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Second Front Opens in the Sunni-Shia War: Jonathan Spyer, PJ Media,,June 15, 2013— The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) organization swept into the city of Mosul in western Iraq last week.
ISIS: Iran’s Instrument for Regional Hegemony?: Pinhas Inbari, JCPA, June 19, 2014— The battle currently being waged over the city of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria reveals a great deal about the political orientation of the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (or ISIS), that recently captured Mosul and large stretches of Iraqi territory hundreds of kilometers away to the south.
As I See It: With Iran, My Enemy’s Enemy is Still My Enemy: Melanie Phillips, Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2014— Rub your eyes. One minute Iran is a principal enemy of civilization – sponsoring terror around the world, arming the Assad regime’s mass slaughter in Syria, developing nuclear weapons to further its war against the West and its declared aim of exterminating Israel.
Inspections: The Weak Link in a Nuclear Agreement with Iran: Dore Gold, JCPA, June 11, 2014— One striking feature appearing in the leading commentaries on the Comprehensive Agreement being negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 is the stress they are placing on the role of inspections in assuring the international community that Tehran will not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons.
The West and Iran – A Muddle and a Mistake: Neville Teller, Jerusalem Post, June 21, 2014
Turmoil in Iraq Spells Trouble for Oil Markets: Gal Luft & Robert McFarlane, Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2014
Spinning the West: Doug Lamborn, Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2014
Iran and the Arab World: Elliott Abrams, Israel Hayom, June 1, 2014
SECOND FRONT OPENS IN THE SUNNI-SHIA WAR Jonathan Spyer
Middle East Forum, June 15, 2014
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) organization swept into the city of Mosul in western Iraq last week. No one has any right to be surprised. ISIL has held a large swath of western Iraq since January – including the city of Fallujah. The organization was clearly planning a larger scale offensive action into Iraq. In January it had carried out a strategic withdrawal from large swaths of Idleb and Aleppo provinces in Syria. This was intended to consolidate its lines in northern Syria, so as to move fighters out toward Iraq. ISIL controls a contiguous bloc of territory stretching from western Iraq up through eastern and northern Syria to the Turkish border.
Its “Islamic State” is already an existing, if precarious fact, no longer a mere aspiration. So, like a state at war, it moves its forces to the front where they are most needed. The rapid collapse of Nouri al-Maliki’s garrison in Mosul in the face of the ISIL assault should also come as no surprise. These forces are hollow. Saddam Hussein maintained a huge army by coercion. Shirkers and deserters could expect to be executed. But Maliki’s army consists of poorly paid conscripts and often corrupt officers. The Shia among them in Mosul saw no reason to fight and die for what seemed to them to be Sunni, alien territory. Sunni officers among the garrison, meanwhile, may well have been working with ISIL itself or with one of the other Sunni Islamist or nationalist formations fighting alongside them.
So what will happen now? The pattern of developing events is already clear, and much may be learned from the experience of Syria. Bashar Assad, when rebellion broke out against him in March 2011, sought to use his huge conscript army to crush it. But the Syrian dictator rapidly found out that his supposedly 295,000-strong army was largely a fiction. Sunni conscripts refused to engage against the rebels, and Bashar was able to make use only of certain units composed largely of members of his own Alawi sect — units such as the Republican Guard and the 4th Armored Division.
How did Assad address this problem? The answer is that he didn’t — Iran did. Realizing that their Syrian ally was facing defeat because of an absence of reliable manpower, the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps stepped in to effectively create a new, sectarian military for the Assads. In addition, Iran introduced its various regional paramilitary proxies into the Syrian battlefield. By mid-2013, the new, sectarian infantry force trained by the Quds Force and Hizballah – named the National Defense Force – was beginning to be deployed against the Syrian rebellion. In addition, Hizballah, and Iraqi Shia volunteers of Sadrist and other loyalties began to fill the gaps in manpower for Assad. These units turned the tide of the Syrian war. But they have brought Assad survival, not victory. The dictator rules over only about 40% of the territory of what was once Syria. The rest is under the control of ISIL, the Kurds, and the Sunni Arab rebels. It is likely that a similar pattern will now emerge in Iraq. Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani has been in Baghdad since Friday. He is in the process of organizing Iraqi Shia volunteers, who in the months to come are likely to be transformed into a sectarian military force resembling the Syrian National Defense Force.
ISIS: IRAN’S INSTRUMENT FOR REGIONAL HEGEMONY?
Pinhas Inbari
JCPA, June 19, 2014
The battle currently being waged over the city of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria reveals a great deal about the political orientation of the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (or ISIS), that recently captured Mosul and large stretches of Iraqi territory hundreds of kilometers away to the south. The siege of Deir ez-Zor has been maintained by the army of Bashar al-Assad in the south and by ISIS to the north and east. Among the forces that have been trapped in the middle are the Free Syrian Army (FSA), raising the question of whether ISIS was colluding with the Syrian government and its Iranian allies to defeat the more mainstream elements of the Syrian opposition. It must be recalled that since the outbreak of the uprising in Syria, and the widespread deployment of Iranian security services there, Iran’s intelligence networks are fully aware of the Syrian military’s activities. Today, given the extraordinary dependence of the Syrian state on Iran, it is difficult to imagine that Tehran is not fully updated on the security policies the Assad regime pursues.
The ISIS connection with the Syrian leadership, and hence with Iran, raises serious questions. It was recently noted that President Assad released ISIS operatives from his prisons and for the most part left it alone, sparing it from attacks by the Syrian army. A New York Times reporter recently wrote on her Twitter account that according to a Syrian government advisor, ISIS was not a priority for Assad’s regime. Two leading American analysts just wrote in the Washington Post, “The non-jihadist Syrian opposition insists that ISIS is a creation of Iran.”
The more time passes, the more this notion of a link between ISIS, Syrian and even Iranian intelligence has become fixed in the minds of leading Arab analysts as well. For example, Abdul Rahman al-Rashid, a Saudi commentator for Asharq Al-Awsat and also director of the influential TV channel Al Arabiya, wrote: “ISIS is a creation of Iranian and Syrian intelligence…. Most [of its members] are in the dark [and do not know] they are being manipulated, and some of the al-Qaeda leaders are still living in Iran. Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the online daily Al-Rai Al-Youm, also saw ISIS’ advance as an Iranian success, and for similar reasons, claiming it would enable Iran and the United States to coordinate their moves in Iraq and possibly in Syria as well.
The US Department of the Treasury released a statement designating the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) as a supporter of international terrorist organizations. The US document, published on February 16, 2012, specifically stated that the Sunni “al-Qaeda in Iraq” was provided with money and weapons by the Iranian ministry. Within 14 months al-Qaeda in Iraq would be renamed ISIS (see below). Thus, the notion that Shiite Iran would help Sunni jihadists was not farfetched, even if it seemed to defy the conventional wisdom in Western capitals.
ISIS was established on April 8, 2013, when its subsidiary organization, Jabhat al Nusra, merged with the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), which itself was a successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq. The organization’s leader is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who regards himself as the heir to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and as no less fierce. Immediately after al-Baghdadi’s release from an American prison in 2006, not long before Zarqawi was assassinated, they met, and in the wake of the killing al-Baghdadi was crowned the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and dubbed it “the al-Qaeda Organization of Mesopotamia.” After the revolt against President Bashar Assad erupted in Syria, the organization emerged in Syria under the new name of ISIS. There it quickly clashed with its former al-Qaeda branch, already active in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra or the al-Nusra Front headed by Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani. The head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, subsequently decided to eject ISIS from the al-Qaeda network, even though ideologically they remained virtually identical groups.
What enabled ISIS’ rapid success in Iraq was the alliance it forged with powerful forces there that previously were reluctant to cooperate with a Salafi organization. These include the Bedouin tribes in the Sunni areas, the Sahwa tribes that previously had cooperated with the Americans, remnants of Saddam Hussein’s old army headed by his deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, and the armed Sufi order, the Naqshbandis, who also are led by al-Douri. The clash between ISIS and al-Nusra sparked accusations that the former was nothing but a means for the Syrian Mukhabarat (Military Intelligence Directorate), along with the Iranians, to plant agents of the Assad regime and of Iran within the Syrian opposition, thereby spreading confusion in its ranks and diverting it from the fight against Assad into internecine struggle. Immediately after ISIS emerged in the Syrian theater, sources in the Syrian opposition told this author: “We are familiar with the commanders of ISIS. Once they belonged to Assad’s intelligence, and now they are operating on his behalf under the name of ISIS.”
The daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that “Emir Raqqah” (the emir of ar-Raqqah, a city in north central Syria), also known as Abu Lukman, had been imprisoned in Syria but was released by the Syrian regime immediately after the outbreak of the Syrian revolt. The release of jihadi prisoners became a pattern. In the days of President George W. Bush, Syria would send al-Qaeda operatives to Iraq to attack US forces. Subsequently relations cooled and Syria incarcerated these fighters. But after the revolt began, Syrian intelligence again took an interest in them, and freed them – in full coordination with Iran – so that they could infiltrate the ranks of the Salafis now fighting in Syria. Once free, they broke into Iraqi prisons to liberate their comrades, thereby creating the basis for expanding ISIS. Seemingly, the Sunni successes against the Shiites in Iraq would evoke words of encouragement and support from Saudi elements who view Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, as one of their country’s chief enemies. That is not, however, what happened. It was indeed strange to find the Saudi commentator Abdul Rahman al-Rashid asserting that it was in fact Iran that was benefiting from the exploits of ISIS! He explained that Iran and the United States are now allies, and Iran, should it so desire, now has an opportunity to invade Iraq. Rashid, however, did not see Iran as intending to do so…
[To Read the Full Article, With Footnotes, Click the Following Link—Ed.]
AS I SEE IT: WITH IRAN, MY ENEMY’S ENEMY IS STILL MY ENEMY
Melanie Phillips
Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2014
Rub your eyes. One minute Iran is a principal enemy of civilization – sponsoring terror around the world, arming the Assad regime’s mass slaughter in Syria, developing nuclear weapons to further its war against the West and its declared aim of exterminating Israel. The next minute it has become America’s ally and the West’s new best friend. The US says it is “open to engaging the Iranians” over the crisis in Iraq. The reason for the volte-face is that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a savage terrorist army previously known as al-Qaida in Iraq, has routed the Iraqi army and now controls territory from the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria to Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq, even threatening Baghdad. The prospect of such a well-equipped and financed fanatical force controlling a swathe of Iraq is an unconscionable threat to the West. It puts oil supplies in jeopardy, creates an enormous territorial infrastructure for holy war and will serve as Indoctrination Central for even more Muslim youths pouring in from the UK and Europe to be trained and sent back to their host countries to perpetrate terrorist atrocities.
Notwithstanding this catastrophe, the US has no intention of getting sucked back into Iraq. Enter Iran, which has offered its ally, Iraq’s Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the use of its army, its spies and its fearsome Revolutionary Guards to deal with the ISIS Sunni insurgency. There are many Western voices saying that, despite Iran’s record, the West should ally with it in dealing with their common enemy in ISIS and stabilizing Iraq. But any cozying up to Iran would be astonishingly short-sighted. For sometimes my enemy’s enemy is also my enemy. And Iran remains the West’s deadly enemy.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has been in a state of self-declared war against the West. The State Department considers it to be the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It supports Hamas and Hezbollah, and has been behind countless murderous attacks against US, Jewish and other Western interests. The idea that Iran has an interest in stabilizing Iraq is the opposite of the truth. Iran has every interest in destabilizing Iraq. Since the fall of Saddam, it has been doing precisely that. After years of supporting Shia militias fomenting sectarian strife in Iraq and blowing up US and coalition soldiers there with its roadside bombs, Iran signed a deal last February to sell Iraq arms and ammunition worth $195 million, in violation of international arms trade laws. The aim was to continue to support the Shia militias in terrorist violence against the Sunni minority.
If Iran now embeds itself in Iraq, the country will be permanently destabilized. Saudi-backed Sunni militias will fight back, with the risk of dividing Iraq into two armed camps, Shia and Sunni. These would not only fight each other, but would create two separate Iraqi terrorist bases for jihadi attacks against the West. At the same time, if the West allies with Iran it will also be helping keep its murderous puppet Assad in power in Syria. And if the US really is desperate to use Iran as its proxy against ISIS, that will undermine what remains of the West’s bargaining power in the negotiations to destroy Iran’s capacity to make nuclear weapons. Such an unholy alliance could therefore end up handing Iran a double victory on a plate. Indeed, it’s almost as if it is behind the whole thing.
Although this must be purely speculative, it is not entirely fanciful. For in the Arab and Muslim world, forces can simultaneously be allies and enemies. Although ISIS is a Sunni force and is supposedly at war with the Assad regime in Syria, there is evidence to suggest that both Iran and its Syrian puppet regime may have cooperated with it. In 2012, the US Treasury Department identified Iran as supporting the ISIS precursor, al-Qaida in Iraq. And ISIS is thought to have done oil deals with the Assad regime itself, which some analysts speculate may have wanted to boost jihadi fighters in order to discredit the opposition in Western eyes. It is possible, therefore, that having used ISIS for its own devious ends Iran now finds its activities have got out of hand. Even if Iran had nothing to do with ISIS, however, any Western overtures to the clerical regime would be a serious error.
This week, the Iranian leadership suggested the price of its “help” in “stabilizing” Iraq would be a deal over its nuclear program. State Department denials that these two issues would be in any way linked lack a certain credibility. This is because, since the start of the Geneva negotiations, it has appeared that the US and the rest are determined to do a deal with Iran, even if this is a rotten deal that won’t prevent it from reaching nuclear breakout capacity. Indeed, it is not too cynical to suspect that the Obama administration may be eyeing the Iraq crisis as potential diplomatic cover for a nuclear sell-out to Iran for which it always intended to settle. Moreover, by his own admission Obama aims to achieve a strategic realignment in which Iran is transformed from the enemy of the West into its ally, stabilizing the region by creating a supposed equilibrium of power against Iran’s Sunni enemy, Saudi Arabia. This is a strategic error of the first magnitude…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
INSPECTIONS: THE WEAK LINK IN A
Dore Gold
JCPA, June 11, 2014
One striking feature appearing in the leading commentaries on the Comprehensive Agreement being negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 is the stress they are placing on the role of inspections in assuring the international community that Tehran will not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons. True, all these analyses are agreed that a comprehensive agreement should make more difficult an Iranian “nuclear breakout,” by which Tehran covertly enriches the requisite quantity of uranium for its first atomic weapon. But rather than cut deeply into Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium or drastically limit the number and speed of its gas centrifuge machines, these proposals also suggest that an unusually robust inspection system can play a significant role in assuring that Tehran will have a difficult time breaking out of any of future agreement.
Underlying these proposals is an appreciation by the authors that a strategy stressing inspections may have a better chance of being accepted by the Iranian leadership, facilitating the achievement of a diplomatic breakthrough. As a May 2014 report of the International Crisis Group noted: “In principle, Iran appears much more willing to accept additional transparency measures than to restrict the evolution of its nuclear program.” Joe Cirincione, of the Washington-based Ploughshares Fund, aptly commented this year as well that Iranian officials have long held that “transparency – rather than reduction of capabilities – is the key to assuring the world that its program is peaceful.” The Iranians fed these assumptions with generalized statements like the one recently made by President Hassan Rouhani this May: “What we can offer the world is greater transparency.” But he carefully did not enter into specifics about what kind of transparency he had in mind.
Nonetheless, experts across the political spectrum seeking possible avenues for some diplomatic progress have speculated and in some cases asserted that inspections and verification should play a larger role in the present day U.S. talks with Iran. Thus, Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in The New York Times on May 6, 2014, that while Washington appeared to be focused on limiting the number and type of centrifuges that Iran would be allowed to use, the Obama administration should concentrate more on reaching an agreement that would allow the West to conduct intrusive inspections in Iran that would grant “unfettered” access to its nuclear sites.
Some of the most important analysis of the current negotiations with Iran suggests that the West is already focused on the special role of inspections in making any diplomatic initiative work. In March 2014, Robert Einhorn, who served as the State Department’s arms control expert during President Obama’s first term in office, published a 50-page paper for Brookings outlining the requirements for a comprehensive nuclear agreement. Einhorn wrote about the need to create “a robust and specially devised monitoring system.” Given Einhorn’s ties with the administration, his Brookings paper was seen in many quarters as a “trial balloon” for U.S. negotiators engaging in the current talks with Iran.
The Einhorn paper led the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Major General (res.) Amos Yadlin, to conclude: “The United States appears to be formulating its position on the final agreement, focusing on demands for an unprecedented, tight inspection mechanism for the Iranian nuclear program and an attempt to persuade the Iranian leadership that any violation of the agreement will lead to tough punitive measures (emphasis added).” If the uranium component of the comprehensive agreement is thought of as a three-legged table, with a leg for stockpile reduction, another leg for centrifuge quantities, and a third leg involving intrusive inspections, then it appears that the West is hoping that most of the weight of the table will rely on the leg of inspections. The present discourse raises a fundamental question about the advisability of erecting a comprehensive agreement with Iran that is so highly dependent upon the efficacy of its inspection system and the willingness of Iran to agree to what some analysts call unprecedented levels of transparency. As John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN wrote in December 2013, verification is not a panacea for every problem that will arise in an arms control negotiation: “it cannot convert a bad deal into a good deal.”
Authoritative Iranian commentary also raises some questions over whether Tehran is actually ready to accept unprecedented inspections of its facilities. For example, Ali Asghar Soltanyieh, the former Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), attacked Pollack’s New York Times op-ed and its proposal for robust inspections as a “full contravention” of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Statute of the IAEA. In an article entitled “How Intrusive Can IAEA Inspections Be?” he accused Pollack of adopting a doctrine of “anywhere, anytime” inspections that was used in the case of Iraq after 1991 and wrongly applying it to Iran. Soltanyieh’s legal critique of Pollack clearly seeks to defend Iranian interests, but it also raises the question of whether a robust inspection system, beyond what exists today, will be as easy to obtain through negotiations as some analysts hope. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has introduced other considerations into the formation of Iranian positions that have nothing to do with legal obligations or international security.9 Thus, in an interview with The New Yorker, he asserted that “Nuclear talks are not about nuclear capability; he then added: “they are about Iranian integrity and dignity.”…
It must always be remembered that Iran is not a status quo power. Its constitution calls for the export of the Islamic Revolution. In 1991, its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was quoted in the Iranian daily Ressalat asking whether Iran seeks hefez (preservation) or bast (expansion), and he answered that it seeks the latter. It views itself increasingly as a hegemonial force in the Middle East. Iran has actively intervened in insurgencies and supplied weapons across the region: in Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, Sudan, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Its forces are on the ground and engaged in fighting in the Syrian civil war. Advanced Iranian weapons are provided to the Syrian army. Nuclear weapons would significantly bolster its regional standing in the Middle East and serve its aspirations to become a great power…
[To Read the Full Article, With Footnotes, Click the Following Link—Ed.]
The West and Iran – A Muddle and a Mistake: Neville Teller, Jerusalem Post, June 21, 2014
Turmoil in Iraq Spells Trouble for Oil Markets: Gal Luft & Robert McFarlane, Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2014
Spinning the West: Doug Lamborn, Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2014
Iran and the Arab World: Elliott Abrams, Israel Hayom, June 1, 2014
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