North-Press Agency
Dr. Moheeb Salha
The national opposition didn't form against the Baath regime in Iraq which was run by Saddam Hussein, but it was a wide religious current as the majority of which was the Shiites which are affiliated with the Iranian religious references in Qum city such as Sadrist Movement and al-Dawa Party. All of the Shiite politicians who came on the back of the U.S. tanks in 2003 and were crowned with the Iraqi authority by Washington which was constituted by Bremer law, were members of these two Shiite movements.
Therefore, they didn't hide their sentimental and political affiliation with the Islamic Republic of Iran, where some of them fought with it against Iraq during the 8 years' war between the two countries, and some planned and carried out terrorist operations in a number of Arabic countries such as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was in charge of bombing of the Iraqi embassy in Beirut in 1981. As Khomeinism excluded its partners in the Iranian Revolution from power, pursued its leaders and members, the Shiite groups have excluded their partners from the opposition, too.
General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Quds Force in the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the right-hand man of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, supervised the engineering of the Iraqi house after Saddam Hussein. He was working under the sight of the United States of America and under its supervision, as he arranged the power-sharing process on the basis of sectarian and ethnic quotas, supervised the formation of the Iraqi army, the internal security forces and the intelligence on a sectarian basis where the Shiite component was the majority – except the Kurdish case in the north – he also made control of Iraq’s natural resources for those who blindly obey Iran's orders, and worked only for their advantage.
Because of the exclusion and cancellation policies practiced by this political class towards the Sunni areas, ISIS appeared in Iraq in 2014 and took control over many Sunni areas. In the wake of its widespread expansion after the fall of Mosul, with an apparent collusion of al-Maliki government, and on June 3, 2014, the call of the Shiite cleric, Ayatollah al-Sistani, the Shiites for jihad led to the establishment of the Popular Mobilization Forces, Iran's longest arm in Iraq, which encircled the necks of the political class that controlled its resources.
At the same time, al-Maliki government contributed with direct financial and logistical support from Iran in organizing the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), paying the salaries of its affiliates, arming them and training them in order to move in to carry out military operations against ISIS. Even Qasem Soleimani himself, led the military operation against ISIS in the Iraqi governorate of Anbar. The PMF took part in military operations alongside the Iraqi army in Ramadi, Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul, Tal Afar and Sinjar (Shengal).
The U.S. also allowed the PMF to attack Kirkuk after the referendum on Kurdistan's independence, which it colluded against with the Iraqi political class.
On November 26, 2016, the Iraqi parliament passed a law that officially recognized the PMF as the official Iraqi defense force. This recognition contributed to the increasing influence and expansion of the Popular Mobilization, and thus the increased Iranian influence in Iraq, which may mean for the United States a blatant transgression of the red lines in Iraq which draw the boundaries of the game of interests between the U.S. and Iran.
Despite the emergence of the names of certain groups within the PMF such as (the Sadrist Movement, Badr Brigade, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Khamenei Army, the Iraqi Hezbollah, Ali Akbar Brigade, Ansar al-Marjaiya, Saraya Khorasan and Saraya al-Salam), the number of its groups now exceeds 70.
The soft policy of the former U.S. President Obama had enabled Iran to control the Iraqi joints, as Qasem Soleimani played the role of a maestro who directed and coordinated the work of the Iraqi Brigade, directed its policies and engineered its formations. In this regard, we recall how Iran, in agreement with the Obama administration, brought down the majority of al-Iraqiya Bloc in the 2010 elections, which was led by Iyad Allawi, in order to enable the Coalition of Dawlat al-Qanoun which was led by Nuri al-Maliki, Iran's agent, to form the Iraqi government.
But after Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States, he worked to change the U.S. policies in the Middle East, as the U.S. forces started to target Iran's PMF and incurred it heavy losses.
The strikes against Iran's allies and the killing of General Qasem Soleimani on the morning of January 3, at Baghdad International Airport, minutes after his arrival from Damascus, came as a U.S. declaration of new rules of engagement with Iran, as it is no longer acceptable for President Trump to wait for Tehran, which has mastered playing on the brink of the abyss, in order to implement his terms in all the files of the region, while he is on the eve of presidential elections that he wants to stay in the White House for a second round, and at the same time he is threatened with impeachment by the Congress.
The killing of Soleimani in this way, gives the mullahs of Iran an opportunity to catch their breath and arrange their cards in the face of a revolutionary popular tide from Beirut to Tehran against their policies that strengthen their militias at the expense of weakening the countries of the region, the policies of starvation and the militarization of the economy practiced in Iran and Iraq.
At the same time, it strengthens the tone of the Iranian populist misleading and revenge rhetoric, not only against the U.S., but rather, in the face of other components of the peoples of the region, where the killed Soleimani played the role of the killer in Iran's ambiguous relationship with its revolutions against tyranny. This explains the extreme sadness shown by the parties to the conflict in Syria from the Ba'athists, the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies.
In all cases, if it were carried out, the threat of the Iranian leadership and its arms in the region to avenge the killing of Soleimani would be an open war in the region that its people will pay money and blood. While Iraq will be the most likely arena for a U.S.-Iranian conflict, in which the two sides will win at the expense of the Iraqi people, who have no choice, which is between the sectarian anvil of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the heavy hammer of the United States, other than liberating Iraq from all foreign forces abd the corrupt political class.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author, and do not reflect the editorial policy of North-Press Agency.