With Iran’s missiles pounding Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish Federal Region of Iraq, last week, Iran has dramatically shifted its interventions in the beleaguered neighbouring country into higher gear.
The unprovoked strikes and parallel attacks in Pakistan and Syria have set alight Iran’s increasing belligerency and its determination to use the Gaza conflict to advance its ambitious regional agenda.
They have also highlighted Iraq’s deepening subservience to Iran since the fall of the regime led by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the US-led invasion in 2003, which made the Islamic Republic hold de facto power over Iraq’s key institutions.
On 15 January, Iran fired several ballistic missiles at what it alleged were Israeli “spy headquarters” in Irbil, killing and wounding several civilians including a well-known multimillionaire businessman and members of his family and injuring six others.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the midnight missile strikes targeted a building used by the Israeli Mossad and were conducted in response to Israeli espionage and sabotage operations in Iran.
The Kurdistan Region Government (KRG) condemned the attack and blasted Iran’s claim that the targeted villa in an upscale Irbil suburb was serving as a base for Israeli agents.
Iraq’s National Security Adviser Qassim Al-Araji, who flew from Baghdad hours after the attack to inspect the site, also described Iran’s claims as “baseless.”
Iraq recalled its ambassador from Tehran for consultations and summoned Iran’s chargé d’affaires in Baghdad in protest. Baghdad also filed a complaint against Iran at the UN Security Council and the Arab League over the Iranian “aggression”.
Meanwhile, Tehran remained defiant, and its leaders used their usual cocktail of pomp and threat to play up not only their country’s military capabilities but also its determination to strike “enemies” whenever it deemed necessary.
Beyond the rhetoric, however, the assault on Irbil has underlined Iran’s fundamental strategy in Iraq and the goals it has been trying to achieve and how these are being pursued.
The missile and drone attacks in Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria are clear examples of Iran’s ambitious and aggressive policies, which are aimed at transitioning the Islamic Republic into a regional leadership role.
By using long-range ballistic missiles against the three countries, Iran wanted to demonstrate that its ballistic missile capabilities are also able to hit Israel.
From short (300 km) to medium (300-1,000 km) and long (up to 2,000 km)-range missiles, Iran has now acquired a diverse stockpile of missiles that can complicate and frustrate its rivals’ advances.
Coupled with its nuclear programme, which could put it on the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability, Iran is showing it has become a major Middle Eastern military power.
In this regard, Iraq is a linchpin in Iran’s expansionist strategy. With its human, cultural, economic, and geopolitical potential, it is the centrepiece of Iran’s project of creating a special sphere of influence in the Middle East.
Thanks to the US-led invasion in 2003 that destroyed the Iraqi state and its national fabric and created a security gap, the clerical regime in Iran that has built strong alliances with the Shia groups in Iraq has emerged as the dominant foreign power in its Western neighbour.
As the US retreated from Iraq after 2009, the Iranian-linked parties extended their networks inside the Iraqi government, security forces, and economy using their formidable soft power.
Over more than two decades, the US has failed to dislodge the Iranians, turning Iraq into a battleground with the Islamic Republic and further destabilising the country into the chaos provoked by Tehran’s proxies.
Much has been said about what Iran is trying to achieve in Iraq and how its objectives are being pursued. But assessing Iran’s interventionist policies in Iraq requires a broader view than the predominantly Shia proxies-focused lens that many analysts use.
Iran’s strategy in Iraq has become one of attrition, using security, religious, economic, and political activities to exhaust Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian communities until they accept its influence as a new reality.
Key to this exhaustion strategy has been the Iraqi ethnic groups’ inability to resist Iran’s presence in their country, which has taken various shapes with multiple objectives.
The heaviest burden of Iran’s role in Iraq rests on the Iraqi Shias, whose feelings of anger and upheaval regarding Iran’s intervention have been bubbling below the surface for some time.
Despite the alliance of the Iraqi Shia ruling class with Iran, the Islamic Republic is not “well-linked” within Iraq’s larger Shia community. Iraqi Shias outside the circle of the political class see Iran as having too much influence in their country.
Along with combatting corruption, unemployment, and the lack of basic services, key demands by Iraqi protesters during the massive uprising that rocked Shia-populated cities in Iraq in 2019 was to expel the “occupier Iran” from the country.
Protesters threw petrol bombs and set up fires outside the walls of the Iranian Consulate in Karbala, the Shias’ most sacred city, where Iran has invested a fortune building a religious base for what is seen as ideological indoctrination.
Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, left marginalised by the post-Saddam Shia empowerment, are also caught in the midst of the increased Iranian influence in Iraq.
The post US-invasion arrangements have left the country’s Sunni Muslims, who were once its political elite, feeling disenfranchised, angry, and dissatisfied about their situation and the country’s politics.
Yet, neither their boycott and insurgency, nor their half-hearted participation in Iraq’s successive parliaments and governments since 2003, have brought them any tangible political gains, leaving them excluded and with little say in the governance of their communities and national politics.
The defeat of the Islamic State (IS) terror group in 2017 after its rapid rise three years before gave Iran and its Shia allies that fought against IS an opportunity to expand their influence in the Sunni-populated provinces of Iraq and ultimately in the Sunnis’ participation in national politics.
This influence is increasingly showing itself in the creep of Iranian-backed groups under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) in the Sunni provinces of Iraq, with these pursuing security, economic, and cultural interests while connecting Iranian supply routes through Iraq to Syria.
To make matters worse, the ethno-sectarian quota system in place in Iraq has put the Sunni minority at a disadvantage as it has held back consensus democracy and instead vested power in the Shia majority.
One of the most salient features of this monopoly of power has been demonstrated by the current deadlock over electing a new speaker of the Iraqi Parliament because of a lack of support for candidates from the Iran-allied Shia parties in the ruling coalition.
The post of speaker has been vacant since November, when Iraq’s High Court removed Mohamed Al-Halbousi from the position on charges of forgery. The parliament has since failed to convene to elect a new speaker because of a forced quorum requirement by Shia members.
Under the country’s power-sharing system, the speaker of the parliament is always Sunni, the prime minister is Shia, and the president is Kurdish. But the country’s Shia groups and sometimes also Iran have a say on who will be chosen for the posts.
The Iraqi Kurds are not exempted from this misuse of the consensus system, which is undermining the post-Saddam federal structure enacted to ensure peace and stability in the ethnically divided country.
Iraqi Kurdistan has also not been free from Iran’s interventions, as it attempts to spread its influence and agenda throughout the region’s daily life including by resorting to coercion in its internal politics.
Beyond its political, security, cultural, and economic objectives in co-opting the state and society in Iraq, Iran’s geostrategic goals in northern Iraq include blocking the enclave’s federal system from giving rise to Kurdish separatism inside Iran itself.
Iran also claims major security concerns regarding the activities of anti-regime dissidents who have taken refuge in northern Iraq or out of fears of the enclave being used by its regional rivals, namely Israel, Turkey, and the US to establish footholds in Iraqi Kurdistan, which has a long border with Iran.
Iranian interference in Kurdistan includes sowing divisions between the two main factions that share control over the enclave, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The two groups, which have long fought for political supremacy, remain determined political rivals.
In pursuance of this policy, Iran has cemented security, political, and trade ties with the PUK, which controls provinces neighbouring Iran, while keeping to the minimum its relations with KDP-controlled areas in an effort to force the party’s leadership to toe Tehran’s line.
Overall, some 21 years after the ouster of Saddam, Iran has been quietly consolidating its control over Iraq and creating facts on the ground that will be difficult for Iraqis to challenge.
On the face of it, the missile strikes on Irbil may have been a message from Tehran to its foes during the Gaza conflict in order to project its power throughout the Middle East.
Yet, one fact stands out: in order for Iran to build its sphere of influence in the Middle East, Iraq with its Shia majority, vast resources, and geopolitical importance will be the centrepiece of this expansionist strategy.
Iran is betting that after all it has done in Iraq, the Iraqis will stomach its interventions in their country. It also hopes that its rivals will submit to its predominance in the periphery.
Not much is expected from the Iraqi political class to face up to the Iranian challenge, either because it does not have the means to defend the country against its powerful neighbour or because it is unwilling to do so.
While Iran’s blatant violations of Iraq’s sovereignty will remain a test for Iraqi nationalism, particularly if they trigger the kind of anti-Iran response seen in the 2019 protests, the Israeli answer to the Irbil missile strikes was not long in coming.
Four senior members of Iran’s IRGC were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Syrian capital Damascus on Saturday in what is widely seen as part of ongoing tit-for-tat attacks between Iran and Israel.
As of now, Iran continues to deepen its involvement in Iraq with a list of actions that demonstrate its political agenda and a security influence that will be hard to eradicate.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 January, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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