Profile: Alwiyat al-Waad al-Haq

About the Authors

Crispin Smith is a Washington DC-based national security attorney and leads an initiative designed to impose non-kinetic costs against human rights abusers and great power competitors. He is a cofounder of the Militia Spotlight platform.

Hamdi Malik

Hamdi Malik is an associate fellow with The Washington Institute and cofounder of its Militia Spotlight platform.

Michael Knights

Michael Knights is the Jill and Jay Bernstein Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute and cofounder of the Militia Spotlight platform, which offers in-depth analysis of developments related to Iran-backed militias.

Brief Analysis

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A facade group with unique ties to Kataib Hezbollah, Alwiyat al-Waad al-Haq has been used exclusively to claim or threaten attacks against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Name: Alwiyat al-Waad al-Haq (AWH) (True Pledge Brigades). (This profile was last updated on February 7, 2024).

Type of movement: Facade group. Kinetic military operations. Foreign counter-Saudi Arabia/UAE operations.

Alwiyat al-Waed al-Haq logo

History and objectives:

By its own statements and images, AWH is focused on anti-Saudi and anti-Emirati propaganda and attacks. It has claimed no attacks on Iraqi soil.
On January 23, 2021, AWH’s newly created Telegram account claimed an unmanned aerial vehicle attack on Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, declaring: "After the exaggeration and insistence of the Gulf Arabs on crimes against the nations of the region and their continued support for the criminal gangs of ISIS and takfiri groups stained with the blood of the innocent, we, the children of the Arabian Peninsula, fulfilled our promise and sent drones of terror to the Kingdom of Al-Saud and targeted their strongholds in al-Yamama Palace and other targets in Riyadh.”
- Speaking with the Associated Press, a militia official claimed that three drones were launched from Iraqi-Saudi border areas by a relatively unknown Iran-backed faction in Iraq (referring to AWH) and crashed into the royal complex in Riyadh.
- The same official claimed that the drones came “in parts from Iran and were assembled in Iraq, and were launched from Iraq.”
On January 27, 2021, AWH posted an image of a unmanned combat aerial vehicle attacking the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Some muqawama (resistance) media channels have referred to AWH as “Alwiyat al-Waad al-Sadiq,” which has the same meaning. This suggests the group may originally have been named in a language other than Arabic.
The group stopped posting on January 27, 2021. It is possible that the AWH name and associated account were originally created solely for the purpose of claiming the January 23 attack and threatening Saudi Arabia.
On January 17, 2022, the group became active again, and on February 2 of that year, it claimed an attack on the UAE with four "fixed-wing" drones. The attack was undertaken by AWH commander Abu Baqir al-Saedi, a Kataib Hezbollah (KH) commander.
On October 2, 2022, AWH issued a statement threatening to attack “companies that work on the [Arabian] Peninsula." This was in tandem with threats that channels affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had issued against Saudi Arabia for its purported role in fanning popular protests in Iran.
On October 24, 2023, AWH threatened attacks on U.S. bases in Kuwait and the UAE.
On February 7, 2024, Saedi was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad. He had been linked to multiple KH and AWH attacks on U.S. forces, including the January 28, 2024, strike in Jordan that killed three Americans.

Chain of command:

The preponderance of evidence shows that AWH has unique links to KH (based on analysis of links between their media channels). The late KH commander Abu Baqir al-Saedi controlled at least one known AWH strike (February 2, 2021).
Direct control by Iran's IRGC-Qods Force is a realistic alternative.

Affiliate relationships: