Behind the rise of a paramilitary force in Iraq credited with saving the country from Islamic State is an Iran-trained jihadist the U.S. wants far from the battlefield. A decade ago, the Iraqi known to U.S. officials as Jamal Jaafar Ibrahimi was in a cat-and-mouse game with U.S. forces and on the run from a Kuwaiti death sentence for allegedly orchestrating bombings at the American and French embassies there in the 1980s. The U.S. Treasury lists him as a terrorist. Today, the shadowy figure—known mostly by his nom de guerre, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes—is the most influential commander in the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF. The force of mostly Shiite Muslim recruits is Iraq’s parallel army, crucial in successes against Islamic State in the past two years, filling the gap after the regular army crumbled […]