In a Middle East Forum (MEF)/American Jewish University (AJU) June 17 podcast (video), AJU’s Rick Richman moderated the fifth of a seven-part series of interviews titled “Israel’s Seven-Front War: Part Two: Israel’s West Bank.”
Guest speaker: Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum. The following summarizes his comments:
Iraq has been in chaos since the fall of Saddam Hussein following America’s 2003 invasion. Subsequent events over the past two decades have created an opening for Iran to replicate its Lebanon model of a “civil-military fusion” by building both political and military power in Iraq.
The splintering deteriorated into the current state of Iraq’s “three-way ethno-sectarian conflict,” spawning a civil war of dueling insurgencies between the Shia and Sunni, both of whom are opposed to the Americans.
The U.S invasion in Iraq “upset a certain balance” where, previously, the Sunni Arab minority had dominated. As the Sunnis descended, the Shia majority ascended to fill the vacuum but were not accepted among Iraq’s multi-ethnically divided communities. The splintering deteriorated into the current state of Iraq’s “three-way ethno-sectarian conflict,” spawning a civil war of dueling insurgencies between the Shia and Sunni, both of whom are opposed to the Americans.
Iraq, a country of 46 million people in the “geographical heartland of the Middle East,” was established by the British in 1921 following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and became independent in 1947. A Hashemite monarchy in place until 1958 was replaced by an Arab nationalist general who held power until 1963. That year, the Ba’ath revival party assumed power, further consolidating its hold in 1969.
By 1979, Saddam Hussein had become a “one-man show” in the Ba’athist power structure, ushering in two disastrous decisions. In 1980, he declared war against newly revolutionary Iran. The war, lasting eight years, saw a combined 1.5 million Iraqis and Iranians killed. In 1991, Saddam invaded Kuwait, triggering the First Gulf War.
Post 9-11, America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed Saddam. Plagued by insurgencies, President Obama withdrew in 2011, only to see U.S. troops return in 2014 as Sunnis rose up against the Shia in the form of ISIS. The U.S., in concert with Shia militias, drove ISIS out of Iraq, and the Shia regained power.
The three main groups in Iraq include largely pro-American Iraqi Kurds, which comprise 15-20 percent of the population, a Shia Arab majority, and a Sunni Arab minority. Despite five democratically held elections, the divided society remained weak and is now under the influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
When ISIS arose in Iraq, Iraqi ayatollah Sistani, an important Shia cleric independent of Iran, issued a fatwa [religious ruling] that mobilized hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia into militias to wage jihad against ISIS. As the militias grew into Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)/al-Hashd al-Shaabi, led by the pro-Iranian Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Iran shrewdly exploited the situation by making PMF its parallel army.
Of the seven arenas where the seven-front war on Israel is being waged, three of them (Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq) form a geographically “contiguous land area” and can therefore be understood as a single front.
Al-Muhandis, assassinated with Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force in a 2020 U.S. drone strike, had consolidated Iranian military power in Iraq. By 2022, the Iraqi Shia militias that Iran had mobilized to advance its interests, politically organized to dominate the Iraqi parliament. The symbiotic combination of political and military power became a vehicle to channel resources towards the military arm and secure political power.
The Iranians run Iraq by exerting political influence but have no large conventional Iranian forces there. However, “there is an Iran-controlled structure of military and political power across the Arabic-speaking world which is now mobilizing to fight Israel.” Iraqi Shia militias can fire missiles towards Israel, providing plausible deniability for Iran, while no other Iraqi force is willing to oppose them.
Shia militias are currently more focused on targeting U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. American troops in Iraq who are there to counter a largely spent ISIS should join with regional allies to “challenge the ownership of Iraq against the Iranians.” The problem is that the Biden administration lacks “strategic clarity” to roll back the Iranian advance. This lack of clarity is compounded by Washington’s disunited and disparate U.S.-trained Iraqi military assets.
Of the seven arenas where the seven-front war on Israel is being waged, three of them (Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq) form a geographically “contiguous land area” and can therefore be understood as a single front. This provides Iran “contiguous freedom of movement” from the Iran-Iraq border to the Mediterranean Sea, right up to Israel’s border, making Iran a powerful factor on Iraq’s political stage.
