Members of the Popular Mobilization Forces, a mostly Shiite
militia group, at their post at the Iraqi border with Syria.CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
It truly is Not acceptable what Iran continues to do around D world.
BAGHDAD — Walk into almost any market
in Iraq and
the shelves are filled with goods from Iran —
milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel
broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran.
A new building goes up? It is likely
that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take
pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across
the porous Iranian border.
And that’s not even the half of it.
Across the country, Iranian-sponsored
militias are hard at work establishing a corridor to move men and guns to proxy
forces in Syria and Lebanon. And in the halls of power in Baghdad, even the
most senior Iraqi cabinet officials have been blessed, or bounced out, by
Iran’s leadership.
When the United States invaded Iraq 14
years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a
democratic and Western-facing Middle East, and vast amounts of blood and
treasure — about 4,500 American lives lost, more than $1 trillion spent — were
poured into the cause.
Tehran’s
Turn
Articles in this series examine Iran’s growing
regional influence.
From Day 1, Iran saw something else: a
chance to make a client state of Iraq, a former enemy against which it fought a
war in the 1980s so brutal, with chemical weapons and trench warfare, that
historians look to World War I for analogies. If it succeeded, Iraq would never
again pose a threat, and it could serve as a jumping-off point to spread
Iranian influence around the region.
In that contest, Iran won, and the
United States lost.
Over the past three years, Americans
have focused on the battle against the Islamic State in Iraq, returning more
than 5,000 troops to the country and helping to force the militants out of
Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul.
Photo
Men suspected of fighting for the Islamic State, detained in
a makeshift courthouse in Qaraqosh, near Mosul. CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
But Iran never lost sight of its
mission: to dominate its neighbor so thoroughly that Iraq could never again
endanger it militarily, and to use the country to effectively control a
corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean.
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“Iranian influence is dominant,” said Hoshyar
Zebari, who was ousted last year as finance minister because, he said, Iran
distrusted his links to the United States. “It is paramount.”
The country’s dominance over Iraq has
heightened sectarian tensions around the region, with Sunni states, and American
allies, like Saudi Arabia mobilizing to oppose Iranian expansionism. But Iraq
is only part of Iran’s expansion project; it has also used soft and hard power
to extend its influence in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, and
throughout the region.
Iran is a Shiite state, and Iraq, a
Shiite majority country, was ruled by an elite Sunni minority before the
American invasion. The roots of the schism between Sunnis and Shiites, going
back almost 1,400 years, lie in differences over the rightful leaders of Islam
after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. But these days, it is about
geopolitics as much as religion, with the divide expressed by different states
that are adversaries, led by Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other.
Iran’s influence in Iraq is not just
ascendant, but diverse, projecting into military, political, economic and
cultural affairs.
At some border posts in the south,
Iraqi sovereignty is an afterthought. Busloads of young militia recruits cross
into Iran without so much as a document check. They receive military training
and are then flown to Syria, where they fight under the command of Iranian
officers in defense of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
Passing in the other direction, truck
drivers pump Iranian products — food, household goods, illicit drugs — into
what has become a vital and captive market.
Iran tips the scales to its favor in
every area of commerce. In the city of Najaf, it even picks up the trash, after
the provincial council there awarded a municipal contract to a private Iranian
company. One member of the council, Zuhair al-Jibouri, resorted to a now-common
Iraqi aphorism: “We import apples from Iran so we can give them away to Iranian
pilgrims.”
Politically, Iran has a large number of
allies in Iraq’s Parliament who can help secure its goals. And its influence
over the choice of interior minister, through a militia and political group the
Iranians built up in the 1980s to oppose Mr. Hussein, has given it substantial
control over that ministry and the federal police.
Perhaps most crucial, Parliament passed
a law last year that effectively made the constellation of Shiite militias a
permanent fixture of Iraq’s security forces. This ensures Iraqi funding for the
groups while effectively maintaining Iran’s control over some of the most
powerful units.
Now, with new parliamentary elections
on the horizon, Shiite militias have begun organizing themselves politically
for a contest that could secure even more dominance for Iran over Iraq’s
political system.
To gain advantage on the airwaves, new
television channels set up with Iranian money and linked to Shiite militias broadcast
news coverage portraying Iran as Iraq’s protector and the United States as a
devious interloper.
Partly in an effort to contain Iran,
the United States has indicated that it will keep troops behind in Iraq after
the battle against the Islamic State. American diplomats have worked to
emphasize the government security forces’ role in the fighting, and to shore up
a prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has seemed more open to the United
States than to Iran.
But after the United States’ abrupt
withdrawal of troops in 2011, American constancy is still in question here — a
broad failure of American foreign policy, with responsibility shared across
three administrations.
Iran has been playing a deeper game,
parlaying extensive religious ties with Iraq’s Shiite majority and a much wider
network of local allies, as it makes the case that it is Iraq’s only reliable
defender.
Photo
Shiite militiamen guarding the entrance to a desert road in
Diyala Province that begins near the Iranian border. CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
A
Road to the Sea
Iran’s great project in eastern Iraq
may not look like much: a 15-mile stretch of dusty road, mostly gravel, through
desert and scrub near the border in Diyala Province.
But it is an important new leg of
Iran’s path through Iraq to Syria, and what it carries — Shiite militiamen,
Iranian delegations, trade goods and military supplies — is its most valuable
feature.
It is a piece of what analysts and
Iranian officials say is Iran’s most pressing ambition: to exploit the chaos of
the region to project influence across Iraq and beyond. Eventually, analysts
say, Iran could use the corridor, established on the ground through militias
under its control, to ship weapons and supplies to proxies in Syria, where Iran
is an important backer of Mr. Assad, and to Lebanon and its ally Hezbollah.
At the border to the east is a new
crossing built and secured by Iran. Like the relationship between the two
countries, it is lopsided.
The checkpoint’s daily traffic includes
up to 200 Iranian trucks, carrying fruit and yogurt, concrete and bricks, into
Iraq. In the offices of Iraqi border guards, the candies and soda offered to
guests come from Iran.
No loaded trucks go the other way.
“Iraq doesn’t have anything to offer
Iran,” Vahid Gachi, the Iranian official in charge of the crossing, said in an
interview in his office, as lines of tractor-trailers poured into Iraq. “Except
for oil, Iraq relies on Iran for everything.”
The border post is also a critical
transit point for Iran’s military leaders to send weapons and other supplies to
proxies fighting the Islamic State in Iraq.
Photo
Workers unloading Iranian products at an Iraqi border
crossing. The flow of goods between the two countries is one-sided. CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
After the Islamic State, also known as
ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, swept across Diyala and neighboring areas in 2014, Iran
made clearing the province, a diverse area of Sunnis and Shiites, a priority.
It marshaled a huge force of Shiite
militias, many trained in Iran and advised on the ground by Iranian officials.
After a quick victory, Iranians and their militia allies set about securing
their next interests here: marginalizing the province’s Sunni minority and securing
a path to Syria. Iran has fought aggressively to keep its ally Mr. Assad in
power in order to retain land access to its most important spinoff in the
region, Hezbollah, the military and political force that dominates Lebanon and
threatens Israel.
A word from Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s powerful spymaster,
sent an army of local Iraqi contractors scrambling, lining up trucks and
bulldozers to help build the road, free of charge. Militiamen loyal to Iran
were ordered to secure the site.
Uday al-Khadran, the Shiite mayor of
Khalis District in Diyala, is a member of the Badr Organization, an Iraqi
political party and militia established by Tehran in the 1980s to fight against
Mr. Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.
On an afternoon earlier this year, he
spread a map across his desk and proudly discussed how he helped build the
road, which he said was ordered by General Suleimani, the commander of the Quds
Force, the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
responsible for foreign operations. General Suleimani secretly directed Iran’s
policy in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, and was responsible for the
deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in attacks carried out by militias
under his control.
“I love Qassim Suleimani more than my
children,” he said.
Mr. Khadran said the general’s new road
would eventually be a shortcut for religious pilgrims from Iran to reach
Samarra, Iraq, the location of an important shrine.
But he also acknowledged the route’s
greater strategic significance as part of a corridor secured by Iranian proxies
that extends across central and northern Iraq. The connecting series of roads
skirts the western city of Mosul and stretches on to Tal Afar, an Islamic
State-controlled city where Iranian-backed militias and Iranian advisers have
set up a base at an airstrip on the outskirts.
“Diyala is the passage to Syria and
Lebanon, and this is very important to Iran,” said Ali al-Daini, the Sunni
chairman of the provincial council there.
Closer to Syria, Iranian-allied
militias moved west of Mosul as the battle against the Islamic State unfolded
there in recent months. The militias captured the town of Baaj, and then
proceeded to the Syrian border, putting Iran on the cusp of completing its
corridor.
Back east, in Diyala, Mr. Daini said he
had been powerless to halt what he described as Iran’s dominance in the
province.
When Mr. Daini goes to work, he said,
he has to walk by posters of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, outside the council building.
Iran’s militias in the province have
been accused of widespread sectarian cleansing, pushing Sunnis from their
homes to establish Shiite dominance and create a buffer zone on its border. The
Islamic State was beaten in Diyala more than two years ago, but thousands of
Sunni families still fill squalid camps, unable to return home.
Now, Diyala has become a showcase for
how Iran views Shiite ascendancy as critical to its geopolitical goals.
“Iran is smarter than America,” said
Nijat al-Taie, a Sunni member of the provincial council and an outspoken critic
of Iran, which she calls the instigator of several assassination attempts
against her. “They achieved their goals on the ground. America didn’t protect
Iraq. They just toppled the regime and handed the country over to Iran.”
Photo
Pilgrims waiting for food and water to be distributed before
evening prayer in Karbala, a holy city for Shiites. CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
The
Business of Influence
The lives of General Suleimani and
other senior leaders in Tehran were shaped by the prolonged war with Iraq in
the 1980s. The conflict left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, and
General Suleimani spent much of the war at the front, swiftly rising in rank as
so many officers were killed.
“The Iran-Iraq war was the formative
experience for all of Iran’s leaders,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran analyst at the
International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organization. “From Suleimani
all the way down. It was their ‘never again’ moment.”
A border dispute over the Shatt al Arab
waterway that was a factor in the hostilities has still not been resolved, and
the legacy of the war’s brutality has influenced the Iranian government ever
since, from its pursuit of nuclear
weapons to its policy in Iraq.
“This is a permanent scar in their
mind,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a lawmaker and former national security
adviser. “They are obsessed with Baathism, Saddam and the Iran-Iraq war.”
More than anything else, analysts say,
it is the scarring legacy of that war that has driven Iranian ambitions to
dominate Iraq.
Particularly in southern Iraq, where
the population is mostly Shiite, signs of Iranian influence are everywhere.
Iranian-backed militias are the
defenders of the Shiite shrines in the cities of Najaf and Karbala that drive
trade and tourism. In local councils, Iranian-backed political parties have
solid majorities, and campaign materials stress relationships with Shiite
saints and Iranian clerics.
Photo
Portraits of members of Iraqi forces and Shiite militia
groups at a cemetery in Najaf. CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
If the Iraqi government were stronger,
said Mustaq al-Abady, a businessman from just outside Najaf, “then maybe we
could open our factories instead of going to Iran.” He said his warehouse was
crowded with Iranian imports because his government had done nothing to promote
a private sector, police its borders or enforce customs duties.
Raad Fadhil al-Alwani, a merchant in
Hilla, another southern city, imports cleaning supplies and floor tiles from
Iran. He slaps “Made in Iraq” labels in Arabic on bottles of detergent, but the
reality is that he owns a factory in Iran because labor is cheaper there.
“I feel like I am destroying the
economy of Iraq,” he said. But he insists that Iraqi politicians, by deferring
to Iranian pressure and refusing to support local industry, have made it hard
to do anything else.
Najaf attracts millions of Iranian
pilgrims each year visiting the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali, the first
Shiite imam. Iranian construction workers — many of whom are viewed as Iranian
spies by Iraqi officials — have also flocked to the city to renovate the shrine
and build hotels.
In Babil Province, according to local
officials, militia leaders have taken over a government project to set up
security cameras along strategic roads. The project had been granted to a
Chinese company before the militias intervened, and now the army and the local
police have been sidelined from it, said Muqdad Omran, an Iraqi Army captain in
the area.
Iran’s pre-eminence in the Iraqi south has
not come without resentment. Iraqi Shiites share a faith with Iran, but they
also hold close their other identities as Iraqis and Arabs.
“Iraq belongs to the Arab League, not
to Iran,” said Sheikh Fadhil al-Bidayri, a cleric at the religious seminary in
Najaf. “Shiites are a majority in Iraq, but a minority in the world. As long as
the Iranian government is controlling the Iraqi government, we don’t have a
chance.”
In this region where the Islamic
State’s military threat has never encroached, Iran’s security concerns are
mostly being addressed by economic manipulation, Iraqi officials say. Trade in
the south is often financed by Iran with credit, and incentives are offered to
Iraqi traders to keep their cash in Iranian banks.
Baghdad’s banks play a role, too, as
the financial anchors for Iraqi front companies used by Iran to gain access to
dollars that can then finance the country’s broader geopolitical aims, said
Entifadh Qanbar, a former aide to the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, who died in 2015.
“It’s very important for the Iranians
to maintain corruption in Iraq,” he said.
Photo
Shiite fighters near the Iraqi border with Syria. While Iran
has built up militias to fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, it has also
mobilized an army of Shiite Iraqi men to fight on its behalf in Syria. CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
The
Militias’ Long Arm
For decades, Iran smuggled guns and
bomb-making supplies through the vast swamps of southern Iraq. And young men
were brought back and forth across the border, from one safe house to another —
recruits going to Iran for training, and then back to Iraq to fight. At first
the enemy was Mr. Hussein; later, it was the Americans.
Today, agents of Iran’s Revolutionary
Guards openly recruit fighters in the Shiite-majority cities of southern Iraq.
Buses filled with recruits easily pass border posts that officials say are
essentially controlled by Iran — through its proxies on the Iraqi side, and its
own border guards on the other.
While Iran has built up militias to
fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, it has also mobilized an army of
disaffected young Shiite Iraqi men to fight on its behalf in Syria.
Mohammad Kadhim, 31, is one of those
foot soldiers for Iran, having served three tours in Syria. The recruiting
pitch, he said, is mostly based in faith, to defend Shiite shrines in Syria.
But Mr. Kadhim said he and his friends signed up more out of a need for jobs.
“I was just looking for money,” he
said. “The majority of the youth I met fighting in Syria do it for the money.”
He signed up with a Revolutionary
Guards recruiter in Najaf, and then was bused through southern Iraq and into
Iran, where he underwent military training near Tehran.
There, he said, Iranian officers
delivered speeches invoking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the revered
seventh-century Shiite figure whose death at the hands of a powerful Sunni army
became the event around which Shiite spirituality would revolve. The same
enemies of the Shiites who killed the imam are now in Syria and Iraq, the
officers told the men.
After traveling to Iran, Mr. Kadhim
came home for a break and then was shipped to Syria, where Hezbollah operatives
trained him in sniper tactics.
Iran’s emphasis on defending the Shiite
faith has led some here to conclude that its ultimate goal is to bring about an
Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq. But there is a persistent sense that it just
would not work in Iraq, which has a much larger native Sunni population and
tradition, and Iraq’s clerics in Najaf, including Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, the world’s pre-eminent Shiite spiritual leader, oppose the Iranian
system.
Photo
Shiite militiamen in Baiji. As it did with Hezbollah in
Lebanon, Iran is trying to shift the militias it’s backed in Iraq to positions
of political power. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
But Iran is taking steps to translate
militia power into political power, much as it did with Hezbollah in Lebanon,
and militia leaders have begun political organizing before next year’s
parliamentary elections.
In April, Qais al-Khazali, a Shiite
militia leader, delivered a speech to an audience of Iraqi college students,
railing against the United States and the nefarious plotting of Turkey and
Saudi Arabia. Then, a poet who was part of Mr. Khazali’s entourage stood up and
began praising General Suleimani.
For the students, that was the last
straw. Chants of “Iran out! Iran out!” began. Scuffles broke out between
students and Mr. Khazali’s bodyguards, who fired their rifles into the air just
outside the building.
“The thing that really provoked us was
the poet,” said Mustafa Kamal, a student at the University of al-Qadisiya in
Diwaniya, in southern Iraq, who participated in the protest.
Mr. Kamal and his fellow students
quickly learned how dangerous it could be to stand up to Iran these days.
First, militiamen began threatening to
haul them off. Then media outlets linked to the militias went after them,
posting their pictures and calling them Baathists and enemies of Shiites. When
a mysterious car appeared near Mr. Kamal’s house, his mother panicked that militiamen
were coming for her son.
Then, finally, Mr. Kamal, a law
student, and three of his friends received notices from the school saying they
had been suspended for a year.
“We thought we had only one hope, the
university,” he said. “And then Iran also interfered there.”
Mr. Khazali, whose political and
militia organization, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, is deeply connected with Iran, has been
on a speaking tour on campuses across Iraq as part of an effort to organize
political support for next year’s national election. This has raised fears that
Iran is trying not only to deepen its influence within Iraqi education, but
also to transform militias into outright political and social organizations,
much as it did with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“It’s another type of Iranian infiltration
and the expansion of Iran’s influence,” said Beriwan Khailany, a lawmaker and
member of Parliament’s higher-education committee. “Iran wants to control the
youth, and to teach them the Iranian beliefs, through Iraqis who are loyal to
Iran.”
Photo
Markets in Bagdad are flooded with consumer goods from Iran. CreditSergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
Political
Ascendancy
When a group of Qatari falcon hunters,
“including members of the royal family, were kidnapped in 2015 while on safari
in the southern deserts of Iraq, Qatar called Iran and its militia allies — not
the central government in Baghdad.
For Mr. Abadi, the prime minister, the
episode was an embarrassing demonstration of his government’s weakness at the
hands of Iran, whose proxy militia Kataibb Hezbollah was believed to be behind
the kidnapping.
So when the hostage negotiations were
about to end, Mr. Abadi pushed back.
Around noon on a day in April, a
government jet from Qatar landed in Baghdad, carrying a delegation of diplomats
and 500 million euros stuffed into 23 black boxes.
The hunters were soon on their way
home, but the ransom did not go to the Iranian-backed militiamen who had
abducted the Qataris; the cash ended up in a central bank vault in Baghdad.
The seizure of the money had been
ordered by Mr. Abadi, who was furious at the prospect of militias, and their
Iranian and Hezbollah benefactors, being paid so richly right under the Iraqi
government’s nose.
“Hundreds of millions to armed groups?”
Mr. Abadi said in a public rant. “Is this acceptable?”
In Iraq, the kidnapping episode was
seen as a violation of the country’s sovereignty and emblematic of Iran’s
suffocating power over the Iraqi state.
In a post on Twitter, Mr. Zebari, the
former finance minister, who was previously foreign minister, called the
episode a “travesty.”
Mr. Zebari knows firsthand the power of
Iran over the Iraqi state.
Last year, he said, he was ousted as
finance minister because Iran perceived him as being too close to the United
States. The account was verified by a member of Parliament who was involved in
the removal of Mr. Zebari, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid
angering Iran.
Mr. Zebari, who recounted the events in
an interview from his mountainside mansion in northern Iraq, said that when
President Barack Obama met with Mr. Abadi last September at the United Nations,
the American leader personally lobbied to save Mr. Zebari’s job. Even that was
not enough.
Mr. Abadi now finds himself in a
difficult position. If he makes any move that can be seen as confrontational
toward Iran, or as positioning himself closer to the United States, it could
place a cloud over his political future.
“He had two options: to be with the
Americans or with the Iranians,” said Izzat Shahbander, a prominent Iraqi
Shiite leader who once lived in exile in Iran while Mr. Hussein was in power.
“And he chose to be with the Americans.”
Mr. Abadi, who took office in 2014 with
the support of both the United States and Iran, has seemed more emboldened to
push back against Iranian pressure since President Trump took office.
In addition to seizing the ransom
money, he has promoted an ambitious project for an American company to secure the highway from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan,
which Iran has opposed. He has also begun discussing with the United States the
terms of a deal to keep American forces behind after the Islamic State is
defeated.
Some are seeing an American troop
commitment as a chance to revisit the 2011 withdrawal of United States forces
that seemingly opened a door for Iran.
When American officials in Iraq began
the slow wind-down of the military mission there, in 2009, some diplomats in
Baghdad were cautiously celebrating one achievement: Iran seemed to be on its
heels, its influence in the country waning.
“Over the last year, Iran has lost the
strategic initiative in Iraq,” one diplomat wrote in a cable, later released by
WikiLeaks.
But other cables sent warnings back to
Washington that were frequently voiced by Iraqi officials they spoke to: that
if the Americans left, then Iran would fill the vacuum.
Ryan C. Crocker, the American
ambassador in Iraq from 2007 to 2009, said that if the United States left again
after the Islamic State was defeated, “it would be effectively just giving the
Iranians a free rein.”
But many Iraqis say the Iranians
already have free rein. And while the Trump administration has indicated that
it will pay closer attention to Iraq as a means to counter Iran, the question
is whether it is too late.
“Iran is not going to sit silent and do
nothing,” said Sami al-Askari, a senior Shiite politician who has good
relationships with both the Iranians and Americans. “They have many means.
Frankly, the Americans can’t do anything.”
Correction:
July 15, 2017
An earlier version of this article misquoted Ali Vaez, an
analyst at the International Crisis Group. He described the Iran-Iraq war as
“the formative experience for all of Iran’s leaders,” not “the formidable
experience.”
