Displaced Sunni people, who fled the violence in the city of Ramadi, arrive at the outskirts of Baghdad Photo: STRINGER/IRAQ
Its strategy is essentially Maoist – the comparison has not been enough made, but now that Isil has declared itself an agent of Cultural Revolution, with its destruction of history, perhaps it will be more. Like Mao’s revolutionaries, it conquers the countryside before storming the towns.
Even now, the fact that much of its territory is rural or even desert is seen as a weakness. But it is beginning to “pick off” major towns and cities with impunity. In fact, where society is fractured, like Syria and Iraq, the “sea of revolution” panics the citizenry, making it feel “surrounded” by unseen and incomprehensible agents of doom.
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Have any words come back to haunt President Obama so much as his description of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant last team as a “JV” – junior varsity – team of terrorists?
This wasn’t al-Qaeda in its 9/11 pomp, he said; just because a university second team wore Manchester United jerseys didn’t make them David Beckham.
How times change. As of this weekend, the JV team is doing a lot better than Manchester United. With its capture of Palmyra, it controls half of Syria.
Its defeat in Kobane – a town of which few non-Kurds had heard – was cheered by the world; its victory in Ramadi last Sunday gives it control of virtually all of Iraq’s largest province, one which reaches to the edge of Baghdad.
Calling itself a state, one analyst wrote, no longer looks like an exaggeration.
Senior US officials seem to agree. “Isil as an organization is better in every respect than its predecessor of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It’s better manned, it’s better resourced, they have better fighters, they’re more experienced,” one said at a briefing to explain the loss of Ramadi. “We’ve never seen something like this.”
How did Isil manage to inflict such a humiliation on the world’s most powerful country? As with many great shock-and-awe military advances over the years, it is easier to explain in hindsight than it apparently was to prevent.
Ever since Isil emerged in its current form in 2013, military and and political analysts have been saying that its success is due to its grasp of both tactics and strategy.
Its strategy is essentially Maoist – the comparison has not been enough made, but now that Isil has declared itself an agent of Cultural Revolution, with its destruction of history, perhaps it will be more. Like Mao’s revolutionaries, it conquers the countryside before storming the towns.
Even now, the fact that much of its territory is rural or even desert is seen as a weakness. But it is beginning to “pick off” major towns and cities with impunity. In fact, where society is fractured, like Syria and Iraq, the “sea of revolution” panics the citizenry, making it feel “surrounded” by unseen and incomprehensible agents of doom.
Like Mao, Isil uses propaganda – its famed dominance of social media – to terrorise its targets mentally. Senior Iraqi policemen have recounted being sent images via their mobile phones of their decapitated fellow officers. This has a chastening effect on the fight-or-flight reflex.
It then uses actual terror to further instil chaos. Isil’s main targets have been ground down by years of car bombs and “random” attacks. It seems extraordinary, but one of the reasons given by Mosul residents for preferring Isil rule is that there are no longer so many terrorist attacks: not surprising, since the “terrorists” are in control.
Only once your enemy is weak, divided, and demoralised, do you strike.
You then do so with an awesome show of force – one which can mislead as to the actual numbers involved.
The final assault on central Ramadi, which had been fought over for almost 18 months, began with an estimated 30 car bombs. Ten were said to be individually of an equivalent size to the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, which killed 168 people.
There is nothing new in saying that both Syrian and Iraqi governments have contributed greatly to the rise of Isil by failing to offer the Sunni populations of their countries a reason to support them.
Some say that focusing on the failings and injustices of these regimes ignores the fact that militant Islamism, like Maoism, is a superficially attractive, even romantic idea to many, whether oppressed or not, and that its notions must be fought and defeated intellectually and emotionally.
That is true. But relying on Islamic extremism to burn itself out, or for its followers to be eventually persuaded of the errors of their ways, is no answer. Like financial markets, the world can stay irrational for longer than the rest of us can stay politically and militarily solvent.
Rather, the West and those it supports have to show they can exert force against force, and then create a better world, one which all Iraqis and Syrians, especially Sunnis, are prepared to fight for.
In March, an uneasy coalition of Shia militias, Iraqi soldiers, and US jets took back the town of Tikrit from Isil. It remains a wasteland, whose inhabitants have yet to return, ruled over by gunmen rather than by the rule of law.
That is not an attractive symbol, for Iraqi Sunnis, of what victory against Isil looks like. If the war against Isil is to be won, the first step is to make clear to Iraqis and Syrians alike what victory looks like, and why it will be better for them.
The downside to playing on the same team as the Iranian regime, even in just this one military campaign against ISIS, is that we are helping to enable a far more dangerous power than ISIS to extend its hegemonic dominance throughout the entire region.
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Iraq’s defense minister Khalid al-Obeidi is claiming victory over ISIS forces in the city of Tikrit, which ISIS had captured last summer as its forces advanced across large swaths of territory in northern and western Iraq. “We have the pleasure, with all our pride, to announce the good news of a magnificent victory,” Obeidi said. The Pentagon and a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition were a bit more cautious, noting some residual ISIS resistance. However, they too reported that significant progress had been made in wresting control of Saddam Hussein’s birthplace from ISIS’s grip.
The next strategic military objective in pushing ISIS back from the territories it controls in Iraq is to re-take Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul.
Iran supplied significant military support to the Shiite militia forces, who were a major part of the Iraqi counter-offensive on the ground. At the same time, U.S. air strikes seemed to have helped in supporting the Iraqi ground forces’ advance into Tikrit. The precise extent of any behind-the-scenes direct or indirect coordination between the U.S. and Iran is unknown at the present time. However, according to DebkaFile {March 26, 2015), “In the last two weeks of the Tikrit operation, liaison between the US and Iranian military in Iraq was routed through the office of the Iraqi Prime Minister in Baghdad.”
There is little question that without the Iranian-backed Shiite militia and substantial military support on the ground from Iran, ISIS would most likely still be in control of Tikrit today. U.S. airstrikes may have been necessary to soften ISIS’s resistance, but only ground troops with Iran’s support could dislodge them.
The downside to playing on the same team as the Iranian regime, even in just this one military campaign against ISIS, is that we are helping to enable a far more dangerous power than ISIS to extend its hegemonic dominance throughout the entire region.
As General David Petraeus, who certainly knows something about Iraq, told the Washington Postrecently:
In fact, I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq’s long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by — and some guided by — Iran… Longer term, Iranian-backed Shia militia could emerge as the preeminent power in the country, one that is outside the control of the government and instead answerable to Tehran.
Without downplaying ISIS’s horrific acts, its rapid-fire successes in Syria and Iraq (even with the setback in Tikrit), and its growing allegiances in Libya, Nigeria and areas further away from its home base including Afghanistan, the fact is that ISIS’s ambitions far exceed its current means for achieving them. ISIS is proficient in using social media for recruitment, propaganda and intimidation purposes, but that can only take ISIS so far.
Iran, by contrast, has built up its military capabilities to the point that it can back up its aggressive threats in the region. And that’s even without the nuclear arms capability that President Obama seems to be willing to risk allowing Iran to achieve in order to secure his legacy with a deal.
As a result, America’s traditional Sunni allies in the region such as Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states are doubting whether they can continue to count on the United States for support. And they are taking matters into their own hands, including a decision to form a multinational Arab military force to respond to Iranian aggression and other perceived threats.
As explained by Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo and quoted by the New York Times: “The U.S. is much less trusted as an ally, as an insurance policy towards the security threats facing the governments in the region, and so those governments decide to act on their own.”
These governments know their neighborhood well and see Iran as a much graver threat to regional peace and security than ISIS. Iran’s military and financial support of the Shiite Houthi rebels in taking control of major parts of Yemen was the last straw. Saudi Arabia on its own initiative decided to launch an air campaign against Houthi positions in Yemen and has not ruled out a ground attack along with the military forces of other Arab countries.
In response to the air and sea blockade of Yemen that Saudi Arabia is imposing on Yemen, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to dispatch “two naval task forces to sail to the Red Sea,” according to DebkaFile (March 31, 2015). “The naval task forces are being sent to draw a sea shield around the Houthi forces to defend them against Saudi-Egyptian assaults. This maneuver was orchestrated by the Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani,” DebkaFile reported.
Soleimani certainly gets around. Earlier this month he popped up in Iraq to lead the Shiite militias in their fight against ISIS. Now the man who fought on the same side as us against ISIS in Iraq is apparently coordinating Iran’s fight to hold onto the Houthis’ gains in Yemen where they forced the American and Saudi Arabian-backed president to flee.
Soleimani is “the puppet master controlling numerous Iranian surrogates in various countries,” said Jim Phillips, Middle East analyst for the Heritage Foundation. “His organization is drenched in American blood,” Phillips added. “It’s infused with an anti-American philosophy and a cooperation with him or his followers would not be on a sustainable basis. The U.S. would regret it.”
The Obama administration is now scrambling to catch up with Iran’s multi-pronged offensives, some of which are under Soleimani’s coordination. Thus, President Obama decided to support the Sunni Gulf coalition and Egypt against Iranian-backed action by the Shiite Houthi rebels to take control of Yemen.
However, the Obama administration’s reactive tactics in dealing with the crisis in Yemen are too little too late. Saudi Arabia is reportedly looking to Pakistan for help in acquiring its own nuclear arms to counter the Saudis’ well-founded suspicions that any deal negotiated by the Obama administration with Iran will not prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed power. And while Obama finally lifted the arms freeze he imposed against Egypt two years ago, clearing the way for the delivery of F-16 aircraft, Harpoon missiles and tanks, he also decided to end Egypt’s ability to finance purchases of American arms by drawing credits in advance based on future aid Egypt expects to receive starting in the 2018 fiscal year. Obama also wants to reduce Egypt’s flexibility in what it can purchase with the future military aid. Thus, the Egyptian government can be expected to continue on its course to find other sources for military aid and weapons including Russia, because of doubts that the U.S. will remain a reliable supplier.
The Obama administration has been willing to sacrifice the confidence of its Arab allies, not to mention the United States’ historically close alliance with Israel, in a vain effort to lure the Iranian regime into acting as a responsible party in the Middle East that can help stabilize this volatile region. Instead, Obama should listen to the expert on Iraq, General Petraeus, whose surge victory Obama undermined completely with his precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011:
The current Iranian regime is not our ally in the Middle East. It is ultimately part of the problem, not the solution. The more the Iranians are seen to be dominating the region, the more it is going to inflame Sunni radicalism and fuel the rise of groups like the Islamic State…Iranian power in the Middle East is thus a double problem. It is foremost problematic because it is deeply hostile to us and our friends. But it is also dangerous because, the more it is felt, the more it sets off reactions that are also harmful to our interests — Sunni radicalism and, if we aren’t careful, the prospect of nuclear proliferation as well.
We can rejoice in the pushback of ISIS out of Tikrit. Perhaps it is a sign of more victories over ISIS to come. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we have more in common with the Iranian regime in combatting ISIS in Iraq or Syria than the Iranian regime ultimately has in common with ISIS. They may be bitter enemies in the struggle over which set of fanatical jihadists should get to rule the global Islamic ummah or caliphate they both fantasize about. However, both fervently believe in the fundamental ideological goal of universal Islamic supremacy. And both are willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of people to reach that goal, no matter how long it takes them. The difference is that a nuclear-armed Iran would be much more capable of carrying out its jihadists’ apocalyptic vision than ISIS and in a much shorter period of time.
(Don’t worry! Be Happy! Obama is in charge so everything will come up roses for sure.
Just ask Obama, the all-wise, all-knowing. He will set it right, as soon as Iran uses the nukes she deserves. — DM)
American warplanes have begun bombing the Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Tikrit in order to bail out the embattled, stalled ground campaign launched by Baghdad and Tehran two weeks ago. This operation, billed as “revenge” for the Islamic State (IS) massacre of 1,700 Shiite soldiers at Camp Speicher last June, was launched without any consultation with Washington and was meant to be over by now, three weeks after much triumphalism by the Iraqi government about how swiftly the terrorist redoubt in Saddam Hussein’s hometown was going to be retaken.
U.S. officials have variously estimated that either 23,000 or 30,000 “pro-government” forces were marshaled for the job, of which only slender minority were actual Iraqi soldiers. The rest consisted of a consortium of Shiite militia groups operating under the banner of Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Population Mobilization Units (PMU), which was assembled in answer to afatwahissued by Iraq’s revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani in June 2014 following ISIS’s blitzkrieg through northern Iraq. To give you a sense of the force disparity, the PMUs are said to command 120,000 fighters, whereas the Iraqi Army has only got 48,000 troops.
Against this impressive array of paramilitaries, a mere 400 to 1,000 IS fighters have managed to hold their ground in Tikrit, driving major combat operations to a halt. This is because the Islamic State is resorting to exactly the kinds of lethal insurgency tactics which al Qaeda in Iraq (its earlier incarnation) used against the more professional and better-equipped U.S. forces. BuzzFeed’s Mike Giglio has ably documented the extent to which IS has relied upon improvised explosive devices, and just how sophisticated these have been. Even skilled explosive ordnance disposal teams — many guided by Iranian specialists — are being ripped apart by what one termed the “hidden enemy” in Tikrit.
Because IS controls hundreds of square miles of terrain in Iraq, it has an unknown number of bomb manufacturing plants, and because it knows the terrain so well, it’s been able to booby-trap houses and roads. Even Shiite prayer beads left lying on the ground are thought to be rigged to explosives. One Kurdish official told Giglio that the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters alone have “defused or detonated more than 6,000 IEDs along their 650-mile front with ISIS since the war began in August.”
The toll this has taken on the militias is extraordinary. Cemetery workers in Najaf told the Washington Postthat as many as 60 corpses are arriving per day. Former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Derek Harvey tweeted last week that an Iraqi Shiite source told him the number of militia war dead from the Tikrit offensive so far may be as high as 6,000. So the militias’ triumphalism, much of it no doubt manufactured by Iran’s propaganda machine, proved to be misplaced. Jeffrey White, another former DIA analyst now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes “there’s a failure of will on the part of the militias and government forces. They just didn’t have the sufficient desire and determination to take the fight forward given the casualties they’ve been sustaining.”
So now, the same Iraqi government which earlier dismissed the need for U.S. airpower had to put in an eleventh-hour request for it, lest an easy victory descend into embarrassing folly. But the past few months ought to have shown that even indirectly relying on Iranian agents to conduct a credible ground war against Sunni extremists was always a lousy idea for three reasons: those agents hate the United States and have threatened to attack its interest in Iraq; they’re guilty of IS-style atrocities themselves; and they’re lousy at fighting an entrenched jihadist insurgency.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told Congress on March 3: “What we are watching carefully is whether the militias — they call themselves the popular mobilization forces — whether when they recapture lost territory, whether they engage in acts of retribution and ethnic cleansing.” He needn’t watch any longer. They are engaging in exactly that.
The crimes of war
On March 10, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a comprehensive study of human rights violations committed by both IS and pro-Iraqi forces. The Islamic State, OHCHR concluded, has likely committed genocide against the Yazidis, a ethno-religious minority in Iraq, in a catalogue of war crimes and crimes against humanity that include gang-rape and sexual slavery. But OHCHR’s language is equally unambiguous in condemning the other side on the battlefield: “Throughout the summer of 2014,” the report noted, “[PMUs], other volunteers and [Shiite] militia moved from their southern heartlands towards [Islamic State]-controlled areas in central and northern Iraq. While their military campaign against the group gained ground, the militias seem to operate with total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.” [Italics added.]
Sunni villages in Amerli and Suleiman Bek, in the Salah ad-Din province, have been looted or destroyed by militiamen operating on the specious assumption that all inhabitants once ruled by IS must be IS sympathizers or collaborators. Human Rights Watch has also lately discovered that the “liberation” of Amerli last October — another PMU/Iranian-led endeavor, only this one abetted by U.S. airstrikes in the early stages — was characterized by wide-scale abuses including the looting and burning of homes and business of Sunni residents of villages surrounding Amerli. The apparent aim was ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch concluded, from witness accounts, that “building destruction in at least 47 predominantly Sunni villages was methodical and driven by revenge and intended to alter the demographic composition of Iraq’s traditionally diverse provinces of Salah al-Din and Kirkuk.”
Sunnis weren’t the only demographic subjected to collective punishment. A 21-year-old Shiite Turkmen from the Yengija village was “burned with cigarettes and tied to a ceiling fan” by militants of Saraya Tala’a al-Khorasani, another Iran-backed militia. He told Human Rights Watch: “They kept saying, ‘You are ISIS,’ and I kept denying it. They were beating me randomly on my face, head, shoulders using water pipes and the butts of their weapons…. They went to have lunch and then came back and beat us for an hour and half. Later that night they asked me if I was Shia or Sunni. I told them I was Shia Turkoman and they ordered me to prove it by praying the Shia way…. They kept me for nine days.”
This account tracks with a mountain of social media-propagated video and photographic evidence showing that Iraq’s Shiite militias are behaving rather like the Islamic State — beheading and torturing people they assail as quislings, and then exhibiting these atrocities as a means of recruitment. More worrying, a six-month investigation by ABC News has found that U.S.-trained Iraqi Security Force personnel are also guilty of anti-Sunni pogroms, with officers from Iraq’s Special Forces shown in one video accusing an unarmed teenaged boy of being a shooter (a charge the boy denies) before opening fire on him.
Looking the other way
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism-driven policy for the Middle East, and a quietly pursued diplomatic reconciliation with Iran, has resulted in America’s diminishment of grave war crimes committed by Iran’s clients and proxies, and the problem is hardly just confined to Iraq. In Syria, for instance, the National Defense Force, a conglomerate of militias trained and equipped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC) — a U.S.-designated terrorist entity — has been accused by the Syrian Network for Human Rights and the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, of “[burning] at least 81 people to death, including 46 civilians; 18 children, 7 women, and 35 of the armed opposition fighters,” along with other pro-Assad forces. The State Department has offered condolences to Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani on the death of his mother; to date, it has not said a word about the immolation of these Syrians at the hands of a Quds Force-built guerrilla army.
All of which raises the question: Does the United States have a “common interest,” as Secretary of State John Kerry phrased it, with a regime in Tehran whose proxies are currently burning people alive in their houses, playing soccer with severed human heads, and ethnically cleansing and razing whole villages to the ground?
It really ought to surprise no one in the U.S. government that what amounts to an Iranian occupation of the Levant and Mesopotamia would lead to an increase in jihadist bloodletting. Dempsey has less of an excuse than most. A four-star general, he formerly commanded the First Armored Division in Baghdad, which in 2004 was the unit redirected, as it was about to go home, to fight the Shiite militias who had taken over Karbala and other southern cities, so he would have seen the precursor to the PMUs in action. Yet somehow managed to brief legislators that the Islamic Republic’s role in Iraq might yet prove “positive” — provided, that is, it didn’t lead to an uptick in sectarianism. This is like arguing that death wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t result in being dead. It did not take much, however, for the scales to fall from Dempsey’s eyes. He took a helicopter tour of Baghdad last week and noticedthe “plethora of flags, only one of which happens to be the Iraqi flag,” The rest, he told reporters to evident dismay, belonged to Shiite militias. (He might have also added that posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are now omnipresent in the Iraqi capital where ones of Saddam Hussein used to be.)
Everyone from Gen. David Petraeus to Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani is acknowledging the obvious: that Shiite militias pose more of a long-term threat to the stability of Iraq than does the Islamic State. Even Ayatollah Sistani has made noises lately about the rampant abuses committed by the “volunteers” he assembled through a religious edict.
While it is true that most Iraqis do not wish to live in a state of vassalage to Iran, it also true that most of the “units” in the PMUs are well-known subsidiaries of the Quds Force. “The indoctrination they’ve been getting is anti-American, Khomeinist ideology,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias and author of a comprehensive survey of them put out by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Sectarianism has been promoted whether we like it or not.”
According to Chris Harmer, a former U.S. Naval officer and now an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, there really is no dressing up who the supposed “good guys” in Iraq now are. “They killed hundreds of Americans during the war,” Harmer said. “These are not ‘affiliated’ organizations — they are same guys, the same organizations. And can you find me anybody stupid enough to say that what Iran wants is a stable, unified, secular, non-sectarian Iraq?”
The enemies of our enemy are our enemy
Indeed, quite apart from having American blood on their hands and American interests furthest from their mind, Shiite militias — following Tehran’s favorite playbook — have also taken to conspiratorially blaming the United States for inventing and militarily supporting the Islamic State, while decrying any American anti-IS involvement in Iraq. Take, for instance, the Badr Corps, headed by Hadi al-Amiri, the commander of Hashd al-Shaabi, and a man infamous for “using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries,” or so the State Department found in a 2009 cable to Washington, which also alleged that al-Amiri “may have personally ordered attacks on up to 2,000 Sunnis.” (Despite this grim record, al-Amiri was invited to the Obama White House in 2011 when he was Iraq’s transportation minister.)
Lately al-Amiri taken to both boasting that Stuart Jones, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, personally offered him close air support, whilereprehending those Iraqis who “kiss the hands of the Americans and get nothing in return.” But when it comes to Tehran, he’s full of praise for the “unconditional” support his country has received. Now al-Amiri has found a more modest tongue. He told the Guardian’s Martin Chulov on March 26: “We did not ask for [U.S. airstrikes on Tikrit] and we have no direct contact with the Americans. From what I understand, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi made the request. However, we respect his decision.”
Kataeb Hezbollah may be the only Iraqi Shiite militia in Iraq to be designated a terrorist entity by the United States, but that hasn’t stopped it from driving around in Abrams tanks, Humvees, armored personnel carriers, MRAPs, and toting M4 and M16 rifles — all the accidental largesse of Uncle Sam, which has sent $1 billion in military equipment to Baghdad, but has no oversight as to which actors, foreign or domestic, ultimately receive what. An abundance of U.S. weapons hasn’t dissuaded Kataeb Hezbollah from openly inciting violence against the American-led coalition to destroy the Islamic State.
“Recently we had them accusing the United States of supplying [IS] via helicopters,” said Smyth. “Kataeb Hezbollah then came out with a bullshit article claiming that they shot down a British cargo plane carrying arms to [IS]. They also said they were going to move antiaircraft missile batteries in Anbar and north of Baghdad to counter U.S. airdrops to [IS]. Whenever they sense too much of a U.S. influence in Iraq, they start to threaten American soldiers.” Kataeb Hezbollah, it bears mentioning, is headed by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iranian spy who is widely believed to have planned the bombings of both the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s. There’s even a photograph of him holding up a Kuwaiti newspaper fingering him for this act of international terrorism. Kataeb Hezbollah has also been caught on video playing bongos with severed human heads.
Another prominent Shiite militia is Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, which in 2007 set an ambush which killed 5 U.S. servicemen in Karbala. It, too, now also happily motors around Iraq in U.S. armored vehicles, some of them thought to have been stolen from the U.S. consulate in Basra. One unnamed U.S. official told Al Jazeera that Asaib was most recently responsible for burning down homes in Albu Ajil, a village near Tikrit in retaliation for massacres carried out by the Islamic State. It has also been implicated in the abduction and murder of Sheik Qassem Sweidan al-Janabi, one of the Sunni tribal leaders who worked cheek-by-jowl with U.S. forces in fighting al Qaeda in Iraq during the so-called Awakening period.
Remarkably, the demagogic Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, once the bane of U.S. forces in Baghdad, condemned al-Janabi’s murder — in language more severe than anything contrived by the U.S. State Department’s Marie Harf or Jennifer Psaki. “Did not I tell you that Iraq will suffer from the brazen militias?” al-Sadr was quoted as saying. “Did I tell you that the army must handle the reins?” Al-Sadr demanded that Shiite head-loppers be punished and actually backed up his rhetoric with action, suspending the participation of his own al-Salam Brigades and al-Yaom ak-Mawood military in ongoing operations. (He unsuspended these militias a week ago to help with the battle in Tikrit, but so far, because of the frozen nature of the ground campaign, none of the Sadrists have seen any real action.)
Assad’s friends in Iraq want to kill Americans
The Basij-ization of Iraq of was both inevitable, given the defunct and corrupted state of the U.S.-trained military, and Iran’s outsize influence in Baghdad even before ISIS conquered a third of the country. “When the Iraqi Army was destroyed last July, this was a gift to Iran to build up these militias,” Gen. Najim Jibouri, the former mayor and police chief of Tal Afar, a crucial Iraqi border town now held by the Islamic State, said in a recent interview. “A few days ago, Khaled al-Obaidi, Iraq’s minister of defense, went to Tikrit, but the militias wouldn’t allow him to enter. He had to stay in Samarra.”
All of which makes risible U.S. officials’ continued emphasis that there is no direct American coordination with Iran or its proxies. Gen. James Terry, the U.S. commander of the coalition, claims that the “ongoing Iraqi and coalition air strikes are setting the conditions for offensive action to be conducted by Iraqi forces currently surrounding Tikrit. Iraqi security forces supported by the coalition will continue to gain territory.”
One of the authors personally witnessed in Baghdad how the IRGC targets make their way into the U.S. targeting queue. Shiite militia commanders pass Quds Force-selected targets to Badr-affiliated Iraqi Security Force commanders on the ground (many of whom are, in fact, agents of the militias), who then pass them on as legitimate targets to Iraq’s Defense Ministry representatives in the Joint Operations Centers where U.S. advisors then put those targets into a queue for aerial sorties. This is the pattern of target development that U.S. forces tried to stop during the American occupation of Iraq — when there was actually a military strategy for countering Iranian influence in the country.
But this nefarious chain of putting intelligence into action — and making the United States do the dirty work — has been resurrected. Soleimani knows it, al-Muhandis knows it, al-Amiri and his Badr agents in the Iraq Security Forces know it — so, too, should the Pentagon, whatever claims to the contrary it puts out. Iranian intelligence operatives are now America’s eyes on the ground.
What does this mean for Tikrit? The Islamic State will no doubt be flushed from the city or bombed to death eventually, but it will be a tactical loss for IS, not a strategic one. They’ll still have Mosul and most of Anbar province. The Institute for the Study of War’s Chris Harmer notes that this will have a direct bearing on bigger fights ahead. “These militiamen will say, ‘This is how badly we got beat up in Tikrit, who wants to volunteer to storm that castle in Mosul?’”
Even if Iran’s proxies do end up massing on Mosul, they’ll remain the ultimate occupying force in post-Islamic State Tikrit. The Washington Post’s Loveday Morris tweeted on March 26 that Kataeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq have now “suspended” their operations in the city, no doubt out of a desire to not appear to be coordinating with the hated United States. But once the Pentagon declares victory, the militias will no doubt try to hijack it and move right in to serve as the occupying force in Tikrit.
Despite reports on Thursday that three Shiite militias were “withdrawing” from operations in objection to U.S. airstrikes, now the news has come that they’ve called off their boycott, largely owing to another edict by Ayatollah Sistani. Even an alleged accidental hit by U.S. warplanes on Asaib Ahl al-Haq barely raised that militia’s pique, according to the New York Times. A Badr Corps representative also told the newspaper, “We haven’t retreated from our positions near Tikrit.” Still, others have indicated that they’re not going to let a good turn go unpunished and intend to strike at American soldiers in Iraq.
Akram al-Kabi, the leader of the Al Nujabaa Brigade, which has also fought with the Assad regime in Syria, has said: “We are staying in Tikrit, we are not leaving and we are going to target the American led coalition in Tikrit and their creation, ISIS.” Today, one of al-Kabi’s spokesmen reiterated thatthreat. Al-Kabi was once a deputy in Asaib Ahl al-Haq and was associatedwith that militia’s attacks against U.S. and British troops in 2008-2011, including an incident in which British contractors were abducted from the Iraqi Finance Ministry and later murdered. CENTCOM commander Gen. Lloyd Austin’s nevertheless briefed the Senate on Thursday with a straight face that “[c]urrently, there are no [Shiite] militia and as reported by the Iraqis today, no [PMU] in that area as well.” This is either propaganda or sheer ignorance about what is transpiring in Austin’s theatre of operations. The Guardian’s Chulov, who just returned from Tikrit, confirmed to one of the authors, in fact, that both al-Amiri and al-Muhandis were indeed in the center of the city on March 26.
Recrimination and resentment by these militias is no light matter. According to Politico, U.S. military planners are now worried that any decision to engage or isolate the Assad regime in Syria will encourage Iran or its cut-outs to attack the some 3,000 U.S. military trainers currently stationed in Iraq. It’s hard to tell where genuine concern bleeds into further excuse-making on the part of an Obama administration that has shown no intention of engaging or isolating the Assad regime, which is responsible for the vast majority of war dead and war crimes in Syria. Regardless, the result is the same: Washington is now behaving as if it needs Tehran’s permission to pursue its own anti-IS strategy, if it can even be called that.
You call this a plan?
“What strategy?” asks Chris Harmer. “We have only consequentially intervened in one part in Syria — Kobani. What’s the plan for countering [the Islamic State] there? Training 5,000 Syrian rebels per year. That is laughable when you consider the 200,000 dead from four years of attritional warfare, the four million refugees, and slow-motion destruction of the country. Five thousand doesn’t even get you into the ballgame. You have to have a significant portion of the population on your side. Moderate Syrians should be on our side. They’re saying the Americans are unreliable, they’re not on our side. This is why the moderate opposition has collapsed and the beneficiaries of that collapse have been al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Assad.”
The loss of confidence in the United States by moderate Sunnis in Syria is mirrored in Iraq. New polling data has confirmed that most Mosulawis, for instance, welcomed IS back into Iraq’s second city not out of ideological sympathy for the terror group, but out of deep-seated political grievances with the Iraqi government. Yet the Obama administration is doing next to nothing to redress these grievances. The Anbar tribal leader Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, whose charismatic brother was notoriously gunned down by al Qaeda just days after meeting with President George W. Bush in Baghdad in 2007, simply could not get a meeting with any significant official in White House during a 10-day tour of Washington last February. Vice President Joe Biden was good enough to drop in on a lesser confab, mainly to smile and pat them on the head and tell them to work constructively with the new government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
“Many of the people in Mosul will stand with [the Islamic State] if Shiite militias invade,” said Gen. Najim Jibouri. “Eighty percent of the population is does not like [IS], but if the militias are involved — 80 percent will stand very strong with [IS]. I told the Americans before, the image now is not like it was in 2003. Now the Sunni people want American forces. They will throw the flowers on them now, because the battle now is not between them and the United States and [IS], it’s between the Sunnis and Iran.” Yet far too many Sunnis still see the United States as aligned with Iran against them, Jibouri said.
Whether or not a nuclear agreement with Iran gets signed in Lausanne this weekend, whether or not Obama inaugurates a perestroika with Tehran as a result, the unshakable truth is that most of Iraq looks in the long term to remain a satrapy of the mullahs. This will only lead to further sectarian violence and civil war. “I met with almost two dozen national leaders in Iraq last week,” Ali Khedery, the longest consecutively serving U.S. diplomat in the Green Zone, told us. “I heard from Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish officials and virtually all of them told me that the real prime minster of the country is Qasem Soleimani and his deputy is Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”
(Perhaps it’s just Obama’s unrequited love for Iran and his need to get any nuke deal that Iran will give him. — DM)
US government officials and top military commanders are so eager to destroy the Islamic State that they are crawling into bed with the flip side of the jihadist coin: the fanatical Shiite militias backed by Iran that are terrorist organizations and ultimate destabilizers of Iraq in their own right.
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Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), the US-led Coalition that is launching airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, announced that it conducted 17 strikes against Islamic State fighters entrenched in Tikrit. US commanders continue to insist that they are supporting Iraqi security forces, and not the Iranian-backed Shiite militias who make up more than two-thirds of the fighting force in the Tikrit offensive.
The 17 airstrikes targeted “an ISIL [Islamic State] building, two ISIL bridges, three ISIL checkpoints, two ISIL staging areas, two ISIL berms, an ISIL roadblock and an ISIL controlled command and control facility,” according to a press release. The US military continues to refer to Islamic State as ISIL, the outdated acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Syria).
The airstrikes launched “in support of Iraqi Security Forces in Tikrit commenced last night after a request from the Government of Iraq,” CJTF-OIR stated. The 17 targets hit in the last 24 hours were “approved by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.”
US military officials have previously said that support for the Tikrit offensive was being withheld because of the massive presence of the Iranian-backed militias and Iranian military units and advisers.
Despite this previous acknowledgment, Lieutenant General James Terry, the commander of CJTF-OIR, skips over the presence of Shiite militias in the Tikrit operation [emphasis mine] in the latest statement.
“The ongoing Iraqi and Coalition air strikes are setting the conditions for offensive action to be conducted by Iraqi forces currently surrounding Tikrit,” said Lt. Gen. James Terry. “Iraqi Security Forcessupported by the Coalition will continue to gain territory from Daesh [a vaguely pejorative Arabic acronym for the Islamic State].” [Emphasis in original — DM]
Pretending that US airpower isn’t supporting the Iranian-backed Shiite militias obviously doesn’t make it so.
US military officials’ denials that they are serving as the air force for Iranian-backed Shiite militias that are responsible for killing hundreds of American soldiers before US forces withdrew from Iraq in December 2011 becomes even more perplexing once you understand that many of the top leaders of these militias have been designated by the US as terrorists. And one of these militias (Hezbollah Brigades) is listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. [See LWJ report, US begins airstrikes against Islamic State in Tikrit, supports Shiite militias.]
US government officials and top military commanders are so eager to destroy the Islamic State that they are crawling into bed with the flip side of the jihadist coin: the fanatical Shiite militias backed by Iran that are terrorist organizations and ultimate destabilizers of Iraq in their own right.
The separate operations in Yemen and Iraq attested to the widening breach between the Sunni Arab camp and the Obama administration and the former’s resolve to thwart US strategy for buying a nuclear deal with Tehran by empowering Iran to attain the rank of leading Middle East power.
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In a surprise step, Egyptian marine naval and marine forces Thursday morning, March 26, seized control of the strategic Bab El-Mandeb Straits to foil Tehran’s plans to grab this important energy shipping gateway between the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal, DEBKAfile’s military sources report from the Gulf. Egypt disguised the raid as a counter-piracy operation. It rounded off the Saudi-led air strikes launched the same morning against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. These operations signaled the start of a major Sunni Arab revolt against Iran’s approaching takeover of Yemen, through its Houthi proxy, and advances in other strategic positions in the Middle East, with Washington’s support.
Thursday morning too, the US launched the US launched its first air strikes against Islamic State positions in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, rallying to the aid of the Iranian-commanded Iraqi operation, which had failed to dislodge the jihadis in two weeks of fighting.
The separate operations in Yemen and Iraq attested to the widening breach between the Sunni Arab camp and the Obama administration and the former’s resolve to thwart US strategy for buying a nuclear deal with Tehran by empowering Iran to attain the rank of leading Middle East power.
DEBKAfile reported earlier Thursday morning:
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) are now leading war action in four Mid East arenas: Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon, while building Shiite “popular” armies deferring to Tehran in three: Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
The formal announcements coming from Riyadh and Washington attempted to gloss over the open breach. The Saudis Wednesday indicated that their military buildup on the Yemeni was “purely defensive,” while Washington subsequently declared support for the Saudi-Gulf-Egyptian air strikes after they began.
According to our Washington sources, President Obama decided Wednesday to accede to the Iraqi premier Haider al-Abadi’s request for air support to de-stall the Tikrit operation against ISIS. Iran’s Al Qods Brigades chief, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who commanded the operation from the start has departed the scene.
Nothing has been said to indicate whether the Iranian forces, including Revolutionary Guards officers, remain in the area. It appears that the Obama administration prefers as little as possible to be mentioned about US-Iranian battlefield coordination in Iraq versus the Islamists, especially since it was not exactly a big success. At the same time, US air strikes launched to support ground forces are bound to be coordinated with their commanders, who in this case happen to be mostly Iranian. In the last two weeks of the Tikrit operation, liaison between the US and Iranian military in Iraq was routed through the office of the Iraqi Prime Minister in Baghdad.
Early Thursday, Riyadh reported that the Saudi Royal Air Force had taken out Houthi air defenses, destroyed numerous Houthi fighter planes and were imposing a wide no-fly zone over Yemen.
Egypt is providing political and military support for Saudi-GCC operation against Houthi fighters in Yemen, the Egyptian state news agency said Thursday. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry was quoted as saying this support could involve Egyptian air, naval and ground forces, if necessary.
DEBKAfile’s military sources add: The Saudis declared Yemeni air space a no-fly zone to achieve to goals: (1) To deny the Yemeni forces advancing on the key port city of Aden access to air cover which would undoubtedly have been forthcoming from mutinous elements of the Yemeni air force. Without it, the rebel advance would be severely hobbled, and, (2) to prevent Iranian warplanes from landing at Yemeni air bases with deliveries of military equipment and ammunition their Houthi proxies.
Gulf sources disclose that Saudi Arabia has placed 100 warplanes and 150,000 troops with heavy weapons at the disposal of the operation against Iran’s Yemeni proxy, the Zaydi Houthis, as well as pressing into service Pakistani, Moroccan and Jordanian military units. This force is a sign that Riyadh intends of following up its air action with a ground invasion across the border into Yemen to crush the revolt in its backyard.
Iran-backed rebels bring Yemen to brink of civil war
Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen early Thursday, one day after the U.S.-backed Yemeni president was driven out of the country.
President Obama has authorized the provision of logistical and intelligence support to the military operations, National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan said late Wednesday night. She added that while U.S. forces were not taking direct military action in Yemen, Washington was establishing a Joint Planning Cell with Saudi Arabia to coordinate U.S. military and intelligence support.
Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir said the operations began at 7 p.m. Eastern time.
He said the Houthis, widely believed to be backed by Iran, “have always chosen the path of violence.” He declined to say whether the Saudi campaign involved U.S. intelligence assistance.
Al-Jubeir made the announcement at a rare news conference by the Sunni kingdom.
He said the Saudis “will do anything necessary” to protect the people of Yemen and “the legitimate government of Yemen.”
A Yemeni official earlier Wednesday would not say where Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi fled to, but did tell Fox News: “He is safe. That’s all I can say at this point.”
Hadi’s departure marks a dramatic turn in Yemen’s turmoil and means a decisive collapse of what was left of his rule, which the United States and Gulf allies had hoped could stabilize the chronically chaotic nation and fight Al Qaeda’s branch here after the 2011 ouster of longtime autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Over the past year, the Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who are believed to be supported by Iran, have battled their way out of their northern strongholds, overwhelmed the capital, Sanaa, seized province after province in the north and worked their way south. Their advance has been boosted by units of the military and security forces that remained loyal to Saleh, who allied with the rebels.
With Hadi gone, there remains resistance to the Houthis scattered around the country, whether from Sunni tribesmen, local militias, pro-Hadi military units or Al Qaeda fighters.
Hadi and his aides left Aden after 3:30 p.m. on two boats, security and port officials told The Associated Press. He is scheduled to attend an Arab summit in Egypt on the weekend, where Arab allies are scheduled to discuss formation of a joint Arab force that could pave the way for military intervention against Houthis.
His flight came after Houthis and Saleh loyalists advanced against Hadi’s allies on multiple fronts. Military officials said militias and military units loyal to Hadi had “fragmented,” speeding the rebel advance. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters
Earlier in the day, the rebels seized a key air base where U.S. troops and Europeans had advised the country in its fight against Al Qaeda militants. The base is only 60 kilometers (35 miles) away from Aden.
In the province of Lahj, adjoining Aden, the rebels captured Hadi’s defense minister, Maj. Gen. Mahmoud al-Subaihi, and his top aide on Wednesday and subsequently transferred them to the capital, Sanaa. Yemen’s state TV, controlled by the Houthis, announced a bounty of nearly $100,000 for Hadi’s capture.
Hadi then fled his presidential palace, and soon after warplanes targeted presidential forces guarding it. No casualties were reported. By midday, Aden’s airport fell into hands of Saleh’s forces after intense clashes with pro-Hadi militias.
Aden was tense Wednesday, with schools, government offices, shops and restaurants largely closed. Inside the few remaining opened cafes, men watched the news on television. With the fall of the city appearing imminent, looters went through two abandoned army camps, one in Aden and the other nearby, taking weapons and ammunition.
The takeover of Aden, the country’s economic hub, would mark the collapse of what is left of Hadi’s grip on power. After the Houthis overran Sanaa in September, he had remained in office, but then was put under house arrest. He fled the capital earlier in March with remnants of his government and declared Aden his temporarty capital.
Yemen’s Foreign Minister Riad Yassin told Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV satellite news network that he officially made a request to the Arab League on Wednesday to send a military force to intervene against the Houthis. Depicting the Houthis as a proxy of Shiite Iran, a rival to Sunni Gulf countries, he warned of an Iranian “takeover” of Yemen. The Houthis deny they are backed by Iran.
Mohammed Abdel-Salam, a spokesman for the Houthis, said their forces were not aiming to “occupy” the south. “They will be in Aden in few hours,” Abdel-Salam told the rebels’ satellite Al-Masirah news channel.
Earlier, Al-Masirah reported that the Houthis and allied fighters had “secured” the al-Annad air base, the country’s largest. It claimed the base had been looted by both Al Qaeda fighters and troops loyal to Hadi.
The U.S. recently evacuated some 100 soldiers, including Special Forces commandos, from the base after Al Qaeda briefly seized a nearby city. Britain also evacuated soldiers.
The base was crucial in the U.S. drone campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which Washington considers to be the most dangerous offshoot of the terror group. And American and European military advisers there also assisted Hadi’s government in its fight against Al Qaeda’s branch, which holds territory in eastern Yemen and has claimed the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
U.S. operations against the militants have been scaled back dramatically amid Yemen’s chaos. U.S. officials have said CIA drone strikes will continue in the country, though there will be fewer of them. The agency’s ability to collect intelligence on the ground in Yemen, while not completely gone, is also much diminished.
The Houthis, in the aftermath of massive suicide bombings in Sanaa last week that killed at least 137 people, ordered a general mobilization and their leader, Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, vowed to send his forces to the south to fight Al Qaeda and militant groups.
In Sanaa, dozens of coffins were lined up for a mass funeral of the victims Wednesday. Among the victims was a top Shiite cleric. Yemen’s Islamic State-linked militants have claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, in September and have since been advancing south along with Saleh’s loyalists. On Tuesday, they fired bullets and tear gas to disperse thousands of protesters in the city of Taiz, known as the gateway to southern Yemen. Six demonstrators were killed and scores more were wounded, officials said.
The Houthis also battled militias loyal to Hadi in the city of al-Dhalea, adjacent to Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city. Taiz is also the birthplace of its 2011 Arab Spring-inspired uprising that forced Saleh to hand over power to Hadi in a deal brokered by the U.N. and Gulf countries.
Hadi on Tuesday asked the U.N. Security Council to authorize a military intervention “to protect Yemen and to deter the Houthi aggression” in Aden and the rest of the south. In his letter, Hadi said he also has asked members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League for immediate help.
Saudi Arabia warned that “if the Houthi coup does not end peacefully, we will take the necessary measures for this crisis to protect the region.”
Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Tikrit battlefront
US President Barack Obama’s plans for Iran, which were spectacularly challenged by Binyamin Netanyahu in his Congress speech Tuesday, March 3, were manifested 10,000 kilometers from Washington in the firestorm over Tikrit, the important Sunni town north of Baghdad. There, Iranian-led Iraqi troops are on the offensive against the Islamic State in the biggest ground battle fought in Iraq since the Iraqi army fell apart and scattered last June against the conquering Islamist march through western and central Iraq.
For four reasons, this battle is loaded with ramifications for Obama’s Iran policy and the Islamic Republic’s drive for recognition as the leading Middle East power:
1. For Tehran it is a high-stake gamble for prestige, Its top military strategist, Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, was thrown into the Tikrit operation, to become the first high-ranking general Iran has ever placed publicly up front in direct command of a key battle as a guarantee of its success.
2. However, three days after the offensive was launched on Sunday, March 1, the 25,000 Iranian and Iraqi troops, backed by Iraqi Shiite militias, were still fighting outside its gates, upsetting the high hopes of a swift victory and breakthrough into the city.
Islamist forces slowed their advance by strewing hundreds of mines and roadside bombs on all the roads leading to Tikrit, while teams of suicide bombers jumped out and blew themselves up amidst the invading army – a tactic seen before in the battle for the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani.
ISIS boasted that one of the suicide bombers was an American citizen whom they dubbed “Abu Dawoud al-Amriki.”
3. The United States has no military input in the battle – neither US advisers on the ground nor aerial bombardment. On Tuesday, March 3, while Netanyahu was advising Congress in reference to the relative merits of radical Iran and ISIS that “the enemy of your enemy is the enemy,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed some of the Obama administration’s thinking on the subject.
He said Iran and its allies (Iraqi Shiite militias) had taken part in the Iraq war ever since 2004. “But the Tikrit campaign signals a new level of involvement,” he said. “This is the most overt conduct of Iranian support in the form of artillery and other things” and “…could turn out to be a positive thing.”
These comments corroborated DEBKAfile’s disclosures on the US-led war on ISIS, which defined America as confining itself to air strikes over Iraq and Syria and assigning the brunt of the ground war to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards forces – a division of labor, which Israeli military chiefs watch with increasing concern as it brings the Iranian peril closer than ever to Israel, DEBKAfile’s military sources report.
The Iraq format is replicated in southern Syria, where the same Gen. Soleimani, joined by a group of fellow Iranian generals, is leading an operation to seize that part of the country from Syrian rebel hands, including the Golan town of Quneitra .
4. The role Obama has assigned Iran in the two embattled Middle East countries bears directly on the scope of his concessions in the bargaining for a comprehensive nuclear deal.
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