As Iran’s proxies capture the entire Iraq-Syria border, it’s time to sit up and take notice
Abadi the figurehead for the operations against the Kurds – with senior Iranian politicians cynically lauding Al-Abadi as the strongman who saved Iraq. When Al-Abadi visited Riyadh a few days ago, he made sure to turn up in Tehran immediately after. When Tillerson denounced the Hashd and referred to Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis as a terrorist, Iraqi statements condemning Tillerson were put in Al-Abadi’s name. This could be interpreted as a Machiavellian attempt to exploit these developments to co-opt moderate Shiite politicians ahead of elections next year. Indeed these elections promise to be a show of force between relative moderates and sectarian factions aligned with Tehran. The winner of this contest will dominate the government at a crucial moment for defining Iraq’s identity. In the past we could have expected to see substantive Western efforts to empower non-sectarian entities – but the world is not paying attention.
Tehran’s gambit for capturing the entire Syria-Iraq border zone fulfils several goals. It sets pro-Iran forces up for recapturing eastern Syria, while opening up a choice of land routes from Tehran to Damascus, Beirut and the Mediterranean for unrestricted transport of military hardware.
Iran is obsessed with access to strategic choke-points: Hormuz, Mandib, the eastern Mediterranean and key routes through Iraq. Routes between Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan have been a vital supply route important in the fight against Daesh. US allies will find their transport options are limited if Iran dominates this border, control of which the Revolutionary Guards will profit from for smuggling and weapons proliferation.
Iran and Turkey have a shared interest in stifling Kurdish autonomy and joint Kurdish action. Turkey and Iran may be pleased to see Syrian and Iraqi Kurds isolated from one another. Although Turkey is certainly chastened by Iran’s recent strategic gains, these nations usually avoid unnecessarily antagonizing each other. Washington meanwhile neither knows nor cares that it spent two decades cultivating the Kurds as a strategic ally – before thoughtlessly abandoning them to abject humiliation at Iran’s hands.
Few outsiders will have heard of the Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmatu, but it is a key junction between Iran, Kurdish areas and central Iraq. There have been bouts of factional bloodletting there since 2014, particularly between Hashd forces and Kurds. In the past two weeks Hashd fighters unleashed a particularly brutal vengeance against citizens, as documented by Amnesty International, with thousands of Kurds forced to flee as their homes went up in smoke behind them. Hashd human-rights violations habitually serve strategic goals, and in this case Tuz is a valuable prize for exerting control across the region. Yet the world barely noticed.
One state that is watching very carefully, of course, is Israel, meaning that each bout of Iranian expansionism brings us closer to an inevitable regional conflict, which would be devastating for citizens of states such as Lebanon and Syria – even if it didn’t significantly weaken the two principal protagonists. That is because Israel prefers to carpet-bomb enemies and civilian targets from a distance, while cowardly Iran fights its battles through mercenaries and proxies.
One doesn’t have to be a fortune-teller to realise that recent events will define patterns of conflicts and tensions for decades to come. Analysts will look back at these events with far greater attention than self-proclaimed experts are currently doing, and wonder why the international community failed to lift a finger.
American liberals deride Trump’s foreign policy incompetence and worry that his belligerent language toward Iran is setting us on the path for conflict. On the contrary, it is this vacuous rhetoric in the absence of coherent policy – or even elementary-level understanding of these developments – that is emboldening bully states such as Iran, North Korea and Putin’s Russia to walk all over us and redefine the global balance of power for decades to come.
Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and a foreign editor at Al-Hayat, and has interviewed numerous heads of state.
Q