Last week pictures of Qassem Suleimani started to circulate on social media, which is always a pretty sure sign that an Iranian military campaign is about to kick off somewhere in the Middle East. And indeed not long after, Iranian-backed Shiite militias, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units, and the Iranian Basij militia targeted Fallujah, the Sunni-majority Iraqi town under Islamic State control. If Suleimani, the IRGC commander, is able to vanquish ISIS forces, as he did in the Tikrit campaign, it will be largely thanks to U.S. air support. While no one was looking, the Obama administration bundled American and Iranian interests together.

The White House says it is fighting ISIS, but its Iranian and Iranian-backed partners say the war is about killing Sunnis. “There are no patriots, no real religious people in Fallujah,” said the leader of one Iranian-backed Shiite militia. “It’s our chance to clear Iraq by eradicating the cancer of Fallujah.” That doesn’t sound like the kind of ally the United States should be embracing. That sounds like the United States taking sides in a sectarian war, against the Sunni Arab regional majority.