T. Belman. As David Goldman pointed out, this is due to the US insistency that Iraq have a representative government. Since the population of Iraq is 60% Shiite, they dominated the government. Previously the Sunnis controlled Iraq and thus it was a bulwark against Iran. No longer. It is now a lackey to Iran.
Notice that Iran is also backing the Kurds in Kurdistan (Peshmurga). with this help they also took back Kabani in Syria.
Six months ago US to Make Peshmerga into Professional Army. So has Iran taken over the role or is the US doing this while allowing Iran to be in charge of them.
A leaked video by fighters from the so-called Iraqi militia executed an 11 year old boy with bursts of bullets on his head in Diyala province in Iraq. Shoebat.com was able to obtain the footage showing a child in handcuffs being brutally beaten while surrounded by a group of Iranian backed Iraqi fighters, then executed the child with showers of bullets on the head.
What the Obama administration did when he pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq was to replace them with militias who are providing the essential service; a plethora of new and old pro-Iranian Shiite militias that are dominating the battlefields in Iraq and Syria which raises concerns about the growing Iranian influence. The growth of these groups — known as popular mobilization units — poses a conundrum for the Obama administration. These are Iran-backed groups who are providing most of the “boots on the ground” that are pushing back ISIS forces from key areas near Baghdad, including Diyala province.
The Iraqi government is so vulnerable at this point that it has little choice but to turn to Iran which, unlike the US, has people on the front lines in Iraq.
Iran began organizing new militias, known as “special groups,” such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq, (the League of the Righteous), which has attacked US forces in the past. Now these are supposedly our “allies”. When the United States ended its combat mission in Iraq in 2009, militia leaders who had been jailed or blacklisted were freed and ‘rehabilitated’ and some are now prominent in the fight against ISIS.
The evidence on the ground is beginning to reveal a simple observation: who today is leading battles in Salahuddin Province to recover Tikrit from ISIS: the Iraqi army or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Shiite militia crowd who are running Iraq amok.
It was in June of 2014, in response to the advances of ISIS in Iraq and the virtual collapse of Iraqi military forces, Iran began to provide direct military aid to the Iraqi government by deploying Quds Force soldiers to stiffen Iraqi positions in Samarra, Baghdad, and Karbala, as well as the former US base, Camp Speicher, in Tikrit. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard also deployed seven Sukhoi, Soviet era, Su-25 Frogfoot jets.
They also began to supply arms and munitions to Peshmerga forces in Kurdistan. In December 2014, Iran allowed foreign media to confirm the presence of Iranian F-4 Phantom jets in Iraq striking IS positions in Diyala province.
US sources later confirmed that the planes were Iranian but that US military forces were not coordinating air strikes with the Iranian military. Although the presence of the F-4 Phantoms was not disclosed till December, these were not the first Iranian planes to be operating in Iraq and it is likely that the F-4s had been operating there for some time.
And now, according to the prime minister in Iraq, the prime minister Haider al-Abadi is leading his own expulsion of ISIS.
The overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government resulted in the emergence of a Shia dominated government in Baghdad replacing it with an Iraqi Shiite government friendly to Tehran. This eliminated what had been an existential threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran and had tipped the local balance of power significantly in Tehran’s favor. And once Iran cleans the ISIS mess in Iraq, we will all rejoice. Iran will be happy, the U.S. will be happy, while all we have done is chase out ISIS while Iran’s Shiite militias can already be seen running amok in Iraq.
The Fars (Pars/Persian) news agency, confirmed that Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Qods Force, is since Saturday in Iraq to lead the fight against ISIS. The Iraqi state is heavily reliant on the Iranians for military assistance.
Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not Iraq cleaning the ISIS mess, but Iran, Suleimani is fiercely loyal to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
While he is viewed as a useful man to have by Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister scrambling to organize a counterattack against the Sunni jihadis of ISIS, but this deal is not free. Even for the Americans, while the U.S. lacks the will to have its ground forces embroiled in another Middle East war or even play the chips correctly in having smaller powers like Egypt and Syria take on ISIS they resorted to Iran.
According to Fars, the Soleimani, that is Iran, submitted to Iraq’s military in order to give instructions to the army and volunteers in the region. Today the Iraqi forces, composed of 27 thousand troops in addition to the volunteer fighters, are nearing the control of the city of Tikrit within days. And now we see Qassem Soleimani working with Qais al-Khazali, the head of a militia called Asaib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous) that is backed by Iran. He is one of the most feared and respected militia leaders in Iraq, and one of Iran’s most important representatives in the country. Alongside Asaib Ahl al-Haq, there are the Badr Brigades, formed in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, and the younger and more secretive Kataib Hezbollah which is an admitted terrorist organization by U.S. State Department. In other words, the United States is in bed wit not only terrorists, but the terrorist regime of Iran.
The three militias have been instrumental in battling ISIS, the rival Sunni sect. These militias are the three small Iraqi Shi’ite armies, all backed by Iran, which together have become the most powerful military force in Iraq since the collapse of the national army in June and are key to Iran’s power and influence inside neighboring Iraq.
That influence is rooted in the two countries’ shared religious beliefs. Iran’s population is overwhelmingly Shi’ite, as are the majority of Iraqis. Tehran has built up its influence in the past decade by giving political backing to the Iraqi government, and weapons and advisers to the militias and the remnants of the Iraqi military, say current and former Iraqi officials.
Iran will soon invade Iraq. The Bible is speaking of today and Persia is on the rise to gulp up Iraq.
Iraq is now more or less an Iranian province as are parts of Syria and Lebanon.
There are those blind who will not see what is in front of them.
A Pax Iranica is not in Israel’s interests.