Hussain Abdul-Hussain
However, judging by how Tehran organizes its proxies, their use of explosive drones, Iraq’s political context, Iranian statements after the attack, and the history of pro-Iran militias around the region, there is little doubt that the assassination order came from Iran.
Iran has been building and exporting its militia model throughout the region since 1979, often by exploiting opportunities to plant and grow local armed groups that pledge allegiance to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. War usually offers Iran a great opportunity to recruit followers and form militias.
In 2014, Sunni remnants of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency, rebranding themselves as the Islamist terrorist group ISIS, took over the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the Najaf-based top Shiite authority, issued an edict, fatwa, that allowed Iraqis to form militias to defend their country against the Islamic State onslaught. Tehran’s proxies stepped into the chaos.
But the pro-Iran militias predate the rise of ISIS and go as far back as the Iraqi war with Iran (1980-1988), when Tehran organized Iraqi exiles and prisoners of war into battalions that fought alongside the Iranian army against their own country. After the downfall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the exiles returned to Iraq and brought with them their militias that attacked U.S. troops and engaged in bloody rounds of fighting with other armed groups inside Iraq.
Sistani’s edict in 2014 legitimized all these groups. Militiamen were placed on Iraqi payroll. Once ISIS was defeated, the militias should have disbanded, but Tehran had other ideas. It rebranded them as “resistance” to the continuing American presence in Iraq, a move that alienated Sistani, who ordered his followers to retreat to their previous role as guards of the holy shrines. From then on, Tehran’s proxies in Iraq became known as the “loyalist militias,” meaning loyal to Khamenei. Such allegiance means that the hierarchy in these organizations operates along the lines of Takleef Sharii (from the Islamic religious law, Shariah). Disobeying an order from a superior becomes tantamount to religious sacrilege. This is why it is highly unlikely that any of the Iranian militias decided on an operation as significant and sensitive as killing the prime minister of Iraq without a Takleef Sharii from Iran.
But even if Tehran’s proxies wanted to act alone, to use explosive drones would have required the militias to fly them out of one of three bases. A study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that “the broader logistical system that supports drone attacks [in Iraq] uses three lines of supply.” Two bases are located in “Iran’s Ahvaz and Kermanshah regions,” and a third is “between Albu Kamal in Syria and the launch areas near Al-Asad Air Base, east of the Euphrates River.”
It is unlikely that Iraqi militias could fly drones out of bases inside Iran without Tehran’s knowledge. It is also unlikely that Iraq’s militias could use the IRGC base in Syria, usually used to house militias from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, without Iranian clearance. Tehran’s Iraqi proxies could have assassinated Kadhimi in several ways without obtaining Iranian clearance. Using explosive drones could not have been one of them.
Further evidence of Iranian involvement in the attack on Kadhimi could be inferred from Iraqi politics. Elections were held on Oct. 10 and saw the defeat of the pro-Iran bloc, which shrank from 48 seats to 16 in Iraq’s 329-seat Parliament. The anti-militia blocs can form a ruling coalition that excludes Iran’s Iraqi proteges from the Cabinet and has promised to disband the pro-Iran militias.
To undo their humiliating defeat and keep their militias intact, Tehran’s proxies held a sit-in in Baghdad, protesting the election as fraudulent and demanding a recount or a repeat.
Iranian attempts to “stop the steal ” hit two main obstacles. The first was the global consensus that the election was free and fair, and the second was Prime Minister Kadhimi’s impeccable credibility as an honest broker.
Unlike his predecessors, Kadhimi was the first incumbent chief executive not to run for election, a move that boosted his credibility, and by extension that of the election. Iran needed Kadhimi out of the way. If a civil war broke out because of the assassination, that would be even better. War can reset politics and end only with holding a new round of elections.
To the militias’ misfortune, the assassination attempt failed and the world denounced it. Feeling the heat, Iran rushed to distance itself while instructing its militias to tell Reuters that Tehran had not ordered them to try to kill the premier.
Yet even in their statements denouncing the plot, Tehran and its Iraqi proxies warned Iraqis of a “civil war” — code word for a bloodbath should the anti-Iran coalition proceed with forming a cabinet that pursues disarming militias.
The behavior of Tehran and its proxies in Iraq took a page from the playbook of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The party lost parliamentary elections in 2005 and 2009, but through a combination of stalling government and using violence against rivals, Hezbollah eventually prevailed in the 2018 election.
The tenure of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud had ended in 2007 when Hezbollah shut down Parliament to prevent its rival majority coalition from electing one of its own. When the elected government decided to dismantle Hezbollah’s illegal underground communication network, the party started a civil war on May 7, 2008, forcing the global community to scramble to restore stability. Settlement led to the election of a “consensus president.” Hezbollah therefore knocked out its rival candidate, while also imposing an electoral law that it thought would give it an election victory.
So confident was Hezbollah of winning that its chief Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech, on the eve of the election, in which he said that winners will form a cabinet and losers will stay out of it and sit in the opposition. Hezbollah lost the 2009 election and Nasrallah walked back his statement. He insisted, instead, on a “national unity” cabinet that included Hezbollah’s losing coalition. The unarmed majority conceded to the demands of Hezbollah and its formidable militia.
In 2014, the term of the “consensus” President Michel Suleiman ended, and the majority was planning, again, to elect one of its own. This time, Hezbollah shut down Parliament for two years while threatening its main opponent in exile, Saad Hariri, with assassination if he returned to Lebanon. The majority conceded and elected the party’s candidate Michel Aoun. Next, Hezbollah imposed yet another electoral law, this time securing its electoral victory in 2018.
As in Lebanon, Iran’s militias in Iraq are not in a hurry. Through a combination of stalling government and using violence against rivals, including assassinations and a full-scale civil war if need be, Tehran’s proxies are patiently culling their opponents and imposing their will. If left unchecked, Iran could turn Iraq into another one of its satellite countries.
But not so fast. Iraq might prove to be a harder nut to crack than Lebanon. To start with, Lebanon’s Shiite population that Iran has subsumed, using funds and arms, numbers 1 million. In Iraq, the Shiites count around 20 million, which means that it would take Iran 20 times as much money to buy the Iraqi Shiite community, a sum it could never afford.
Second, unlike impoverished and resourceless Lebanon, Iraq is the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, bringing its treasury some $50 billion annually and allowing the Iraqi state to be one of the largest employers in the world. As such, the Iraqi government has been able to outbid Tehran in trying to buy Shiite loyalty.
Third, unlike Lebanon, which has no claims to Shiite history, the southern Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala are the most revered in the Shiite world, giving the Iraqi Shiite religious authorities, such as Sistani, much more prestige over the Qom-based Iranian Shiite clerics, such as Khamenei.
Since 2003, Iran has been trying to transform Iraq into another satellite state like Lebanon. The attempt on Kadhimi’s life resembled the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. A U.N. tribunal indicted five Hezbollah leaders on charges related to Hariri’s killing.
In Yemen, too, Iran instructed its proxy militia to kill former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in 2017, when he was on his way to break ranks with Tehran and join its opponents.
So far, Iraq has proven to be far more difficult for Tehran to control, a lesson Washington should heed. Before the United States withdraws the remaining 2,500 military advisers in Iraq, it is worth remembering that the country is not lost to Iran yet and that, with global support, Baghdad can beat Iran and disband its militias. All Washington needs to do is have some faith in anti-Islamic Iran Iraqis, and some patience in maintaining the currently costless U.S. policy on Iran in Iraq.
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