Iran’s Game in Iraq
Here’s a good analysis at MEMRI of Iran’s destabilizing influence in Iraq: Iran’s Stirrings in Iraq.
With the downfall of its nemesis Saddam Hussein, Iran can now pursue two principal objectives in Iraq: the first is to stir up problems for the Americans to keep them pinned down and divert their attention from its nuclear program. The second is to assert its influence over the Hawza, or the Shi’a religious centers in the two holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and to prevent the emergence in these cities of an independent religious and spiritual leadership competing with the Iranian city of Qum.
In a Friday sermon on April 9, delivered at Tehran University amid shouts of “Death to America, Death to Israel,” Expediency Council head Hashemi Rafsanjani said: “The present situation in Iraq represents a threat as well as an opportunity… It is a threat because the wounded American beast can take enraged actions, but it is also an opportunity to teach this beast a lesson so it won’t attack another country.” [1]
Open Borders - An Invitation to Subversion
It is commonly recognized that the coalition forces have been unable to fully control Iraq’s borders with its neighbors, particularly with the antagonist neighbors - Iran and Syria. On Iraq’s eastern and southern fronts, both Iranian intelligence agents and Iranian-sponsored terrorists have been able to enter Iraq at will. Many of them are easily disguised as religious pilgrims who, for the first time in years, are able to visit the two holy cities of Najaf and Karbala freely. For Shi’a Muslims, these pilgrimages are almost as theologically significant as a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Operating in a friendly milieu in southern Iraq, which is inhabited predominantly by Shi’a Muslims, Iranian intelligence officers have used a combination of incentives and coercion to widen the base of collaborators. According to the Iraqi daily Al-Nahdha, the Iraqi police have arrested many Iranians who are ostensibly pilgrims but, in reality, are intelligence operatives. The newspaper estimates the number of Iranian agents operating in Iraq at 14,000. They are penetrating the country’s nascent security forces and taking advantage of the open distribution of books and literature. As a measure of their success to sell their revolutionary dogmas to the Iraqis, the newspaper’s reporter has found that, for the first time in modern Iraqi history, a growing number of policemen have grown beards as a symbol of their identification with revolutionary Iran. Pilgrims are also known to have brought to Iraq hundreds of remote controls devices capable of activating explosives.
There’s much more; read it all. This is essential information for understanding the situation in Iraq.