My project examines how an obscure group of Iraqi exiles succeeded in reshaping US foreign policy on Iraq towards regime change. I trace the covert and overt measures undertaken by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a transborder political opposition party led by the Iraqi exiles Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya, to draw the CIA, Congress, the Pentagon, and White House into war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between 1991-2003. Given that American policymakers tended to dismiss the broader Iraqi opposition’s pleas for US-backed regime change as extreme and unrealistic, how did a relatively unknown group of Iraqi exiles in the INC without political legitimacy inside of Iraq build political support in the United States for their objective to overthrow Saddam Hussein? I use the case of the INC’s involvement in the American interventions in Iraq as an opportunity to understand how exiled or transborder political opposition groups without an army or state of their own interface with, influence, or otherwise coopt domestic political networks in a host country to enact policies against their home regimes. I develop a conceptual model that makes analytically visible the murky world of what I describe as the transborder-domestic nexus: the configuration of political elites and political institutions such as consultancy firms, think-tanks, and ethnic lobbies that link rebel groups, political dissidents and operatives, and even authoritarian regimes to sympathetic officials in government and obfuscate their violent agendas in palatable human rights- or civil society-based discourse. The public is accustomed to witnessing the visible output and tangible consequences of the transborder-domestic nexus: the fake “grassroots” organizations and civil society initiatives pushing for foreign intervention abroad, newspaper articles and media reports emphasizing human rights violations and regime atrocities, and, most importantly, the oversees violence it produces. My dissertation provides a window through which both scholars and the interested public can observe the backstage of the powerful and influential transborder and domestic networks that routinely shape political violence and war.