As the Iraqis and US have been purging southern Iraq of Shiite Cleric Moqtdata al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army forces more and more evidence on the role Iran has played in training and arming (and possibly leading) the Mahdi has brought the US and Iran to heads like never before. That is because Sadr and his Mahdi Forces openly claim their attacks are on US forces (though they do seem to kill a lot of Iraqis in the process). The fact Iran is fighting a proxy war with American forces has sent the two countries on collision course which only Iran can stop – and it looks like it will not.

Caught in between is the Iraqi government led by many Iraqis who lived in exile from Saddam’s brutal regime inside Iran for years. They are prepared to clear out the Mahdi forces but fear what a US-Iran clash might bring. So after the overwhelming evidence of Iranian support to the insurgents surfaced in their raids on the Mahdi Forces Iraq asked the US for an opportunity to try diplomatic approach to end the crisis. They sent a delegation to Iran to discuss how to stop the pending confrontation one last time. The results are not clear, but it seems the delegation failed.

OK, that is all background from (my perspective) and now here are the news stories that reflect this narrative. We start with the reporting on the purpose of the delegation:

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has met senior Shiite leaders who held talks in Tehran on concerns that Iran is arming and funding militias in Iraq, an Iraqi politician said Sunday.

The elite delegation had been dispatched to Tehran by al-Maliki to convey Iraq’s concerns and discuss US accusations that Iran had a role in recent fighting between Shiite militias and Iraqi and US troops in the southern city of Basra and Baghdad’s sadr City area.

Al-Maliki and the leader of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, were told by members of the delegation that Tehran gave its backing to Iraq’s offensive against militias, a UIA member told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

One of the things that seems to have come out of this is Iran’s support for the crack down on the militia (but only partially). But then again maybe not. In another report Iran also says it opposes excessive forces being used by the government on its people – which is totally laughable given Iran’s own oppressive regime:

Reports from Teheran on Sunday said that Iran had warned Iraq against using excessive force in its crackdown against Shiite militias.

“We support the efforts of the Iraqi government to disarm the armed militia but we advise them not to confront the population,” an official source, who was not named, told the student ISNA news agency in Teheran.

“The official position of the Islamic republic of Iran is to support the legal Iraqi government and we will do everything to assure the security of the country,” added the source.

What this indicates to me is Iran might just be trying to gain some space from the Mahdi and establish some plausible deniability, except so far it has been anything but plausible (except to those in the liberal SurrenderMedia). One of the more head-scratching comments on the return of the Iraqi delegation from Iran is the claim there is no ‘hard evidence’ tying the Iranian weapons, training, etc to the government itself:

Iraq said on Sunday it has no evidence that Iran was supplying militias engaged in fierce street fighting with security forces in Baghdad.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said there was no “hard evidence” of involvement by the neighbouring Shiite government of Iran in backing Shiite militiamen in the embattled country.

Asked about reports that weapons captured from Shiite fighters bore 2008 markings suggesting Iranian involvement, Dabbagh said: “We don’t have that kind of evidence… If there is hard evidence we will defend the country.”

It is well known that there are no copies of orders from the Iranian leaders to the weapons factories to siphon off weapons for the Mahdi or transportation groups to move weapons to the Mahdi within weeks of their production. There is simple deductive logic which says smuggled weapons cannot move from Iran to Iraq that fast without the government participating somehow, even if it is orders to look the other way. So why is an Iraqi official appearing to give Iran some space? It would seem we are at the ‘last chance’ stage before other, non-diplomatic options are employed.

Initially I would have feared this was acquiescence by Iraq, but other statements seem to indicate it is simply an honest effort to give Iran an opportunity to take some action. For example, regardless of Iran’s laughable comments about oppressing the people, Iraq is not shying away from continuing the crackdown on the Mahdi forces:

A top Iraqi official said Sunday that a crackdown on Shiite militants will not stop, despite word that Iran will not restart security talks with the United States until the fighting is halted.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told reporters that the Iraqi government is “seizing every opportunity to establish good relations with Iran” but that it also has a responsibility to «implement the rule of law. “I think that the ongoing military operations in Iraq are an internal Iraqi affair and concern the Iraqi government and the coalition forces in Iraq,” al-Dabbagh said. “No other party, except the Iraqis, has anything to do with this issue”.

The real question is whether the Iranian Qud Forces, part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard implicated as the driving element in the proxy war, will pull back and stop supporting the Mahdi Army. It seems the Iraqi delegation met with their commanding officer Gen. Ghassem Soleimani (who we posted on previously) and the results weren’t very positive:

One of the meetings was with Gen. Ghassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps that has been accused of training and funneling weapons to Shiite extremists in Iraq.

The Iraqi delegation was said to have had documents and other material implicating the Quds Force in supplying weapons and training fighters.

U.S. military officials have said the evidence includes caches of weapons that have date stamps showing they were produced in Iran this year _ including mortars, rockets and armor-piercing roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces are in the midst of a crackdown on the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is believed to be living in Iran.

According to officials familiar with the meeting, the delegation received a frosty reception from Soleimani, who questioned the origin of the documents.

 

 

How much control does Iran have over the Quds Force (image above is the Quds Force Emblem)? The fact the general simply dismissed the evidence is not a good sign. What I suspect happened is there was some promise for action which pushed the Iraqis to give a little on the media front. But there seems to be little optimism since they are not giving on the destruction of the Mahdi Army. In fact Iraqi and US forces decided to take out a Special Groups (a.k.a. Iranian Trained Mahdi) Command Center that had viscously been set up near a hospital in the hope the hospital could shelter their command center. Instead of backing off the US and Iraqi forces took it out, even though the SurrenderMedia would hype the attack ‘near a hospital’ instead of the international war crime of establishing military commands near such establishments:

The US military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum yesterday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

…

The strike in Sadr City, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant command-control center, the US military said. The center was in the heart of the 8-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, none of them patients in the hospital.

The military blamed the militants for using Iraqi civilians as human shields. “This is a circumstance where these criminal groups are operating directly out of civilian neighborhoods,” said Specialist Megan Burmeister, a military spokeswoman.

She said it presents a “complex and very difficult” challenge for US forces to strike the militants when they are “putting themselves next to municipal buildings.”

Note that these are comments by the US military, not statements of fact captured by the reporting. But these are facts – it is a war crime to house military units next hospitals, let alone inside civilian enclaves like Sadr City. For a group obsessed with finding US war crimes one wonders how they miss the obvious crimes of our enemies. Bill Roggio has much more on this and how the US had intelligence on this command center:

“There were six GMLRS [Guided Multiple-Launch Rocket System] rocket strikes on these Special Groups criminal command and control nodes,” Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover, the chief Public Affairs Officer for Multinational Division Baghdad, told The Long War Journal while refuting claims that the US used aircraft to attack. “We conducted a precision strike, hopefully got a few leaders, and sent a very strong message.”

The Special Groups have been using the location near the hospital for an extended period of time and US intelligence has followed the activities at this site. “We had been tracking it for some time,” Stover said. “Operations made the call to hit it. There may have been damages to the hospital – broken glass. There was likely ambulances damaged; however, it was the Special Groups criminal leadership that purposely put their command and control node there.”

One thing that has not materialized is popular support for the Mahdi. In fact most indicators show falling support for the Mahdi, which is no wonder given their use of unarmed Iraqis as human shields in a cowardly and losing fight with the Iraqi government:

Rusafa is a large district in central Baghdad bordered by the Tigris River to the southwest and Sadr City to the northeast. The district is predominantly Shia, but contains significant Sunni enclaves and a small Christian population, with a surprising number of openly practicing churches, according to Colonel Craig Collier, the commander of the 3rd Squadron, 89th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division. The 450 soldiers of the 3-89 Cav are responsible for the district’s security, in conjunction with thousands of Iraqi Army, Iraqi National Police, Iraqi Police, Kurdish private contractors, and Sons of Iraq (neighborhood watch).

Rusafa contains Baghdad’s largest and most famous markets, including the Shorja, Saria, and Bab al Sharji, some of which were the scenes of high-profile suicide bombings during the sectarian-fueled carnage of 2006-2007. Over the past year, and especially over the past six months, the district has calmed significantly. The predominant remaining threats are Mahdi Army mortar rounds aimed at the International Zone that fall short and suicide vest bombers and car bombs that target the markets and Coalition forces. Less successful suicide attacks occur maybe once a month, while once common highly successful “spectacular attacks” have become much less frequent.

…

But Thornburg attributes most of the improvement in his area in southern Rusafa to the Sons of Iraq, the local neighborhood watchmen who are paid by the US. ….

“The SOI have exceeded expectations. They’ve turned one of the most violent areas of Baghdad into one of the most quiet,” said Thornburg. “Specifically, they are looking for Mahdi Army. They know who comes into their area, they man checkpoints 24 hours a day, they do vehicle searches, they question people and they patrol. The locals trust them and they are happy with them. They’ve earned a lot of wasta [respect] from the citizens, and the results speak for themselves. It’s a real success story.”

…

Above all, Hassan and his neighborhood watchmen do not like the Mahdi Army.

“Originally, the Jaish al Mahdi [Mahdi Army] in our area used to deceive people by using the name of the religion to do their purposes,” said Dhia, Hassan’s executive officer. “They were all corrupted. They have history in crime, robberies, murders, rapes, and all kinds of bad things. They even reached the level of kidnapping people and demanding ransoms just because they have money. It didn’t matter if he is Shia or Sunni; just because he has money. They gave a bad reputation for Islam.”

American officials assert that the final factor that has improved security is the citizenry’s fatigue with violence and the militias.

“They’re still intimidated by [the Mahdi Army], but they’re tired of them,” said Thornburg.

The romantic view of Jihad against the Great Satan America has morphed into an ugly reality – the Islamo Fascists of the Mahdi and al-Qaeda rely on violent criminals to do their bidding. Men who have committed abhorrent sins are employed by these ‘religious leaders’ to inflict more abhorrent sins on the people of Iraq. Without popular support, the Mahdi will go the way of al-Qaeda in Iraq, becoming the enemy of Iraqi Muslims.

So we have a stand off brewing between Iraq and the Mahdi thugs where the Mahdi thugs are losing day by day. And we have a stand off between the Mahdi masters in Iran and the US who is not going to allow Iran to use the Mahdi to kill Americans. Both Iraq and the US Forces benefit from the final destruction of the Mahdi and the Iranian puppet masters (who may be in slums of Sadr City – which seems to be the last place on Earth one would fight to the death for). As indicated in all these stories there is not a clear and publicly noted solution coming. There seems to have been some markers laid down to Iran which must be met, or else the US will take action. Iraq knows this, which is why the gave Iran one last chance to change its collision course with America.

And that collision course has been publicly confirmed – making it a challenge Iran better not ignore:

THE US military is drawing up plans for a “surgical strike” against an insurgent training camp inside Iran if Republican Guards continue with attempts to destabilise Iraq, Western intelligence sources said last week.

One source said the Americans were growing increasingly angry at the involvement of theguards’ special operations Quds force inside Iraq, training Shia militias and smuggling weapons into the country.

Despite a belligerent stance by US Vice-President Dick Cheney, the administration has put plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on the backburner since Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Defence Secretary in 2006, the sources said.

However, US commanders are increasingly concerned by Iranian interference in Iraq and are determined that recent successes by joint Iraqi and US forces in the southern port city of Basra should not be reversed by the Quds force.

“If the situation in Basra goes back to what it was like before, America is likely to blame Iran and carry out a surgical strike on a militant training camp across the border in Khuzestan,” said the source, referring to a frontier province.

They acknowledged Iran was unlikely to cease involvement in Iraq and that, however limited a US attack might be, the fighting could escalate.

Although US defence chiefs are firmly opposed to any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, they believe a raid on one of the camps training Shia militiamen would deliver a powerful message to Tehran.

Actually, an attack on the Iranian sites supporting the Mahdi forces would do two things. It would send a clear signal to Tehran that we will use our military forces to end these dangerous games they are playing as well as put a huge dent in the support infrastructure behind the Mahdi thugs. People are dying and it is time to put an end to Tehran’s meddling. Iran needs a wake up call that clearly demonstrates to it why they do not want a full up confrontation with America. Everyone who once thought they could go toe-to-toe with us and force us to retreat have been proven spectacularly wrong. Seems in the ME the only education that sticks is the one that is up close and personal.