The Conflict with the Shia Comes Into Sharper Focus: Yemen and Iraq

The problem for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms is that their Wahhabite proxies, Islamic State and Al Qaeda, don't have an air force. Thus, when confronted by a seasoned, motivated fighting force like the Houthis in Yemen who have been rolling through the country at will mopping up any forces remaining loyal to the pro-Saudi president Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council can't rely on their usual weapon of choice, Salafi terror.

Hence, we have today's headline, "Saudi Jets Strike Yemen in Bid to Halt Houthis," by David Kirkpatrick. The Yemeni air force is reported to have been destroyed and the Saudis have massed 150,000 troops on their border with Yemen. The United States, while denying that it is flying sorties, is providing public relations flak and is coordinating the air campaign. Here is the roll call of nations attacking Yemen:

The United States and most of the Arab nations moved quickly to support the Saudi-led operation in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia has called Operation Decisive Storm. 

The White House said in a statement that the United States would provide “logistical and intelligence support” to the Saudi-led military operations. “While U.S. forces are not taking direct military action in Yemen in support of this effort, we are establishing a joint planning cell with Saudi Arabia to coordinate U.S. military and intelligence support,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in a statement.

“The United States strongly condemns ongoing military actions taken by the Houthis against the elected government of Yemen,” she said.

“We strongly urge the Houthis to halt immediately their destabilizing military actions and return to negotiations as part of the political dialogue,” she said, adding, “The violent takeover of Yemen by an armed faction is unacceptable and a legitimate political transition – long sought by the Yemeni people – can be accomplished only through political negotiations and a consensus agreement among all of the parties.”

Four other Persian Gulf monarchies, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, joined the Saudi operation, as well as the allied Arab kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco.

Egyptian state news media reported that Cairo was also providing undefined political and military support. The Egyptian government was consulting with Saudi Arabia about the possibility of providing forces in the naval or air support or ground troops as well, the state news media reported.

Of the Persian Gulf states, only Oman declined to participate. Two other less expected nations outside the immediate region — Pakistan and Sudan — took part as well, according to the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya network.

Al Arabiya reported that in addition to 100 fighter jets, Saudi Arabia had deployed 150,000 soldiers and other naval units. But the operation has so far consisted only of an aerial campaign.

I must admit I am bit surprised that the Saudis are taking such an above-board role in the conflict; it is not the Kingdom's style. Yemen is no Bahrain. The Saudis as well as the Egyptians have been bloodied there in the past. But one thing we have come to expect from the House of Saud is that they categorically accept no victory for the Shia. One commentator on The New York Times web site sagely noted that the Saudis were not roused to similar martial action when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula controlled large swaths of territory in Yemen. Ah, yes, but the Houthis are Zaydi, a Shiite sect.

This is not going to end well. The Houthis cannot be easily broken. The one potential positive is that war will come home to al Saud. The Houthis will be able to inflict damage on Saudi ground troops if they are ever committed to Yemen.

Part of the problem in the world today is that war doesn't come home to centers of aggression like Washington D.C. and Riyadh. Thus the war planners can plot away free of charge implementing their schemes of slaughter and destruction. This has to change.

Before signing off this morning I recommend you take the time to read Rod Nordland and Peter Baker's frontpager, "Opening New Iraq Front, U.S. Strikes ISIS in Tikrit." After doing so, it is impossible to deny that the "war" against Islamic State is merely a foil for the larger U.S.-GCC-Israeli conflict with Iran.

Obama yesterday apparently decided to grant a request for airstrikes made last week by Iraqi prime minister Abadi. The issue is that about 1,000 Islamic State fighters have holed up in parts of Tikrit preventing the 30,000 Iraqi troops (most of whom are Shiite militia) from exercising complete control of the city.

One wonders if Obama's decision to get U.S. air power off the sidelines was linked to assistance of the Saudi-led assault on Yemen. The discussion being, "If you let me help Abadi take Tikrit, I'll run the air traffic for your bombing runs on the Houthis."

In any event, there were conditions exacted from Abadi to get the airstrikes on the jihadis in Tikrit:

Mr. Abadi asked the ambassador Stuart E. Jones and Brett McGurk, the deputy special envoy for the battle with the Islamic State, for American help with the Tikrit offensive last week. The American side insisted that it could help only if operations were coordinated by a joint center with the American military in Baghdad and if there were clear targets.

The Americans wanted to work with Iraqi forces they had helped train and insisted on “deconflicting” with the Iranian-backed militias so they would not bomb them by mistake, American officials said. The Shiite militias have generally been on the east side of the Tigris River, the officials said, so it should be possible to avoid any errors.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke with Mr. Abadi by telephone, and Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of Central Command, developed a plan for strikes and concluded that the Iraqis had met the Americans’ condition, the officials said. Although Mr. Obama does not personally sign off on most airstrikes in the fight with the Islamic State, he was brought this decision for approval because it represented a more complicated shift in policy. [A more complicated shift in policy, to attack ISIS?]

American officials seemed heartened that Mr. Abadi had made a point of calling the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey last weekend to reassure them that once the Islamic State is rooted out of Tikrit, the Sunni city would be returned to the control of its Sunni police, not dominated by Shiite forces.

There you have it. Abadi, in order to get the air strikes, had to kowtow to Islamic State's sponsors to guarantee Sunni control of Tikrit post-ISIS.

The Abadi supplication is being spun as a U.S. victory, that Abadi clearly chose the United States over Iran, sending Iranian Quds Force chief Qassim Suleimani packing back to Tehran:

Mr. Obama approved the airstrikes after a request from Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on the condition that Iranian-backed Shiite militias move aside to allow a larger role for Iraqi government counterterrorism forces that have worked most closely with United States troops, American officials said. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who has been advising forces around Tikrit, was reported on Sunday to have left the area.

The United States has struggled to maintain influence in Iraq, even as Iran has helped direct the war on the ground against the Islamic State. But as the struggles to take Tikrit mounted, with a small band of Islamic State militants holding out against a combined Iraqi force of more than 30,000 for weeks, American officials saw a chance not only to turn the momentum against the Islamic State but to gain an edge against the Iranians.

If the Americans did not engage, they feared becoming marginalized by Tehran in a country where they had spilled much blood in the last decade, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

American officials now hope that an American-assisted victory by Mr. Abadi and his forces will politically bolster him and counter the view of Iranian officials, and many Iraqi Shiites, that Iran is Iraq’s vital ally. “Taking back Tikrit is important, but it gives us an opportunity to have our half of the operation win this one,” one American official said. “It’s somewhat of a gamble.”

The administration also hopes that a Tikrit victory with American air power will ensure that it is their coalition with Mr. Abadi’s forces, and not the faction led by Mr. Suleimani, that then proceeds to try to recapture the larger and more pivotal city of Mosul.

Islamic State is not the chief concern. There it is for all to see right there on the Gray Lady's front page -- a direct quote from an "America official." (Brett McGurk?) With this present war against Islamic State, and the last several years since the Arab Spring, we are seeing what will be a decades-long struggle -- a world war -- against the Shia. It will remake the West and likely destroy whatever vestiges of formal democracy remain there.

Islamic State's Funding and the Battle for Mosul

Iraq launched a military operation on Monday to rout Islamic State from Tikrit (Omar al-Jawoshy and Tim Arango, "Iraqi Offensive to Retake Tikrit From ISIS Begins"), and today The New York Times features a timely unsigned editorial, "To Hurt ISIS, Squeeze the Cash Flow." The editorial is a gloss of a recent Financial Action Task Force (FATF) report, "Financing of the Terrorist Organisation Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)." FATF is an international organization set up by the G-7 to monitor and deal with money laundering. The Gulf Cooperation Council is a member.

The report, after a quick scan, seems to be extremely light on the historic funding streams of ISIS; it assumes an ISIS post-June of 2014 and its capture of Mosul -- in other words, after al-Baghdadi declared ISIS to be the Islamic State -- as the steady state. This is fundamentally misleading. How did ISIS grow so quickly after it took Fallujah in January 2014 that it could effortlessly capture Mosul, one of Iraq's largest cities, five months later? The oil revenue and looting of banks that followed the fall of Mosul became an explanation -- I am not kidding you -- for how ISIS funded its far flung potent military campaigns. To my mind, the early non-interference of the Kurds as they moved to take Kirkuk and the melting away of Iraqi Army commanding officers in Mosul indicated high-level coordination.

Now there appears to be a shift underway. Iraq's prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, originally pegged to succeed Nuri al-Maliki because of Abadi's pro-Western, more-Sunni-inclusive sensibilities, is ready to lead the assault on Islamic State. The campaign to recapture Mosul, when it was first announced, was to take place during Christmas of this year. Now that has been moved up to this spring. This is causing some consternation in the U.S. According to al-Jawoshy and Arango,

In a speech Monday to Parliament, Mr. Abadi echoed the words of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, saying that the residents of Tikrit were either with Iraq or with the Islamic State.

“There is no neutrality in the battle against ISIS,” Mr. Abadi said. “If someone is being neutral with ISIS, then he is one of them.”

From a military perspective, capturing Tikrit is seen as an important precursor to an operation to retake Mosul, which lies farther north. Success in Tikrit could push up the timetable for a Mosul campaign, while failure would most likely mean more delays.

The American military, though, appears divided on the question of when the Iraqi military — which collapsed last summer in the face of the Islamic State onslaught — would be ready for a wide-scale offensive on Mosul, or in Anbar Province in the west of the country, which is also in the militants’ hands. Some American officials have backed off earlier estimates that it could happen as early as April.

Even a victory in Tikrit could be costly, given the prominent role of Shiite militias, which are feared by the Sunni population. And reports that the militias have carried out sectarian abuses in some areas have complicated efforts to persuade Sunnis to work with the government.

The United States, in returning to a military role in Iraq, has pushed for reconciliation between Iraq’s Shiite-led government and the country’s Sunni minority, but there has been little apparent progress. The United States has also insisted that Iraq establish Sunni fighting units to retake and hold Sunni areas, and it warned against using Shiite forces to invade those areas.

Yet it has been almost exclusively Shiite fighters that have protected Baghdad since the Islamic State offensive last summer, and it has been Iranian-directed militias that have secured some of the most significant gains on the battlefield, often fighting with the support of American airpower.

Further, the fight against the Islamic State has brought the United States and Iran into an awkward alliance in Iraq. While the United States’ effort has been most apparent in its airstrike campaign, Iran has taken the most prominent role on the ground, not just with the militias but with Iranian generals sometimes directing the fighting. 

On Monday, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian spymaster who once directed the militias’ deadly campaign against American forces in Iraq, was on the ground near Tikrit, according to a prominent Iraqi militia leader and the Iranian Fars news agency.

What we are seeing, and have been seeing since last summer, is a third Iraq war since its invasion of Kuwait. And just as the last war left Iran in a more powerful strategic position after Saddam Hussein was ousted and a pro-Iranian, Shiite-majority government installed, so too this one is moving in the same direction.

The goal all along of the West and the Gulf Cooperation Council has been regime change in Iran. But Iran and it proxies and allies have proven to be formidable opponents on the battlefield.

So the fighting will continue, with the U.S. position -- working with Iran to fight ISIS at the same time working with the GCC to fight Iran -- becoming more obvious and untenable.