Wathiq al-Battat (died 20 December 2014) was the Secretary-General of the Hezbollah Brigades in Iraq and the founder of the Mukhtar Army.
Biography[]
Wathiq al-Battat was a Shia Muslim cleric in Iraq, and he was formerly a top-ranking official in the Hezbollah Brigades. On 4 February 2013, al-Battat formed his own group, the Mukhtar Army, with the goal of protecting Shi'ites in the country from the sectarian Sunnis and the Islamic State. al-Battat stated that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of Iran was his leader, and that the Mukhtar Army's goals were to annihilate the "atheist state" of Saudi Arabia and all of the countries that supported Israel and America, saying that the Shi'ites could focus on domestic matters after annihilating the Jews. On 9 February, seven members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) militia were killed in a mortar attack by the Mukhtar Army, and he was later arrested on the orders of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on 2 January 2014. Later released, he was killed at a fake police checkpoint on 20 December 2014 in eastern Iraq's Diyala Governorate, and some supporters of the Islamic State on Twitter claimed that IS killed him.