July 11, 2014
Iran continues denying that it is doing anything militarily inside Iraq, but it appears to have sent aircraft with Iranian markings painted out to bomb the Islamic State.
Iran also publicly acknowledged that an Iranian pilot had denied near Samara, the location of one of the Shiite shrines in Iraq and a city with Islamic State troops stationed in the suburbs and firing into the city.
Baghdad announced last week that Russia had sold it some used Sukhoi-25 jets that are designed for attacking ground targets. Iraqi television showed the crated planes being unloaded at Baghdad airport and ready to be re-assembled.
Then last Tuesday, more Sukhoi-25s were shown flying into Baghdad airport. The Iraqi government didn’t say where they came from, but the implication was that they were more planes from Russia.
However, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said it believed the planes—three of them—were actually from Iran. It showed clips from an Iraqi Defense Ministry video of the planes arriving at Baghdad airport, one with the number 56 under the cockpit, IISS showed another photo of a plane in the Iranian military with the same number painted in the same place.
Another photo showed the tail of a plane in Iran with the Iranian flag on it. A second photo from the plane in Baghdad had no Iranian flag, but an identical camouflage design below the tail suggesting it was the same plane.
ISIS said all three planes had two-digit numbers painted below the cockpit that corresponded with the known serial numbers of Iranian Sukhois.
Iran’s Pasdar air arm owns a few dozen Sukhoi-25s that it bought years ago from the Soviet Union. It also uses several additional Sukhoi-25s that Saddam Hussein flew to Iran for safety before his forces were attacked by the United States in 1991. Iran just appropriated those Sukhois as its own. It isn’t known if the Sukhois flown to Baghdad last week were ones Iran bought or ones it appropriated.
US officials also confirmed that Iran is flying drones over Iraq—as is the United States.
On Saturday, the state news agency carried a report about a funeral in Shiraz for Col. Shojaat Alamdari Murjani, identified as a Pasdar pilot. It said he died fighting in Samara to protect the Shiite shrine there. But the reports did not say if he was shot down or if he was fighting on the ground in Samara.
There have been no reports from Iraq about any fighter jets being downed. It should be very obvious since the Iraqi Air Force owns no jets, just helicopters and propeller-driven Cessnas. If the Islamic State had shot down a Sukhoi, it would almost certainly tout that to the world.
That fed speculation that the martyred colonel had not been shot out of the sky but was a volunteer on the ground in Samara. Still, it was odd that the Pasdaran failed to make the colonel’s status in Iraq clear and left the impression that he was on active duty, despite the fact that the Iranian military has been very careful to deny that it has sent any troops into Iraq. It even denies having sent any advisers into the country, although Western intelligence says there at least dozens of such Iranian advisers in Iraq.
The United States has sent 750 uniformed military into Iraq, about half to guard Americans there and about half to assess the problems facing the Iraqi military and advise on ways to strengthen it.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference last Thursday that the preliminary assessment is that the Iraqi Army is strong enough to prevent the Islamic State from taking Baghdad or the majority Shiite parts of Iraq, but not strong enough to drive the Islamic State out of Iraq and reclaim the territory seized in recent weeks.
“If you’re asking me, will the Iraqis, at some point, be able to go back on the offensive to recapture the part of Iraq they’ve lost … probably not by themselves,” Dempsey said.
The United States is providing the Iraqi military with some arms, mainly 4,000 Hellfire missiles to attack vehicles of the Islamic State. But Dempsey made clear that the Obama Administration has no intention to invest heavily in Iraq so long as the government there is under narrow Shiite control with Sunnis excluded.
Dempsey said such a narrow government would have no hope of taking back the lost regions even if Washington provided vast quantities of arms—and therefore Washington wouldn’t be providing much help unless and until a new government is formed that includes Sunnis and Kurds as well as Shiites.
Dempsey said the first step “is to determine whether we have a reliable partner that is committed to growing their country into something that all Iraqis will be willing to participate in. If the answer to that is ‘no,’ then the future is pretty bleak.”
There is some concern among analysts that this distancing from the Iraqi government by Washington will only serve to push Iraq closer to Iran—and maybe even make Iraq a true dependency of Iran.
However, others argue that a strong Iranian role in Iraq will actually be harmful for Iran in the long run for it will further cement a growing attitude among Sunnis across the Arab world that they now face a sectarian war to repel Shiite efforts to take over the Islamic world.
In Tehran, the regime continues to say very little publicly about what is going on inside Iraq—except to blame all the bad news on the United States.
The commander of the Basij force, Brig. Gen. Mohammad-Reza Naqdi, added a new element to the propaganda fusillade Monday. He said that Washington has been sending Arabs from the Guantanamo prison to Iraq to fight on behalf of the Islamic State. He said the United States was dispatching prisoners who had been tortured into supporting the United States.
The official line is that the Islamic State is a creation of the United States and is carrying out American policy in Iraq. The Islamic State was previously called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Its original name was Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and it was founded to kill American troops and fight the US occupation of Iraq.
Iranian officials, up to and including President Rohani, have repeatedly denied on the record that Iran has dispatched any Sukhois to Iraq, has supplied any arms, has sent any advisers into Iraq. They have also denied that Major General Qasem Solei-mani, the commander of the Qods Force, has visited Iraq, although the Iraqi government notified Washington when he arrived in Baghdad.
The officially stated position that has been repeated almost daily is that Baghdad has not asked Iran for any military help as of yet, but that Tehran will consider any request from Baghdad short of the deployment of combat units.
Iran has also adopted a neutral position on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. It has neither supported nor opposed his efforts to continue as prime minister. That is the same position the United States has taken. However, Tehran has not adopted Washington’s position that the next government of Iraq must be a broad coalition including Sunnis and Kurds. Tehran has just ignored that topic.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the Islamic State appears to be trying to consolidate control over Sunni majority areas of the country. There is no indication of an effort to invade Shiite majority regions or Kurdish regions.
