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.

U.S. and Asaib Ahl al-Haq Allies Against ISIS: Great Satan Shows Multiple Personalities

Something shifted in U.S. policy vis-a-vis Islamic State at the beginning of August. That is when ISIS took Mosul Dam from the pesh merga and it looked like the capital of Kurdistan, Erbil, was in danger of being overrun. ISIS was also targeting the Yazidis, scattering their communities and creating a humanitarian crisis on Mount Sinjar.

It was then that the United States shifted from basically ignoring Islamic State to suddenly sounding the alarm. The extent of this shift is on full display today in the frontpage article by Tim Arango and Azam Ahmed, "U.S. and Iran Unlikely Allies in Iraq Battle." U.S. air power operating in concert with Kurdish pesh merga, Iraqi Army and, most importantly, Iraqi Shiite jihadi militia broke the siege of Shiite Turkmen villages clustered around Amerli. The Shiite militias included Sadrists, Badr Ogranization and Asaib Ahl al-Haq:

The Obama administration has tried to avoid being seen as taking sides in a sectarian war, because the Shiite militias are especially feared by Iraq’s Sunnis.

But for the weekend at least, the realities on the ground appeared to override any concerns of effectively supporting the militias.

ISIS has been rampaging through Iraq, beheading prisoners, carrying out massacres of Shiites and expelling hundreds of thousands of residents. The Shiite militias have been accused of some recent abuses against Sunnis, but so far have avoided large-scale revenge killings.

Among the militias fighting for Amerli are Asaib Ahl al-Haq, considered the most fearsome of Iraq’s Shiite militias, and a group linked to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, one of the Americans’ most unyielding enemies during the occupation. Those groups are supported by Iran. 

Asaib, a militia that was a particularly fierce opponent of the United States as it was winding down its military role in Iraq, was said to have taken on the most prominent role in the fighting for Amerli, in Salahuddin Province.

“I would like to thank the jihadists from Asaib Ahl al-Haq, as they are sacrificing their lives to save Amerli,” said Mahdi Taqi, a member of the provincial council in Salahuddin. 

Naeem al-Aboudi, the spokesman for Asaib, said, “today is a great happiness and victory for all Iraqis. Iraqi security forces, volunteers and resistance brigades have proved their ability to defeat ISIS.”

And what makes this ironic and signals a sea change in U.S. policy in Iraq, Syria and Iran is Asaib Ahl al-Haq is sponsored by Iran's Quds Force, an American bête noire akin to Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad or Hezbollah.

The U.S. is denying coordination with the Iraqi Shiite militias, but, make no mistake, coordination is occurring. How it works is that the U.S. communicates through the pesh merga and the Iraqi Army who then communicate to the Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Sadrists and Badr Organization:

As night fell Sunday, the fighting was still raging in Qaryat Salam, a village to the north of Amerli. At a makeshift forward base, set up amid half-constructed homes and the hulk of a new soccer stadium, Kurdish pesh merga forces fired a barrage of artillery, mortars and rockets. A line of trucks roared into the area, their headlights smeared with mud to dull the brightness. An assortment of Kurdish fighters, Iraqi Army soldiers and Shiite militia members, who seemed to be working together in a highly coordinated way, passed by. 

Several Iranian military advisers were also seen, according to a pesh merga fighter. 

“We are cooperating with the pesh merga and other military forces,” said Abd Kadum al-Mousaw, a militia fighter. “From each force there is a commander who is a member of a higher committee that makes decisions.” 

Pesh merga commanders said they had cleared about half of the village, but were facing stiff resistance from the militants, “who were fighting like madmen.”

Of course this has set off some hand-wringing in the Deep State, which, hitched as it is to Israel and Saudi Arabia, is addicted to Iran hatred. What better way to note this than have the disgraced former DCIA David Petraeus bleat the conventional wisdom?

David Petraeus, a former top American military commander in Iraq who led the United States troop surge in 2007, months ago warned against such possibilities as the Obama administration, reeling from the fall of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, weighed military action against ISIS. 

“This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias or a Shia-on-Sunni Arab fight,” he said at a security conference in London in June. “It has to be a fight of all of Iraq against extremists, who do happen to be Sunni Arabs.”

There is a tendency on the anti-imperialist left to see a grand intelligence at the Deep State control board. What the U.S. turnabout on Islamic State shows is that there is not a monolithic master plan at work here.

In Iraq USG is working with a Quds Force proxy, while in Libya it is working with Sunni salafis backed by Qatar and Turkey in a proxy war against Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt. Then in Syria USG is working with the Saudis -- the Syrian National Coalition is a joint Saudi-U.S. front group.

It is not multi-dimensional chess being played by Great Satan; it is chaos.

Caliphate Rising with Tacit U.S. Approval

In addition to yesterday's Cantor bombshell there was the far larger bombshell of the successful offensive against the Iraqi city of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). ISIS is now on the march to Baghad; in addition to controlling Mosul, ISIS controls Saddam Hussein's birthplace, Tikrit; the home of the largest oil refinery in Iraq, Baiji; it threatens Samarra, home to the Shiite Al-Askari Mosque, the 2006 demolition of which kicked off the Sunni-Shiite civil war allowing the U.S. invasion forces to successfully divide and conquer Iraq. Now, Kurdish troops are reported to have established control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. As Thanassis Cambanis points out in "Sunni Fighters Gain as They Battle 2 Governments, and Other Rebels,"

. . . Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a militant Sunni group whose thousands of fighters have occupied crucial swatches of Syria and have now surged into northern Iraq. The group has vowed to create a caliphate spanning the Sunni-dominated sections of neighboring countries.

In doing so, it is simultaneously battling the Syrian and Iraqi governments and Sunni rebels it considers insufficiently committed to Islam. Having seized vast areas of Iraqi territory and several large and strategic cities, including the country’s second-biggest, Mosul, it controls territory greater than many countries and now rivals, and perhaps overshadows, Al Qaeda as the world’s most powerful and active jihadist group.

Many of us have been transfixed by the relaunching of the Cold War in Ukraine over the last five months, but it is important to remember the operating logic from last year in Syria when ISIS came from out of nowhere to become a dominant belligerent in the jihadi war against Bashar al-Assad's Baathist government: a gain on the battlefield by the Syrian Arab Army was usually followed by an ISIS attack against softer targets in Iraq.

The battlefields of Iraq and Syria are linked. This is why the Obama administration has been unwilling to assist the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki in bombing ISIS staging areas, as Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt report in "U.S. Said to Rebuff Iraqi Request to Strike Militants":

As the threat from Sunni militants in western Iraq escalated last month, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki secretly asked the Obama administration to consider carrying out airstrikes against extremist staging areas, according to Iraqi and American officials. 

But Iraq’s appeals for a military response have so far been rebuffed by the White House, which has been reluctant to open a new chapter in a conflict that President Obama has insisted was over when the United States withdrew the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011. 

The swift capture of Mosul by militants aligned with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has underscored how the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have converged into one widening regional insurgency with fighters coursing back and forth through the porous border between the two countries. But it has also called attention to the limits the White House has imposed on the use of American power in an increasingly violent and volatile region.

Despite the fact that Al Qaeda groups are purported to be the existential enemy of the U.S., the real enemy for the United States is Iran and the Shia-led nations of Iraq and Syria. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Some experts say that such American military action could be helpful but only if Mr. Maliki takes steps to make his government more inclusive. 

“U.S. military support for Iraq could have a positive effect but only if it is conditioned on Maliki changing his behavior within Iraq’s political system,” Kenneth Pollack [a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council official, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution] said. “He has to bring the Sunni community back in, agree to limits on his executive authority and agree to reform Iraqi security forces to make them more professional and competent.”

But so far, the administration has signaled that it is not interested in such a direct American military role. 

“Ultimately, this is for the Iraqi security forces, and the Iraqi government to deal with,” Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday.

ISIS, risen phoenix-like from the moribund fragments of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), has always been seen as a Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) project. Half or more of ISIS fighters are foreigners. ISIS attracts manpower from other jihadi groups because it pays better and is more organized. The caliphate rising in the Levant and Iraq is being carried out with the tacit blessing of the United States.