Iran is still the West's enemy, even if it is fighting Isil

By Con Coughlin

03 Dec 2014

Video footage showing Iranian warplanes bombing Islamic State(Isil) targets in Iraq just goes to show the truth of that old Middle Eastern adage, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were helping the Taliban the make deadly roadside bombs to be used against British Army patrols in Afghanistan. And before that they were arming Shi’ite militias fighting the beleaguered British force based in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

Yet now it seems that the threat posed by the Isil has resulted in the unusual circumstance whereby Iran and the West are fighting on the same side. Well, not exactly on the same side, as I very much doubt there are any Revolutionary Guard commanders sitting in the US command headquarters at Qatar’s al-Udeid air base which is directing the air campaign against Isil.

But the al-Jazeera footage which appears to show an Iranian air force F-4 Phantom bombing the Iraqi town of Saadiya and Jalula, situated north-east of Baghdad not far from the Iranian border, suggests that Tehran has now become a tacit ally of the West in the battle to destroy Isil.

The Iranians know all about bombing Iraq, of course, having fought a brutal eight-year war with its neighbour in the 1980s when Saddam Hussein was still in power. Indeed, Iran still retains possession of the scores of Iraqi warplanes that defected to Iran in the build up to the first Gulf War in 1991, when Iraqi pilots refused to follow Saddam’s orders to undertake suicidal missions against coalition fighters.

These days, though, Iran’s main concern is to prop up Iraq’s Shia-dominated government, and it is to this end that Tehran has dispatched teams of Revolutionary Guard commanders to Baghdad to assist the Iraqi government’s effort to prevent Isil seizing further tracts of territory, and to halt its advance on the Iraqi capital. There are even reports that Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds force, has now arrived in Baghdad to supervise operations.

At a time when the West is still at loggerheads with Iran over its nuclear programme, there will be many who think this demonstrates that we can do business with Iran after all.

Personally, I am not so sure. Iran clearly has a vested interest in preventing the Sunni fanatics fighting with Isil from seizing control of its ally in Baghdad. But it also has a vested interested in acquiring the technology to build nuclear weapons. And so long as that continues to be the case, Iran will be seen more as the West’s enemy that its friend.