July 24, 2020
Iranian officials poured into Baghdad in recent months, since the death of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleymani, in an effort to get an Iranian pick installed as prime minister. But they failed and have finally assented to a prime minister known for his closeness to the Americans.
No one expects Mustafa al-Kazimi, 53, to be a shill for Washington, however. But no one expects him to be a front for Tehran either.
In the end, Iraq’s Shiite political leaders seemed to conclude that a prime minister closer to the Americans was a safer bet than one tied to Tehran.
Kazimi lived in the United States before the Anglo-American invasion of 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein. He then returned to Iraq with the US occupation forces, who made him governor of Diyala province. In recent years, he has the minister of intelligence.
Kazimi was the third nominee for prime minister in recent months. The first two were unable to put together a cabinet that could win majority support in Iraq’s parliament. Kazimi finally won majority support May 7.
Just hours after he won, Washington showed it happiness by granting Iraq a 120-day exemption from sanctions, allowing it to buy natural gas and electricity from Iran. Previously, it had only given 30-day exemptions, expressing displeasure with the failure of the Baghdad government to make any effort to wean itself from Iran economically.
Most of Kazimi’s cabinet choices are technocrats, a demand of protesters, rather than pols who have historically used cabinet post to line the pockets of friends.
But a major task assigned to Kazimi is to organize new elections to give Iraqi voters an opportunity to clean house.
In the past, General Soleymani was Iran’s agent in Iran who demonstrated great skill in maneuvering the multiple factions in Baghdad and producing a prime minister who respected Iran’s desires. But Soleymani was killed in an American drone attack January 3—and Iran has not found anyone with his skills to replace him.
Tehran sent a string of agents to try to work Soleymani’s wonders—such as Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and a fluent Arabic speaker, and Gen. Esmail Qaani, Soleymani’s successor as head of the Qods Force. But all proved ineffective.
When Kazimi was nominated by Iraq’s Kurdish president, Barham Salih, the group closest to Tehran, Kata’ib Hezbollah, came out publicly against him as an American tool. But as the weeks rolled on, Kata’ib Hezbollah drew little support from others and fell silent. The Associated Press said that early in May, Tehran sent it latest agent to Baghdad and he told its militia allies that Tehran was no longer opposing Kazimi.
In the program he presented to parliament, Kazimi pledged to bring all Iraq’s militias under the control of the prime minister. He said nothing about kicking the US military out of Iraq.
One of his first acts as prime minister was to re-instate Gen. Abdul-Wahhab As-Saadi as head of counter-terrorism, the post that puts him back in charge of the military units created, armed and trained by the Americans. The next week, he ordered the military to raid the Ther Allah militia group, which the United States has long attacked for being “Iran-backed.”
The Middle East Eye reported that Kazimi won his endorsement as prime minister as part of a Tehran-Washington horse trade in which the US agreed to unfreeze some of Iran’s assets locked up in Europe. The Iran Times has not seen any other news outlet making the same report. The State Department denied the report.
Shamkhani was previously dispatched to Baghdad, where government and politics had become frozen even before Soleymani’s assassination in January.
Iraq has been rocked by months of protests since October and Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi resigned in November due to the killing of protesters. Some 600 protesters have been killed, many of them by Iranian-backed militias, and some 20,000 wounded.
In late December, Iran is believed by the US to have engineered a rocket attack against US forces in Iraq that killed an Iraqi-born US contractor. The US retaliated against an Iraqi militia, pro-Iranian groups stormed the US embassy compound and the US killed Soleymani.
That killing set in motion a different set of protests led by populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and Hadi al-Amiri’s Badr Organization to oust US troops. Those protests have gone nowhere and appear only to have offended the protesters who flooded the streets starting in October against the corrupt and do-nothing Iraqi political system.
At the same time Iraq’s political parties, of which Sadr and Amiri lead the two largest in a parliament, picked as prime minister designate Mohammed Allawi. Allawi failed in mid-March to form a government, tossing Iraq’s politics back into chaos.
Iran has invested heavily over the last decade and a half at co-opting politicians in Baghdad. Leaked documents in November showed how Iran has a network of agents in Iraq. This network was a key to Soleymani’s role in Iraq over the years.
Iran then sent Shamkhani to pick up where Soleymani left off—and to fulfill what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi has declared to be Iran’s new priority policy—to see all American troops expelled from the region.
According to Iran’s state news agency, Shamkhani said the “countdown” to get rid of the US in Iraq has begun.
Reports from Iraq traced the meetings Shamkhani made in his rounds in Baghdad—the speaker of parliament, the president and a former prime minister, not to mention militia leaders.
“These visits are linked to several scenarios,” said Al-Ain media. “The most important is Iran’s efforts to control the process of forming the new Iraqi government, as it has done since 2003.” The failure of Allawi to form a government set the countdown to another 15 days to find another prime minister.
An unnamed Iraqi official told Al-Ain that Shamkhani was in Baghdad and Najaf. He met with Dawa party head Nouri al-Maliki and also head of the Hikma movement Ammar al-Hakim. He also met Sadr. “Shamkhani oversees the process of forming the government, and is guided by Ayatollah Ali Khamenehi,” the source said. “He came to Baghdad directly to interfere in the process.”
Many differences among militias have appeared since Soleymani’s death, Al-Ain said. Hezbollah in Lebanon has been asked to assist in re-uniting the various factions.
Hezbollah sent Mohammed al-Kawtharani to Iraq and Iran in the wake of Soleymani’s death to try his best to unite the groups, without apparently achieving the desired results. The divisions “grow deeper day after day,” Al-Ain reports.
Gen. Qaani, the head of the Qods Force, was the other major figure dispatched by Tehran after Shamkhani failed. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the main clerical figure in Iraq, refused to received Qaani, and Muqtada as-Sadr, the reigning radical in Iraq, canceled a scheduled meeting with him, stating in writing that “there should be no foreign interference in Iraq’s affairs.”
Many other political figures similarly denounced Qaani for even traveling to Baghdad, in a signal of Iran’s declining favor in Iraq. Qaani does not speak Arabic like Soleymani and Shamkhani.