Iraq’s Last Shot
If the Kurds fall, Iran gets the whole country
IF President Trump wants to stop Iran from making the entire country of Iraq a subsidiary of the Revolutionary Guard, he’ll need to intervene in the burgeoning crisis in Kurdistan — and fast.
On Monday, Iraqi forces trounced Kurdish fighters and emerged victorious in a short fight for control of the oil-rich northern Iraqi town of Kirkuk.
And they couldn’t have done it without us.
When ISIS stormed Iraq in 2014, the demoralized Iraqi army collapsed, its troops deserted and fled. Baghdad was utterly humiliated. Then Kurdish fighters, known as Peshmerga, entered Kirkuk, secured the key city and kept it jihadi-free.
Since then, a better-trained, better-equipped US-backed Iraqi army has been fighting alongside the Peshmerga to chase ISIS out of the country. Now, with ISIS nearly dead, the Iraqi army turned its attention to Kirkuk — and chased the Kurds out in the name of national unity.
The successful blitz is a feather in Prime Minister Haider al Abadi’s cap. He’s struggled to keep Iraq unified in the aftermath of a Sept. 25 nonbinding referendum, in which Iraq’s Kurds overwhelmingly expressed their desire for independence.
So America should be happy, right? After all, US advisers turned the Iraqi army into a viable fighting machine that just proved its worth. Plus, the State Department publicly opposed the referendum declared by Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.
Problem is, the Iraqi army wasn’t alone in defeating the Kurds. Much of the fighting was done by Iraqi Shiite militias — many of which swear allegiance to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran’s vanguard, even as they, too, get American arms.
On Friday, President Trump declared the IRGC a terror organization. The Treasury Department hit the group with new sanctions to confront its growing global influence.
Yet the fall of Kirkuk is undeniably “a big victory for the IRGC and its commander, [Qassem] Soleimani,” Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to Iraq, told me. Khalilzad advocates active US involvement in negotiations between Baghdad and Erbil, the Iraqi-Kurdish capital.
Such talks should include agreements for sharing power and oil revenue from Kirkuk. Ultimately, Kurdish self-determination must be addressed, says Khalilzad. “It is not in our interest for Kurds, who have been good friends of the US, to be destabilized [and] defeated,” he adds.
Yet, as the Kurdish crisis was brewing, the Trump administration did little beyond calling for the need to maintain Iraq’s territorial integrity. Even now, some see the Kirkuk defeat as a lesson for Barzani — proof that the State Department’s opposition to the referendum was sound policy.
“We don’t like the fact that they’re clashing, but we’re not taking sides,” Trump said Monday.
Yet America’s seeming indifference to Kurdish independence encouraged Kurdistan’s neighbors to do things the Mideast way: Turkey, Iran and Iraq’s central government threatened war even as Barzani declined to unilaterally declare independence in the referendum’s aftermath, offering negotiations instead.
And now Kirkuk, a key re- gional asset, is about to be dominated by militias that answer to Suleimani, the IRGC general charged with exporting Iran’s Shiite Islamist revolution to the world.
The easy victory over Kirkuk and America’s indifference could encourage a further Iranian-led push into Kurdish areas. If so, expect fighting to become increasingly bloody. And the longer the crisis remains unresolved, the more Iran gets involved — and the deeper its influence over the Abadi government becomes.
Abadi has long juggled alliances, hoping to keep ties with both Washington and Tehran. But only Americans can force him to face reality and acknowledge Kurdish aspirations. Only America can facilitate a negotiated agreement to prevent a long, bloody war between Baghdad and Erbil — which will force Abadi into Tehran’s arms.
America has spent too much blood and fortune in Iraq to allow Iran to take over now that ISIS is on the verge of extinction.
From National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster on down, Trump is surrounded by advisers well-versed in the nuanced realities of Iraq. They need to take charge ASAP and get Erbil and Baghdad talking.
Otherwise, Soleimani will do it his way.