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Is Iran the True Victor of the Iraq War?
Iran has benefited from the downfall of the Saddam regime like no other country. Now Iran's mullahs are pressing for more influence -- and are apparently using terror as a means to that end. The Shiite-dominated south is already said to be completely under Tehran's control.
By Volkhard Windfuhr and Bernhard Zand
08/23/05 "Der
Spiegel" -- --Hundreds of Shiite Muslims take to the streets following Friday noon prayers in central Baghdad. Critics of the Shiites in Iraq are risking their lives these days.
The Iranian embassy on the west bank of the Tigris river is a modest, almost shabby structure compared with the American diplomatic fortress in Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace. But while Washington's envoys have come and gone in Iraq, Tehran's diplomats and intelligence agents have been going about their work quietly and efficiently in the villa housing their embassy, shaded by overgrown plane trees, for decades. Even when Baghdad and Tehran were firing rockets at one another in the 1980s and hundreds of thousands were killed on the front, Iran maintained its outpost on the Tigris.
Nowadays, the embassy is literally bursting at the seams. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 and the rise of a Shiite-dominated government last May has transformed Iran's former arch-enemy into the kind of neighbor the Iranian theocracy can welcome with open arms. And with each passing day, Iran gains even more influence in Iraq. Americans and Britons see this influence as acutely dangerous -- and Iraqi Sunnis and the country's Arab neighbors are deeply concerned.
According to the most recent allegations, the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose nuclear program is already keeping the rest of the world on its toes, has long since stopped limiting itself to building economic ties and facilitating pilgrimages to Shiite shrines in Najaf and Karbala.
Iran's secret war
According to a report in US newsmagazine Time, Iran is waging a "secret war for Iraq," with Tehran maintaining a dense spy network, bribing politicians and providing militant groups with logistics and weapons. A Pentagon document has even reported that Iranian death squads have been active in Iraq. "It is clearly and undoubtedly the case," said US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, adding fuel to the fire, "that Iranian weapons have been found in Iraq." This, says Rumsfeld, is "a problem for the coalition forces, a problem for the international community and, ultimately, a problem for Iran."
Washington's efforts to intensify the conflict with Iran are happening at a highly sensitive time for Baghdad, as Iraq's ethnic and religious groups attempt to agree on a joint constitution this week.
The level of violence has continued to increase in the weeks leading up to this important political decision. A series of bombings at Baghdad's central bus terminal, Al-Nahda, claimed 44 lives last Wednesday, and the city's central morgue counted 1,100 dead in July alone. It was the bloodiest month since the fall of Baghdad.
Iran, as the de facto protector of Iraq's Shiite majority, which has been especially hard-hit by terror, is a central factor in the fragile political process. But Tehran, its adversaries charge, is playing a dirty game.
Great Britain recently rang the alarm bells about an "unacceptable" incident at the Iranian border. In the southern Iraqi province of Maysan, which is in the British sector, security forces chased smugglers back across the border, but the smugglers left behind boxes filled with explosive materials: timers, detonators, fuses and other bomb-making material. According to a British official, the incident bore the handwriting of the revolutionary guards controlled by Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khamenei -- or possibly of Iran's allies, the Shiite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.
These types of accusations have been increasing recently. Since the beginning of the year, US troops, especially, have been exposed to the dangers of a new generation of so-called roadside bombs, weapons that are far more lethal than previous explosive devices. The new bombs are even capable of penetrating the armor of a modern combat tank, and explosives experts believe that they were designed by Hezbollah. The US military intelligence service has already pinpointed the source of attacks using this powerful new weapon against coalition troops: an approximately 280-member strong terrorist group controlled by Tehran and run by a man named Abu Mustafa Al-Sheibani. According to US officials, Sheibani has already been linked to dozens of attacks, most recently in Amara, where three British soldiers were killed. According to intelligence documents, Sheibani's group trains in Lebanon, in Baghdad's Shiite-dominated Sadr City neighborhood, and "in another country" -- reportedly Iran.
A few Western diplomats, skeptical after Washington's empty warnings about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, believe the charges against Iran are exaggerated. After all, they say, isn't the current administration in Baghdad precisely the administration Tehran has always wanted?
This is all the more reason for concern among Sunni groups in Iraq, such as the influential Society of Muslim Legal Scholars and the Islamic Party, or politicians like Mithal Alusi, who raised serious charges against Tehran last Wednesday on the state-owned Al-Iraqiya television station. Alusi, a former dissident, heads the Iraqi National Party. Iran, says Alusi, is the true winner of the Iraq war, and it is now doing everything within its power to weaken its neighbor. Iran's efforts, he claims, are supported by Iraq's Shiite-dominated government, whose leading members spent their formative years in Iranian exile.
To support his claims, Alusi cites the fact that Iraqi Prime Minster Ibrahim al-Jaafari, after visiting Iran in July, released 400 Iranian prisoners and admitted to Baghdad's culpability for the Iraq-Iran war -- even though the two countries had never negotiated a peace treaty.
Tehran's troubling touch
He also says that Iran's handwriting is obvious in the political process, which Iraqis hope to move forward by ratifying the constitution this week. Jaafari's Daawa Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution, the two leading Shiite groups, are in favor of family law based strictly on religious principles, as well as a sort of shadow government consisting of leading Shiite dignitaries. For secular Iraqis, this is nothing but the germ cell of a guardian council based on the Iranian model.
Especially in southern Iraq, Tehran, unhindered by British troops, is working to bring about the de facto partition of Iraq, warn critics. "Cities like Basra, Amara and Nasiriyah are already completely controlled by the Iranian intelligence service."
This view is shared by many in the south, where Tehran's allies are resorting to increasingly harsh and unrelenting tactics in an effort to bring about their vision of a Shiite theocracy. Women being forced to wear the chador, shops that sell alcohol or music are the targets of bombings, and Christians are derisively branded in the press as "Nazarenes." Critics are putting their lives on the line by openly opposing Iran.
In early June, literature professor Ala Al-Rumi was murdered on the campus of the University of Basra, and historian Jamhur Karim Chammas was kidnapped a short time later. Farm workers found his corpse under a highway overpass four days later, his body bearing the signs of severe torture. Everyone, complains the editor-in-chief of an independent daily newspaper in Basra, knows who is behind the murders of the academics, who had repeatedly spoken out against "Iran's growing expansionism in Iraq."
Major General Hassan Sawadi Al-Saad, Basra's chief of police, also hints at Iranian influence: "All I can say is that 80 percent of our police officers do not obey my commands."
An Iranian source reveals that the leadership in Tehran long ago began preparing for a long-term presence in postwar Iraq. On the day after Saddam's overthrow, an advance unit of the revolutionary guards sent a cable to Tehran to let officials know that American troops were in the streets of Kut, headed for Baghdad. But there was apparently no reason for concern. According to the cable, the Iranians were convinced of one thing: "We have the city under control."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
© DER SPIEGEL 34/2005
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