confrontation, including the selective use of Red Sea attacks to signal resistance while managing escalation.
The Limits and Consequences of Decapitation
In short, actors linked to the axis of resistance are recalibrating. Years of decapitation campaigns and sustained military pressure have fragmented the network, pushing its members toward divergent logics of survival. For some, survival means preserving political footholds within state institutions; for others, it means sustaining the legitimacy of armed resistance and maintaining transnational ties to Iran. Across the region, these groups now operate less as a coherent axis than as a loose constellation of actors navigating different constraints and incentives.
This transformation carries important implications for U.S. strategy. Sustained decapitation and degradation campaigns have reshaped these movements but have not eliminated them. Instead, they have driven many actors to embed themselves more deeply within domestic political and economic systems while leaving smaller, more militant factions to carry forward the transnational confrontation. The result is a network that may be less capable of regional escalation but is also more fragmented, still durable, and less predictable.
As the axis shifts from expansion to survival, the challenge for the United States is not only deterring attacks but managing a landscape of fragmented actors whose incentives to escalate or restrain themselves increasingly diverge. In this sense, the survival mode of the axis of resistance does not signal its disappearance. Rather, it points to a more diffuse and uncertain phase of confrontation in the years ahead.
Renad Mansour is a senior research fellow and project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, where his research focuses on the political economy of state-building, conflict, and regional power competition in the Middle East. He is the co-author of Once Upon a Time in Iraq (BBC Books / Penguin, 2020), published to accompany the award-winning BBC documentary series.
Image: khamenei.ir via Wikimedia Commons
