Photo By: U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Andre Dakis: Taji, Iraq - U.S. Army AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters escort two CH-47 Chinook helicopters carrying U.S. Marines with Task Force Spartan, 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), over Taji, Iraq, as they head to Kara Soar for their mission in support of Operation Inherent Resolve on March 17, 2016. Operation Inherent Resolve is an international U.S. led coalition military operation created as part of a comprehensive strategy to degrade and defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The United States’ killing of Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Suleimani, has ratcheted up the conflict between the Trump administration and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime in Tehran. The cold war between the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and the alliance of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah (and to some extent Russia) could turn into open war between the international and regional powers involved in the crisis. Qassem Sulemani, a senior commander in a powerful, elite branch of the Revolutionary Guard called the Quds Force, was assassinated at Baghdad Airport on 3rd January after arriving from Beirut.
WHAT’s HAPPENING IN IRAQ?
The targeted airstrike and assassination of Iran’s military commander was the climax of months of turmoil in Iraq where hundreds of protesters have been shot, and thousands more wounded by paramilitaries and security forces in cities such as Kerbala, Najaf, Basra and Baghdad, Iraq’s capital. Iraq’s protests which have tipped over into an intifada are a response to poor governance and corruption, and failure of the government to rebuild the country after years of war, the latest round being with Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State. Amidst these protests, there has been a major backlash against foreign interference in Iraq, particularly by the United States and Iran. Many ordinary Iraqi civilians are angry that their country has become hostage to the two rivals political, economic and military interests in the Middle East’s Cold War. The response of Prime Minister Mahdi’s government has been similar to that of other regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. The reaction has been cruel, with security and police forces killing activists, and dispersing protesters with tear gas.
Since the protests erupted in autumn and continued throughout winter, Iran has borne the brunt of this fury, with several its consulates being ransacked and set alight by protesters and activists have also targeted the political headquarters of pro-Iranian militia turned political parties. In response, the paramilitaries and militias linked to Iran have, unquestionably, been involved in killing and maiming ordinary civilians. During these protests, men armed with sniper rifles and machine guns have run-down civilians in pick-up trucks and mini-vans, gunned down protesters demonstrating, and massacred civilians in clutches in city squares, highways and streets across central and southern Iraq. Many groups killing protesters came under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilisation Forces.
WHO ARE THE POPULAR MOBILISATION FORCES?
The PMF is comprised of large, Shia paramilitary groups, such as Munathamat Badr (or Badr Brigades or Badr Organization), Saraya al-Salam (Peace Brigades, formerly Mahdi army), ‘Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous) and Kata’ib Hizbullah (Hizbullah Brigades), that were either formed before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 or emerged in opposition to the US-led invasion and occupation of the country. These paramilitary loyalties have distinct loyalties - some like Saraya al-Salam who are loyal to Muqtada Al-Sadr are national - and many such as Kata’ib Hezbollah and Munathamat Badr have strong ties with Tehran.
The PMF was mobilised rapidly after the rise of Islamic State and played a key role in driving back the terrorist organisation from the doorstep of Baghdad, and eventually helped eject Baghdadi’s cells from Mosul, the organisation’s de-facto capital in north-west Iraq. Along the way, elements of the PMF were involved in flagrant war crimes against Sunni civilians, including the torture and extra-judicial killings of alleged Islamic State sympathisers and supporters. During the Iraq War, the Badr Brigade and Saraya al-Salam were involved in targeting and killing American soldiers, Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein, Sunni and Salafis - moderate and extreme - on occasion moderate, secular Shias, and Iraqi nationalists. In 2017, the war with Islamic State came to an end in an orgy of violence in Mosul, and after the conflict gradually evolved into a guerilla war with remaining terrorist cells, the PMF started being integrated into the Iraqi army and the political structure of the Iraqi government.
The U.S government also has blood on its hands in the brutal crackdown on protesters. Iraqi Security Forces, including the Counter-Terrorism Service and Emergency Response Division, deployed against protesters have been trained by the Western powers. The Emergency Response Division, as detailed by journalist Iraqi photojournalist Ali Arkady (who has since fled the country) have committed war crimes in parallel to the PMF, conducting torture and extrajudicial killings against Islamic State fighters and civilians. In some cases, these units were retrained by the international coalition assembled by President Obama after the calamitous collapse of the Iraqi army after Islamic State’s offensive in 2014 which saw swathes of the country fall to Baghdadi’s soldiers and the formation of the infamous caliphate. Elements of the security forces, CTS and ERD have all been involved in killing protesters. The role is indirect, but the actions of rogue Iraqi military and police forces demonstrate how little control the White House has over elements of the military and police forces it has trained, and the government which directs them. With the military and police forces’ factionalism, and the PMF contested loyalties, it has created chaos as intra-Shia rivalries have brought civil conflict to the streets of Iraq, and poured fuel on the protests in Iraq.
THE BACK-DROP: WHAT HAS CATALYSED THE IRANIAN-U.S CONFLICT?
The protests in Iraq come against the back-drop of inflamed tensions across the region fanned by conflicts and major protests across the rest of the Middle East and North Africa since the early 2000s know as the Arab Revolutions. Some of these revolutions, uprisings and coups have toppled Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, President Ben Ali in Tunisia, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleb and ended successive presidencies in Egypt, Mohammed Morsi and Hosni Mubarek. These organic uprisings were met ferociously by authorities, particularly in Gaza and Bahrain. In Libya, Yemen, Iraq and Syria, they mutated into major civil wars. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was also removed by a coalition led by the United States in 2003, which has significantly contributed to the destabilisation of Iraq, became a nerve centre for the revolutionary ideology of militant Salafi-jihadism.
In Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya, the civil wars have since torn through the fabric of their respective societies killing hundreds of thousands of people, and drawing in regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Israel, and international forces from the United States and Russia. The Middle East has become a battle-ground for competing for political, economic and military interests. This has stoked sectarianism and pushed the region towards what analysts are describing as the Middle East’s ‘First World War moment’ where civil wars and domestic rivalries ignite regional rivalries and internationalise the wars within the feuding states which are dealing in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence.
In this context of the turbo-charged cycle of conflict and crisis across the Middle East exists the long-standing rivalry of Iran and the United States and its key allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel which has existed since the current Iranian regime seized power in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The revolution upended the status quo in Iran deposing of the Shah and replaced it with an Islamic regime transforming the Middle East and the politics of the Persian Gulf. As historian Michael Axworthy explains:
The loss of a key ally, the Shah, who the U.S regarded as a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, coupled with the hostage crisis when Iranian activists, protesters and militants seized 66 American citizens at the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and held 52 of them hostage for more than a year, has left a bitter strain on relations ever since. This strain has frequently devolved into open violence and covert warfare, including acts of terrorism, sanctions and conflict across the world, and in countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Syria since the 1980s through to the 2020s. Wars through proxies and states have been preeminent in the U.S - Iranian relations as illustrated in the Iran-Iraq War (1980 - 1988), Syria (2011 - current), Yemen (2015 - current) or the Iraq War (2003).
Israel and Saudi Arabia’s own rivalries with Iran have exacerbated these tensions with both fearful of Iranian expansionism and encroachment across the region whether it be providing certain levels of support for the Houthi insurgents in Yemen’s civil war or providing logistical and military support to Hezbollah and opening up a new front along the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Saudi Arabia has responded with venom, blockading Yemen by land, air and sea and intervened in the civil war to crush the Houthi rebels. The result was disastrous sparking a famine across the country and sucking the Gulf States into a quagmire which it has failed to extract itself from since 2015. Israel has been bombing Iranian and Hezbollah military operatives with increasing frequency along Syria’s south-western border. The Israeli security apparatus is fearful that Hezbollah, its long-standing military rival in Lebanon (a legacy of Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon), will open up a new front along the Golan Heights, Syrian territory which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. The airstrikes are a deterrent to Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, a message from the Israeli military that Netanyahu’s government has red-lines which Tehran and its allies cannot cross.
The U.S-Iranian rivalry has not, however, been without negotiation and diplomacy. Iran and the United States talk regularly through intermediaries, and this eventually culminated in a breakthrough Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 as the two rivals worked together in parallel to bring down Islamic State. Many regarded the Iranian nuclear deal as a breakthrough, others such as President Trump did not, and since his rise to power, his administration - who withdrew from the nuclear deal - has sought to dismantle the agreement believing that draconian sanctions and using U.S military power to cow Iran into submission could bring a better deal. In President Trump’s calculations, more pressure then what Barack Obama applied in his eight-year tenure, would reap better results. Harsh sanctions were introduced and the Quds forces were labelled as a terrorist organisation.
To some extent the sanctions worked with Iran being battered economically by the Trump administration as the costs of military intervention in Iraq, Syria and Yemen began to bite. Major protests struck Iran in 2017 and 2019, and catastrophic floods swept through the country in April to worsen the plight of ordinary people. However, critics have noted that sanctions have impacted the wrong people, namely ordinary Iranian civilians, and not had an impact on the regime’s calculations other than to aggravate military tensions. This was best demonstrated by the 2019 Persian Gulf Crisis on the Strait of Hormuz which resulted in a last-minute decision by President Trump to call off an airstrike on Iranian positions on the coastline responsible for bringing down an unmanned U.S drone in Iranian airspace.
At face value, the new tactics of the Trump administration have not worked. Sanctions have impacted the wrong people, created major military tensions with Iran and led to bolder clandestine activities including attacks, sabotage, and kidnapping targeting allies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. Despite reassuring allies like Netanyahu and Mohammed Bin Salem by withdrawing from the nuclear deal, the United States’ actions have encouraged Iran to restart its uranium enrichment in response to the sanctions. At the same time, the increase in U.S military forces in the region, the increase in airstrikes against pro-Iranian forces, the systematic rise in war rhetoric and sabre rattling by hawks in the United States has left many critics wondering whether Trump’s circle is interested in negotiating at all, and is more interested in provoking the Iranians into giving a military response which would sanctify a wider war and regime change, something coveted by lobbies and several high-ranking officials in Washington.
THE KILLING OF QASSEM SULEMANI: TIT FOR TAT ESCALATION
The current crisis in the Persian Gulf is the culmination of years of crisis sparked by conflicts pre-dating the Arab Revolutions. The last decade of instability across the Middle East, the presidency of Donald Trump, Iranian intransigence and perceived threats to allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, are factors which have fused to together to push the U.S - Iranian Cold War to a tipping point. The killing of Qassem Sulemani is the climax of an ugly proxy war between the United States and Iran happening in parallel to the protests in Iraq. As this author noted in a previous piece, Iran is responding to threats against its status quo.
The revolutions, uprisings and anti-authoritarian activists across the region are a threat to Iran’s power, and the status quo it has struggled to establish across the Middle East since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iran has been convulsed by major protests itself in 2009, 2018 and 2019. Draconian sanctions imposed by President Trump have intensified economic woes and exacerbated social and political cleavages inside Iran while disastrous flooding decimated the country in March. In Lebanon, and Iraq, fresh protests, driven by nationalism rather than secularism or sectarian slogans have caused Iran’s key pillars underpinning their power in the region to wobble.
Israeli and American airstrikes on weapons depots and paramilitary bases from which Iran projects its hard power have killed dozens upon dozens of Iranian military and pro-Iranian Iraqi soldiers. In August, U.S officials confirmed that the Israeli air force bombed a weapons depot in July. As Al-Jazeera noted, ‘Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu strongly hinted that his country was behind recent air raids that have hit bases and munition depots belonging to Iran-backed paramilitary forces operating in Iraq.’
The attacks near the town of Amerli in northern Iraq were targeted at a military base used by the Badr Organisation. As The Times wrote in August after the U.S confirmed that it was Israel who conducted the strikes, ‘there were also said to be Revolutionary Guards at the base, along with fighters from Kataeb Hezbollah.’ Paramilitary groups have been responding to what it perceives as U.S overreach through the PMF including Kataeb Hezbollah, Badr, and Asae'b Ahlil Al Haq.
In September 2018, U.S official reported an attack from heavy mortars near the embassy. The original source of the mortar fire came from Zayoona, an area in Baghdad which is well known for control of Asae'b Ahlil Al Haq. In May 2019, a Katyusha rocket landed near the U.S embassy and in June 2019, three mortar shells landed in Balad air base, where U.S military trainers were present. There were no casualties but came as tensions were increasing between Iran and the United States in the Straits of Hormuz. In September and October, several mortars and rockets were lobbed into the Green Zone falling close to the U.S embassy. On 27th December, blood was spilt as a US civilian contractor was killed Friday in a rocket attack on a base near Kirkuk. The use of over 30 rockets injured four US service members as well as two members of the Iraqi security forces.
The U.S placed the blame on Kataeb Hezbollah. "There are a lot of similarities to some of the other 10 rocket attacks in the last two months which we have linked to Iranian-backed militias. We are looking into a possible link to Kataeb Hezbollah in particular," an official told CNN on the same day of the contractor’s death. The U.S responded quickly with five airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, killing over 25 of the paramilitary’s fighters in an airstrike. “In response to repeated Kataeb Hezbollah attacks on Iraqi bases that host Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) coalition forces, US forces have conducted precision defensive strikes,” chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told media outlets. “It will degrade KH’s ability to conduct future attacks against OIR coalition forces.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated the United States’ position. “We will not stand for the Islamic Republic of Iran to take actions that put American men and women in jeopardy.” However, the attack was condemned by China and Russia and drew a critical response from the Iraqi government and Iran.
The paramilitaries affected, as much a political force as a military one in Iraq, rallied and marched on the U.S embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve. Fires were lit and vehicles burnt, and stones were hurled at the compound as protesters attempted to storm the embassy and laid siege to the compound. Tear gas was fired by U.S soldiers, officials were evacuated and in response President Trump deployed 3,000 more U.S soldiers to the Middle East.
The siege of the embassy, and the reanimation of the traumatic memories of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 and the incineration of the U.S embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan that same year could have been the final straw for the bullish Trump and Pompeo. On 3rd January, a US helicopter/drone attacked Suleimani's vehicle on an access road as he left Baghdad’s airport, roughly 5km from where the protesters at the U.S embassy had gathered. Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ebrahimi, heavily involved in founding and leading Kataeb Hezbollah, was among the casualties of the helicopter attack, perishing in his own vehicle. According to U.S officials, Suleimani was allegedly responsible for the protests outside the U.S embassy and was planning further attacks across the region.
The following day, a convoy of PMF soldiers were targeted by an airstrike near Taji, killing several. The coalition denied that it was responsible for killing PMF soldiers, however, given the pattern of U.S and Israeli aircraft carrying out secret airstrikes against pro-Iranian paramilitaries across the Middle East, to then admitting later that they conducted them, their dismissal of such responsibility on social media must be treated with a dose of scepticism. As before, Kataeb Hezbollah responded by firing rockets and mortars near the U.S embassy and into Baled airbase. As tit-for-tat violence at a local level is spiralling out of control between the U.S and Iran, the killing of Sulemani is the expression of how local dynamics in Middle Eastern conflicts so often have the capacity to set the region aflame.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER Suleimani's DEATH?
Qassem Suleimani was not a saint. He was a ruthless pragmatist forged by the turbulent power-politics and conflicts of the Middle East over the last four decades. He is responsible for shoring up the murderous Assad regime which killed and tortured hundreds of thousands of civilians, and propped up paramilitaries in Iraq and Lebanon who are also responsible for killing thousands of civilians. The direct military intervention by Iranian Quds forces, Hezbollah and other Shia paramilitaries across Syria, with the support of Russian airpower, contractors, paramilitaries and soldiers, prevented the fall of the Syrian government and crushed the Syrian uprising. In Iraq, Iranian interference, through assassinations, intimidation and the killing and maiming of protesters by the Popular Mobilisation Forces has brought widespread revolt against the Iranian status quo. As news of his death spread, some Iraqi protesters were celebrating Suleimani’s death. For many across the region, the Quds forces led by Suleimani have been a source of terror and discord, and a symbol of the so-called Shia crescent’s encroachment on the Sunni states in the Middle East.
Qassem Suleimani was a destabilising force, however, his motives were rooted in protecting Iranian interests, political, military and economic across the region. For many Iranians, he was an immensely popular figure. As journalist Dexter Filkins noted in The New Yorker in 2013: “Despite all of Suleimani’s rough work, his image among Iran’s faithful is that of an irreproachable war hero—a decorated veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, in which he became a division commander while still in his twenties.” Suleimani was a symbol of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and ‘arguably its second most powerful figure after the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’. From Tehran’s standpoint, the Trump administration’s decision to kill the leader of the Quds forces is effectively the equivalent of Iranian forces assassinating General Richard D. Clarke, who leads the United States Special Operations Command. President Trump’s actions, from an Iranian standpoint, cannot go unanswered, whether they are moderate or hardliners in the regime.
For several leading figures, war is the anecdote to their domestic woes whether it be President Trump’s historic impeachment, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s indictments of corruption and bribery or Mohammed Bin Salman’s war in Yemen and the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi in 2018. An international crisis, and war, is a sharp tool with which to distract civilians from domestic crises. In this case, personal scandals and agendas are helping to push the Middle East to a conflagration - long anticipated by regional analysts and journalists alike - which could push the region into a new era of violence, deadlier and more unpredictable than the civil wars and revolts of the 2010s. Such an era is one which the United States and Iran, and its allies, have played a major part in creating over the span of the last several decades. Diplomacy has barely been given a chance, and far from getting a new agreement with Iran, President Trump - who has treated the whole affair as if he’s on his TV Show The Apprentice - has rearmed the ticking time bomb defused by the world powers in the Iranian Nuclear Deal in 2015 and pushed the Middle East into further mayhem.
Washington has some license to protect its interests whether it be through sabre-rattling and economic sanctions (however inefficient both have been since Trump’s gambit begun), and as history has demonstrated war can be a tool by which peace can be forged. In this instance, however, with war already plaguing the Middle East, and with Iranian-U.S relations now abysmal, it is difficult to see where such a unilateral “deal” with Iran will emerge. Suleimani’s death, much like Baghdadi’s is a trophy for President Trump but it is hardly a demonstration of a long-term strategic plan. Trump’s Middle Eastern policies have been consistently incoherent, impulsive and inflammatory, sparking crises in Syria and Gaza. The assassination of Qassem Suleimani encapsulated all these instincts in one and could be his gravest blunder yet as the United States lurches ever closer to open war with Iran. After decades of war and crisis, another Persian Gulf War would be a fruitless endeavour that benefits no one, and another tragic milestone in the Middle East’s Thirty Years’ War.