Iran breaks new ground in Iraq

The loss of Ramadi in Iraq’s restive Anbar province has been widely perceived as foremost a failure of US policy in Iraq. Whilst high-ranking US officials tried to deflect the blame onto Iraqi forces, America’s confused and half-hearted strategy against the Islamic State (IS) has come into sharp relief.

By contrast, Iran’s parallel campaign against IS has received a shot in the arms, as evidenced by the entry of Shiite-led militias into the Anbar arena.

In Iraq the failure of the American- and British-trained army is by definition a victory for Iran, which has quietly developed an effective fighting force in the form of militias and special groups.

By all credible accounts Iran is escalating its involvement in Iraq by attempting to fuse the disparate militias into a single cohesive force. This speaks to a long-term strategy of developing a parallel state in Iraq and propelling influence-building to its maximum.

But the existence of a clear and clever Iraq strategy does not necessarily imply complete unity of purpose or motivation in Tehran. Indeed, competing forces and interests have different visions of the desired outcome. Iran’s long-term success in Iraq depends on the extent to which these forces can work together to mitigate costs and maximise gains.

Conquering Anbar     

Iraq’s vast Anbar province is often portrayed as the bastion of Arab Sunni identity and resulting resistance to the Shiite-led administration in Baghdad. The province has been deeply and continuously mired in unrest since the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003.

What is less known about Anbar is its place in the historical Iranian imagination. The word “Anbar” is in fact Persian, roughly translated as “warehouse”, the function the area served under the Sassanian dynasty, the last pre-Islamic Iranian empire. 

Ancient, classical and pre-modern Iranian strategists viewed control of this area as vital to projecting power further West with a view to establishing a secure base on the eastern banks of the Mediterranean.

In modern times Iran has been able to establish a secure presence on the Mediterranean coast without controlling Anbar, courtesy of the Islamic Republic’s alliance with Syria and the Shiite community in southern Lebanon.

Yet the prospect of emasculating Anbar must be appealing to the Iranians, not least because of the central role of this province in the long-running Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Many of the most capable Iraqi army officers, in addition to the most effective and loyal intelligence operatives, originally hailed from this region.

Anbar continues to be a hotbed of anti-Iranian feeling, and by extension harbours an intense loathing of the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, making it fertile ground for the growth of IS and its allies.

The Iraqi government has framed the “liberation” of Anbar as the centrepiece of its strategy against IS and its extensive network of local tribal and sub-tribal allies. Even if Ramadi is captured quickly, driving IS out of Anbar is likely to take years.

The long campaign in Anbar has spurred Iran and its most loyal allies in Baghdad to step up the re-organisation of the Shiite-led militias. Hitherto an assortment of relatively large organisations and small groups, some of them poorly led and organised, have dominated the militia landscape.

The formal creation of an umbrella body, the so-called Popular Mobilisation Units - al-Hashd al-Shaabi - (PMU), in June 2014 was the first step in the creation of a pan-militia organisation. This was a direct response to the sweeping gains of IS last June and reflected widespread concerns at the highest levels of Iraq’s Shiite community on the inability of the army and other national security forces to contain the IS threat.  

The long game

Notwithstanding the formal creation of the PMU, hitherto the militias have tended to act more or less independently, with little effective coordination with the Iraqi army. This confusing state of affairs was brought into sharp relief in March-April during the campaign to recapture Tikrit.

Iran has high ambitions for the PMU as evidenced by the close nurturing of this embryonic entity by none other than General Qasem Suleimani, the charismatic commander of the Quds Force, the expeditionary wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

Suleimani and the IRGC likely aspire to create a force akin to the Iranian Basij in Iraq. Created in 1979, the Basij is a popular mobilisation force and acts as the paramilitary arm of the IRGC.

Whilst the Basij has performed useful paramiliary and social policing roles in Iran, in neighbouring Iraq, owing to weak government institutions, a similar organisation can transform into a parallel state.

The development of a pro-Iranian parallel state in Iraq speaks to deep and careful strategising in Tehran. Broadly speaking, there are three Iranian actors and schools of thought on Iraq.

The foreign ministry and its allies (composed of think tanks and university departments) is a solid repository of Iraq-related expertise. The dominant view in these circles is to build up a sufficient level of influence in Iraq with a view to creating lasting strategic depth.   

The IRGC conducts on-the-ground influence-building operations in Iraq primarily through its expeditionary Quds Force. The IRGC approach, whilst also strategic, tends to view Iraq through an ideological lens, notably an arena of conflict with the US and to a much lesser extent Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.  

The third force is comprised of an outlook, as opposed to an institution, that is rooted in Iranian nationalism. This outlook was expressed in clear terms in March by former intelligence minister Ali Younesi, who claimed that Baghdad was now effectively Iran’s capital.

According to this school of thought Iraq is not only Iran’s strategic depth but a historical extension of the country. Whilst elements sympathetic to this outlook maintain a presence inside the two main institutional actors (the foreign ministry and the IRGC), they are not currently in a position to decisively influence policy.

This dense institutional and ideological environment underpins the Islamic Republic’s deep commitments in Iraq, which are likely to unfold over several decades.

It remains to be seen whether Iranian policy makers and strategists succeed in optimally managing institutional and ideological differences in the face of escalating challenges in a fragmenting Iraq.

- Mahan Abedin is an analyst of Iranian politics. He is the director of the research group Dysart Consulting.  

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: File picture shows Gen. Qassem Suleimani, Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force, on 14 September 2013 (AFP)