Once again, Iran has overplayed its hand in Iraq.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force commander was in Baghdad on Wednesday on a special mission. Qassem Soleimani, five Reuters sources say, met with Iran’s top proxy in Iraq, Hadi al-Amiri, and warned him not to abandon Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi. The prime minister is under heavy pressure to resign following weeks of protests over poor services and government corruption. Hundreds have been killed in clashes between protesters and overzealous Iraqi security forces. And Iran bears outsized responsibility for this governing failure.
Amiri, who heads up the Iranian-proxy Fatah parliamentary group, apparently agreed to Soleimani’s demands. This is unsurprising. Amiri is not very smart, but he knows who his boss is. It starts with T and ends with N.
Still, the Iranian hardliners have a problem.
The protests show no signs of dying down, and powerful politicians are now reorienting to support those demanding change. Front and center here is Muqtada al-Sadr. A former Iranian ally, Sadr is a Shiite imam who previously found his support from poor urban Shiites. But today, Sadr has reinvented himself as an Iraqi nationalist. And he has real power: Sadr’s part-Communist Party alliance won the plurality of seats in the May 2018 parliamentary elections. Sadr has thus combined the Shiite urban street with various secular interests in order to form a very unconventional alliance.
And Sadr isn’t happy with Amiri’s deference to Tehran.
Following his refusal to join Sadr in calling for Abdul-Mahdi’s resignation, Sadr warned Amiri that he would “never enter into an alliance with you after today.” That means Iran and Amiri, who controls powerful pro-Iranian militias, have lost a key partner and are now stuck with one of two hard choices. They can reverse course and engage in serious compromise towards reforming Iraqi politics. Or they can double down on violent repression and kill more innocent Iraqis.
America should be clear where we stand: with humility, yes, but also with Iraqis being allowed to set their own destiny.
