How Iran Is Making It Impossible for the US to Beat ISIS
Written byMichael Weiss
The Daily Beast
02.01.15
Washington needs to quit
pretending it can work with Iran to defeat the Islamic State. Tehran’s
real objective is to defeat Washington.
It was August 2007, and
General David Petraeus,
the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, was angry. In his weekly
report to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Petraeus wrote: “I am
considering telling the President that I believe Iran is, in fact,
waging war on the U.S. in Iraq, with all of the U.S. public and
governmental responses that could come from that revelation. …
I
do believe that Iran has gone beyond merely striving for influence in
Iraq and could be creating proxies to actively fight us, thinking that
they can keep us distracted while they try to build WMD and set up [the
Mahdi Army] to act like Lebanese Hezbollah in Iraq.”
There was no question there and then on the ground in Iraq that Iran
was a very dangerous enemy. There should not be any question about that
now, either. And the failure of the Obama administration to come to
grips with that reality is
making the task of defeating the so-called Islamic State more difficult—indeed, more likely to be impossible—every day.
There are lessons to be learned from the experience of the last
decade, and of the last fortnight, but what is far from clear is whether
Washington, or the American public, is likely to accept them because
they imply much greater American re-engagement in the theater of battle.
As a result, what we’ve seen is behavior like the proverbial ostrich
burying its head in the desert sand, pretending this disaster just isn’t
happening. But at a minimum we should be clear about the basic facts.
In Iraq and Syria, as we square off against ISIS, the enemy of our enemy
is not our friend, he is our enemy, too.
In 2007, there were 180,000 American troops in Iraq.
Under Petraeus’s oversight, U.S. Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC), the elite forces responsible for hunting terrorists around the
world, was divided into
two
task forces. Task Force 16 went after al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that
eventually would spawn ISIS, while Task Force 17 was dedicated to
“countering Iranian influence,” chiefly by killing or capturing members
of Iraq’s Shia militias—though in some cases, it even arrested
operatives of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) who
were arming and supervising those militias’ guerrilla warfare against
coalition troops.
At one point, in the summer of 2007, Petraeus concluded that
the
Mahdi Army, headed by the Shiite demagogue Muqtada al-Sadr, posed a
greater “hindrance to long-term security in Iraq” than al Qaeda did.
As recounted in The Endgame, Michael Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor’s
magisterial history of the Second Iraq War, two-thirds of all American
casualties in Iraq in July 2007 were incurred by Shiite militias.
Weapons known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, were
especially effective against the U.S. forces. They were Iranian designed
and constructed roadside bombs that, when detonated, became molten
copper projectiles able to cut through the armor on tanks and other
vehicles, maiming or killing the soldiers inside.
So it came as a surprise to many veterans of the war when Secretary
of State John Kerry, asked in December what he made of the news that
Iran was conducting airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, suggested “the net
effect is positive.” Similarly, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey—formerly the commander of the 1st Armored
Division in Baghdad—told reporters last month, “As long as the Iraqi
government remains committed to inclusivity of all the various groups
inside the country, then I think Iranian influence will be positive.”
Whatever the Iraqi government says it is committed to, “inclusiveness” is not what’s happening on the ground.
Iran’s influence in Iraq since ISIS sacked Mosul last June has
resulted in a wave of sectarian bloodletting and dispossession against
the country’s Sunni minority population, usually at the hands of
Iranian-backed Shia militia groups, but sometimes with the active
collusion of the Iraq’s internal security forces. Indeed, just as news
was breaking last week that ISIS’s five-month siege on the
Syrian-Turkish border town Kobane finally had been broken, Reuters
reported that in Iraq’s Diyala province at least 72 “unarmed Iraqis”
—all Sunnis—were “taken from their homes by men in uniform; heads down
and linked together, then led in small groups to a field, made to kneel,
and selected to be shot one by one.”
Stories such as these out of Iraq have been frequent albeit
under-publicized and reluctantly acknowledged (if at all) by Washington
both before and after Operation Inherent Resolve got underway against
ISIS.
For instance, 255 Sunni prisoners were executed by Shia militias and
their confederates in the government’s internal security forces between
June 9 and mid-July, according to Human Rights Watch. Eight of the
victims were boys below the age of 18. “Sunnis are a minority in
Baghdad, but they’re the majority in our morgue,” a doctor working at
Iraq’s Health Ministry, told HRW at the end of July. Three forensic
pathologists found that most of the victims in Baghdad were shot clean
through the head, their bodies often left casually where they were
killed. “The numbers have only increased since Mosul,” one doctor said.
On August 22, 2014, the Musab Bin Omair mosque in Diyala—the same
province where last week’s alleged executions occurred—was raided by
officers of the security forces and militants of Asaib Ahl al-Haq (the
League of the Righteous), which slaughtered 34 people, according to HRW.
Marie Harf, the U.S. State Department spokeswoman, said at the time:
“This senseless attack underscores the urgent need for Iraqi leaders
from across the political spectrum to take the necessary steps that will
help unify the country against all violent extremist groups.”
Since then, however, U.S. warplanes have provided indirect air
support to Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated
terrorist entity, both of which were at the vanguard of the troops that
ended ISIS’s months-long siege of Amerli, a Shia Turkomen town of about
15,000, in November 2014. These militias have also been seen and
photographed or videoed operating U.S. Abrams tanks and armored vehicles
intended for Iraq’s regular army, which means that there are now two
terrorist organization, Sunni ISIS and Kataib Hezbollah, armed with
heavy-duty American weapons of war.
The Hezbollah-ization of Iraq’s military and security forces has been
overseen by the IRGC-QF, another U.S.-designated terrorist entity,
which is headed by Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, a man personally
sanctioned by the Treasury Department for his role in propping up Bashar
al Assad’s mass murderous regime in Syria.
In Iraq and Syria the enemy of our enemy is not our friend, he is our enemy, too.
Suleimani is the same Iranian operative Petraeus once called “evil”
because of his well-documented role orchestrating attacks on U.S.
servicemen. The most notorious episode happened in Karbala in 2007—in a
raid that was carried out by Asaib Ahl al-Haq and resulted in the death
of five G.I.s One of the founders of this militia and a main perpetrator
of the attack, Qais al Khazali, was captured by coalition forces and
subsequently released in a prisoner swap for a British hostage in 2009.
Today, al Khazali moves freely around Iraq, dressed in battle fatigues,
commanding Asaib militants.
Another one of Suleimani’s major proxies, the Badr Corps, is headed by Hadi al-Amiri,
who happens to be Iraq’s former minister of transport, in which
capacity he was accused by the U.S. government of helping to fly Iranian
weapons and personnel into Syria. Not only was one of al-Amiri’s Badr
henchmen, the group’s intelligence chief Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, the
man chiefly responsible for importing explosively formed projectiles
into Iraq from Iran’s Mehran province during the occupation, but another
of his subordinates, Mohammed Ghabban, is currently Iraq’s Interior
Minister. This gives the Badr Corps purview over all of Iraq’s internal
security forces, including its federal police—that is to say, the men in
uniform who have allegedly acquiesced or connived in the Shia militias’
anti-Sunni pogroms.
Indeed, Iraq’s Interior Ministry gained notorious reputation in the
last decade for being a clearinghouse for sectarian bloodletting. During
the civil war in the mid-2000s, its agents, nominally aligned with U.S.
troops, moonlighted as anti-Sunni death squads that functioned with the
impunity of officialdom. The ministry also ran a series of
torture-prisons in Baghdad, such as Site 4, where, according to a 2006
U.S. State Department cable, 1,400 detainees were held in “in squalid,
cramped conditions,” with 41 of them bearing signs of physical abuse.
Ministry interrogators, the cable noted, “had used threats and acts of
anal rape to induce confessions and had forced juveniles to fellate them
during interrogations.”
Needless to add, Badr has hardly mended its ways with the passage of
time and the exit of U.S. troops from Iraq. Today, the militia has been
accused of “kidnapping and summarily executing people…[and] expelling
Sunnis from their homes, then looting and burning them, in some cases
razing entire villages,” in the words of Human Rights Watch’s Iraq
research Erin Evers, who added for good measure that the current White
House strategy in Iraq is “basically paving the way for these guys to
take over the country even more than they already have.”
As if taunting the Obama administration’s, Suleimani has takento
popping up, Zelig-like, in photographs all over Iraq, usually from a
front-line position from which ISIS has just been expelled. It is hard
to overestimate the propaganda value such images now carry.
Consider this week’s blockbuster disclosure that the CIA and Israel’s
Mossad collaborated in the 2008 assassination of one of Suleimani’s
other high-value proxies, Hezbollah security chief Imad Mughniyeh. In
close collaboration with Iran, Mughniyeh coordinated suicide attacks
ranging from the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombings in Beirut to the
blowing up of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994. Mughniyeh
also was linked to the kidnapping of several Europeans and Americans in
Lebanon in the 1980s, including CIA Station Chief William Buckley,
believed to have died in 1985 after months of torture by Iranian and
Iranian-trained interrogators.
So it is not surprising that Langley wanted Mughniyeh dead. What is
suprising is that according to the Washington Post the CIA and Mossad
had “a chance to kill” the Iranian master-spy Suleimani as he strolled
through Damascus with Mughniyeh in 2008, but passed it up because of
potential collateral damage. No doubt U.S. satellite surveillance is
currently tracking Suleimani’s plain-sight movements in Iraq and Syria,
too.
Last month, an Israeli attack in the Syrian sector of the Golan
Heights killed Mughniyeh’s son, Jihad, who was said to have been an
“intimate” protégé of Suleimani.
While segments of the U.S. intelligence establishment and
punditocracy believe Iran to be a credible or necessary force for
counterterrorism, the fighters associated with Suleimani’s
paramilitaries profess a different agenda entirely.
In October, ISIS was driven from Jurf al-Sakher, a town about 30
miles southwest of Baghdad. The operation was said to have been planned
personally by Suleimani. It featured Quds Force agents and Lebanese
Hezbollah militants embedded with some 7,000 troops form the Iraqi
Security Forces.
Ahmed al Zamili, the head of the 650-strong Al Qara’a Regiment, one
of the militias party to that fight, told the Wall Street Journal that
he actually welcomed the invasion of Iraq by ISIS because this dire
event would only hasten the return of the Hidden Imam, a religious
prophecy which in Shia Islam precedes the founding of a worldwide
Islamic state. Al Zamili made it clear that his notion of
counterinsurgency was holy war. Meanwhile, 70,000 Sunnis were driven
from Jurf al-Sakher, which means “rocky bank” and has now been renamed
Jurf al-Nasr (“victory bank”). The provincial council told them they
would not be allowed to return for eight or ten months.
“Iran has used Iraq as a petri dish to grown new Shia jihadist groups and spread their ideology,”
says Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shia militias. By Smyth’s count, there
are more than 50 “highly ideological, anti-American, and rabidly
sectarian” Shia militias operating in Iraq today, and recruiting more to
their ranks, all with the acquiescence of the central government.
Some of Iraq’s Shia politicians have acknowledged the dismal reality
that has attended Baghdad’s outsourcing of its security to “Khomeinists”
— and the potential it carries for the kind of all-out sectarian
bloodletting that nearly tore the country apart in the mid-2000s.
One unnamed Shia politician told the Guardian newspaper last August
that groups of Shia extremists “equal in their radicalization to the
Sunni Qaeda” are being created. “By arming the community and creating
all these regiments of militias, I am scared that my sect and community
will burn,” he said.
More recently, Iraq’s Vice President for Reconciliation, Ayad Allawi,
a secular Shia who once served as the interim prime minister, told the
same broadsheet that pro-government forces have been ethnically
cleansing Sunnis from Baghdad. This is a starker admission of the
atrocities being committed by America’s silent partner than currently is
on offer by the State Department or Pentagon, and many Sunnis now
suspect Washington of full collaboration with Tehran, whatever the
protestations to the contrary.
When Michael Pregent, one of the authors of this essay, briefed a
team of U.S. military advisors headed to Iraq recently, he warned them
that they are now operating in an environment in which Iranian and
Shia-militia targeting choices take priority over the recommendations of
U.S. advisors and intelligence officers.
The consequence of this tacit collaboration with the Quds Force and
its assets is obvious: the United States will be portrayed by ISIS
propagandists as a helpmeet in the indiscriminate murder and
dispossession of Sunnis.
Kerry and Dempsey would do well to pay closer attention to Iran’s air war, too.
According to one Kurdish Iraqi pilot interviewed by the Guardian,
Suleimani’s command center in Iraq, the Rasheed Air Base south of
Baghdad, is where “the Iranians make barrel bombs” and then use Antonov
planes and Huey helicoptetrs to drop them in Sunni areas — thus
replicating one of the nastiest tactics of Assad’s air force in Syria.
The Anbar Awakening critical to stabilizing Iraq in the middle of the
last decade was made possible by the presence of U.S. ground forces who
represented to the influential Sunni tribes an impartial bulwark
against the draconian rule of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Many in the Obama administration express the hope that another such
awakening can be fomented, given the current political and military
dynamics in Iraq. But how? ISIS has cleverly exploited the sensitivities
and fears of Iraq’s Sunni tribes, offering those it hasn’t rounded up
and murdered the chance to “repent” and reconcile with the so-called
“Calihpate.”
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, a new book by the co-author of this
piece, documents the tragic situation of those Sunni tribesmen who have
risen up against ISIS only to be slaughtered mercilessly, sometimes with
the help of their fellow tribesmen, whom ISIS had already won over. The
rest of the constituents of this bellwether Sunni demographic are thus
given a choice between cutting a pragmatic deal with ISIS or embracing
Shia death squads as their saviors and liberators. Most have,
predictably, opted for the former.
“The American approach is to leave Iraq to the Iraqis,” Sami
al-Askari, a former Iraqi MP and senior advisor to former Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki, told Reuters last November. “The Iranians don’t say
leave Iraq to the Iraqis. They say leave Iraq to us.”
For the White House, that ought to define the problem, not the solution.
