November 17 2019, 11:10 p.m.
IN MID-OCTOBER, with
unrest swirling in Baghdad, a familiar visitor slipped quietly into the Iraqi capital.
The city had been under siege for weeks, as protesters marched in the streets,
demanding an end to corruption and calling for the ouster of the prime
minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi. In particular, they denounced the outsize influence
of their neighbor Iran in Iraqi politics, burning Iranian flags and attacking
an Iranian consulate.
The visitor was there to
restore order, but his presence highlighted the protesters’ biggest grievance:
He was Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, head of Iran’s powerful Quds Force, and he
had come to persuade an ally in the Iraqi Parliament to help the prime minister
hold onto his job.
It was not the first time
Suleimani had been dispatched to Baghdad to do damage control. Tehran’s efforts
to prop up Abdul-Mahdi are part of its long campaign to maintain Iraq as a
pliable client state.
Now leaked Iranian documents
offer a detailed portrait of just how aggressively Tehran has worked to embed
itself into Iraqi affairs, and of the unique role of Suleimani. The
documents are contained in an archive of secret Iranian intelligence cables
obtained by The Intercept and shared with the New York Times for this article,
which is being published simultaneously by both news organizations.
The unprecedented leak exposes
Tehran’s vast influence in Iraq, detailing years of painstaking work by Iranian
spies to co-opt the country’s leaders, pay Iraqi agents working for the
Americans to switch sides, and infiltrate every aspect of Iraq’s political,
economic, and religious life.
Many of the cables describe
real-life espionage capers that feel torn from the pages of a spy thriller.
Meetings are arranged in dark alleyways and shopping malls or under the cover
of a hunting excursion or a birthday party. Informants lurk at the Baghdad
airport, snapping pictures of American soldiers and keeping tabs on coalition
military flights. Agents drive meandering routes to meetings to evade
surveillance. Sources are plied with gifts of pistachios, cologne, and saffron.
Iraqi officials, if necessary, are offered bribes. The archive even contains expense
reports from intelligence ministry officers in Iraq, including one totaling
87.5 euros spent on gifts for a Kurdish commander.
According to one of the leaked
Iranian intelligence cables, Abdul-Mahdi, who in exile worked closely with Iran
while Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq, had a “special relationship with the
IRI” — the Islamic Republic of Iran — when he was Iraq’s oil minister in 2014.
The exact nature of that relationship is not detailed in the cable, and, as one
former senior U.S. official cautioned, a “special relationship could mean a lot
of things — it doesn’t mean he is an agent of the Iranian government.” But no
Iraqi politician can become prime minister without Iran’s blessing, and
Abdul-Mahdi, when he secured the premiership in 2018, was seen as a compromise
candidate acceptable to both Iran and the United States.
The leaked cables offer an
extraordinary glimpse inside the secretive Iranian regime. They also detail the
extent to which Iraq has fallen under Iranian influence since the American
invasion in 2003, which transformed Iraq into a gateway for Iranian power,
connecting the Islamic Republic’s geography of dominance from the shores of the
Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.
The trove of leaked Iranian
intelligence reports largely confirms what was already known about Iran’s firm
grip on Iraqi politics. But the reports reveal far more than was previously
understood about the extent to which Iran and the United States have used Iraq
as a staging area for their spy games. They also shed new light on the complex
internal politics of the Iranian government, where competing factions are
grappling with many of the same challenges faced by American occupying forces
as they struggled to stabilize Iraq after the United States invasion.
And the documents show how
Iran, at nearly every turn, has outmaneuvered the United States in the contest
for influence.
The archive is made up of
hundreds of reports and cables written mainly in 2014 and 2015 by officers of
Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, who were serving in the
field in Iraq. The intelligence ministry, Iran’s version of the CIA, has a
reputation as an analytical and professional agency, but it is overshadowed and
often overruled by its more ideological counterpart, the Intelligence
Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was formally
established as an independent entity in 2009 at the order of Iran’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria,
which Iran considers crucial to its national security, the Revolutionary Guards
— and in particular its elite Quds Force, led by Suleimani — determines Iran’s
policies. Ambassadors to those countries are appointed from the senior ranks of
the Guards, not the foreign ministry, which oversees the intelligence ministry,
according to several advisers to current and past Iranian administrations.
Officers from the intelligence ministry and from the Revolutionary Guards in
Iraq worked parallel to one another, said these sources. They reported their
findings back to their respective headquarters in Tehran, which in turn
organized them into reports for the Supreme Council of National Security.
Cultivating Iraqi officials
was a key part of their job, and it was made easier by the alliances many Iraqi
leaders forged with Iran when they belonged to opposition groups fighting
Saddam. Many of Iraq’s foremost political, military, and security officials
have had secret relationships with Tehran, according to the documents. The same
2014 cable that described Abdul-Mahdi’s “special relationship” also named
several other key members of the cabinet of former Prime Minister Haider
al-Abadi as having close ties with Iran.
A political analyst and
adviser on Iraq to Iran’s government, Gheis Ghoreishi, confirmed that Iran has
focused on cultivating high-level officials in Iraq. “We have a good number of
allies among Iraqi leaders who we can trust with our eyes closed,” he said.
Three Iranian officials were
asked to comment for this article, in queries that described the existence of
the leaked cables and reports. Alireza Miryusefi, a spokesperson for Iran’s
United Nations mission, said he was away until later this month. Majid
Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s U.N. ambassador, did not respond to a written
request that was hand-delivered to his official residence. Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif did not respond to an emailed request.
When reached by telephone,
Hassan Danaiefar, Iran’s ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2017 and a former
deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ naval forces, declined to
directly address the existence of the cables or their release, but he did
suggest that Iran had the upper hand in information gathering in Iraq. “Yes, we
have a lot of information from Iraq on multiple issues, especially about what
America was doing there,” he said. “There is a wide gap between the reality and
perception of U.S. actions in Iraq. I have many stories to tell.” He declined
to elaborate.
According to the reports,
after the American troop withdrawal in 2011, Iran moved quickly to add former
CIA informants to its payroll. One undated section of an intelligence ministry
cable shows that Iran began the process of recruiting a spy inside the State
Department. It is unclear what came of the recruitment effort, but according to
the files, Iran had started meeting with the source, and offered to reward the
potential asset with a salary, gold coins, and other gifts. The State
Department official is not named in the cable, but the person is described as
someone who would be able to provide “intelligence insights into the U.S.
government’s plans in Iraq, whether it is for dealing with ISIS or any other
covert operations.”
“The subject’s incentive in
collaborating will be financial,” the report said.
The State Department declined
to comment on the matter.
In interviews, Iranian
officials acknowledged that Iran viewed surveillance of American activity in
Iraq after the United States invasion as critical to its survival and national
security. When American forces toppled Saddam, Iran swiftly moved some of its
best officers from both the intelligence ministry and from the Intelligence
Organization of the Revolutionary Guards to Iraq, according to the Iranian
government advisers and a person affiliated with the Guards. President George
W. Bush had declared Iran to be part of an “axis of evil,” and Iranian leaders
believed that Tehran would be next on Washington’s list of regime-change
capitals after Kabul and Baghdad.
700 PAGES OF DOCUMENTS
AROUND THE WORLD, governments
have had to contend with the occasional leak of secret communiqués or personal
emails as a fact of modern life. Not so in Iran, where information is tightly
controlled and the security services are widely feared.
The roughly 700 pages of
leaked reports were sent anonymously to The Intercept, which translated them
from Persian to English and shared them with the Times. The Intercept and the
Times verified the authenticity of the documents but do not know who leaked
them. The Intercept communicated over encrypted channels with the source, who
declined to meet with a reporter. In these anonymous messages, the source said
that they wanted to “let the world know what Iran is doing in my country Iraq.”
Like the internal
communications of any spy service, some of the reports contain raw intelligence
whose accuracy is questionable, while others appear to represent the views of
intelligence officers and sources with their own agendas.
Some of the cables show
bumbling and comical ineptitude, like one that describes the Iranian spies who
broke into a German cultural institute in Iraq only to find they had the wrong
codes and could not unlock the safes. Other officers were browbeaten by their
superiors in Tehran for laziness, and for sending back to headquarters reports
that relied only on news accounts.
But by and large, the
intelligence ministry operatives portrayed in the documents appear patient,
professional, and pragmatic. Their main tasks are to keep Iraq from falling
apart; from breeding Sunni militants on the Iranian border; from descending
into sectarian warfare that might make Shia Muslims the targets of violence;
and from spinning off an independent Kurdistan that would threaten regional
stability and Iranian territorial integrity. The Revolutionary Guards and
Suleimani have also worked to eradicate the Islamic State, but with a greater
focus on maintaining Iraq as a client state of Iran and making sure that
political factions loyal to Tehran remain in power.
This portrait is all the more
striking at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and Iran.
Since 2018, when President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and
reimposed sanctions, the White House has rushed ships to the Persian Gulf and
reviewed military plans for war with Iran. In October, the Trump administration
promised to send American troops to Saudi Arabia following attacks on oil
facilities there for which Iran was widely blamed.
TELL THEM WE ARE AT YOUR
SERVICE
WITH A SHARED FAITH and
tribal affiliations that span a porous border, Iran has long been a major
presence in southern Iraq. It has opened religious offices in Iraq’s holy
cities and posted banners of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, on its streets. It supports some of the most powerful political
parties in the south, dispatches Iranian students to study in Iraqi seminaries,
and sends Iranian construction workers to build Iraqi hotels and refurbish
Iraqi shrines.
But while Iran may have bested
the United States in the contest for influence in Baghdad, it has struggled to
win popular support in the Iraqi south. Now, as the last six weeks of protests
make clear, it is facing unexpectedly strong pushback. Across the south,
Iranian-backed Iraqi political parties are seeing their headquarters burned and
their leading operatives assassinated, an indication that Iran may have
underestimated the Iraqi desire for independence not just from the United
States, but also from its neighbor.
In a sense, the leaked Iranian
cables provide a final accounting of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The notion
that the Americans handed control of Iraq to Iran when they invaded now enjoys
broad support, even within the U.S. military. A recent two-volume
history of the Iraq War, published by the U.S. Army, details the
campaign’s many missteps and its “staggering cost” in lives and money. Nearly
4,500 American troops were killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, and
American taxpayers spent up to $2 trillion on the war. The study, which totals
hundreds of pages and draws on declassified documents, concludes: “An emboldened
and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor.”
Iran’s rise as a power player
in Iraq was in many ways a direct consequence of Washington’s lack of any
post-invasion plan. The early years following the fall of Saddam were chaotic,
both in terms of security and in the lack of basic services like water and
electricity. To most observers on the ground, it appeared as if the United
States was shaping policy on the go, and in the dark.
Among the most disastrous
American policies were the decisions to dismantle Iraq’s armed forces and to
purge from government service or the new armed forces any Iraqi who had been a
member of Saddam’s ruling Baath Party. This process, known as
de-Baathification, automatically marginalized most Sunni men. Unemployed and
resentful, they formed a violent insurgency targeting Americans and Shias seen
as U.S. allies.
As sectarian warfare between
Sunnis and Shias raged, the Shia population looked to Iran as a protector. When
ISIS gained control of territory and cities, the Shias’ vulnerability and the
failure of the United States to protect them fueled efforts by the
Revolutionary Guards and Suleimani to recruit and mobilize Shia militias loyal
to Iran.
According to the intelligence
ministry documents, Iran has continued to take advantage of the opportunities
the United States has afforded it in Iraq. Iran, for example, reaped an
intelligence windfall of American secrets as the U.S. presence began to
recede after its 2011 troop withdrawal. The CIA had tossed many of its longtime
secret agents out on the street, leaving them jobless and destitute in a country
still shattered from the invasion — and fearful that they could be killed for
their links with the United States, possibly by Iran. Short of money, many
began to offer their services to Tehran. And they were happy to tell the
Iranians everything they knew about CIA operations in Iraq.
In November 2014, one of them,
an Iraqi who had spied for the CIA, broke and terrified that his ties to the
Americans would cost him his life, switched sides. The CIA, according to the
cable, had known the man by a nickname: “Donnie Brasco.” His Iranian handler
would call him, simply, “Source 134992.”
Turning to Iran for
protection, he said that everything he knew about American intelligence
gathering in Iraq was for sale: the locations of CIA safe houses; the names of
hotels where CIA operatives met with agents; details of his weapons and
surveillance training; the names of other Iraqis working as spies for the
Americans.
Source 134992 told the Iranian
operatives that he had worked for the agency for 18 months starting in 2008, on
a program targeting Al Qaeda. He said he had been paid well for his work —
$3,000 per month, plus a one-time bonus of $20,000 and a car.
But swearing on the Quran, he
promised that his days of spying for the United States were over, and agreed to
write a full report for the Iranians on everything he knew from his time with
the CIA.
“I will turn over to you all
the documents and videos that I have from my training course,” the Iraqi man
told his Iranian handler, according to a 2014 Iranian intelligence report. “And
pictures and identifying features of my fellow trainees and my subordinates.”
The CIA declined to comment.
Iranian spies, Iraqi officials
say, are everywhere in the south, and the region has long been a beehive of
espionage. It was there, in Karbala in late 2014, that an Iraqi military
intelligence officer, down from Baghdad, met with an Iranian intelligence
official and offered to spy for Iran — and to tell the Iranians whatever he
could about American activities in Iraq.
“Iran is my second country and
I love it,” the Iraqi official told the Iranian officer, according to one of
the cables. In a meeting that lasted more than three hours, the Iraqi told of
his devotion to the Iranian system of government, in which clerics rule
directly, and his admiration for Iranian movies.
He said he had come with a
message from his boss in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Hatem al-Maksusi, then commander of
military intelligence in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense: “Tell them we are at
your service. Whatever you need is at their disposal. We are Shia and have a
common enemy.”
Maksusi’s messenger continued,
“All of the Iraqi Army’s intelligence — consider it yours.” He told the Iranian
intelligence officer about secret targeting software the United States had
provided to the Iraqis, and offered to turn it over to the Iranians. “If you
have a new laptop, give it to me so I can upload the program onto it,” he said.
And there was more, he said.
The United States had also given Iraq a highly sensitive system for
eavesdropping on mobile phones, which was run out of the prime minister’s
office and the headquarters of Iraqi military intelligence. “I will put at your
disposal whatever intelligence about it you want,” he said.
In an interview, Maksusi, who
is now retired, disputed saying the things attributed to him in the cables and
denied ever working for Iran. He praised Iran for its help in the fight against
ISIS, but said he had also maintained a close relationship with the United
States. “I worked for Iraq and did not work for any other state,” he said. “I
was not the intelligence director for the Shias, but I was intelligence
director for all of Iraq.”
When asked about the cable, a
former American official said the United States had become aware of the Iraqi
military intelligence officer’s ties to Iran and had limited his access to
sensitive information.
THE AMERICANS’ CANDIDATE
By late 2014, the United
States was once again pouring weapons and soldiers into Iraq as it began
battling the Islamic State. Iran, too, had an interest in defeating the
militants. As ISIS took control of the west and the north, young Iraqi men
traveled across the deserts and marshes of the south by the busload, heading to
Iran for military training.
Some within the American and
Iranian governments believed that the two rivals should coordinate their
efforts against a common enemy. But Iran, as the leaked cables make clear, also
viewed the increased American presence as a threat and a “cover” to gather
intelligence about Iran.
“What is happening in the sky
over Iraq shows the massive level of activity of the coalition,” one Iranian
officer wrote. “The danger for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests
represented by their activity must be taken seriously.”
The rise of ISIS was at the
same time driving a wedge between the Obama administration and a large swath of
the Iraqi political class. Barack Obama had pushed for the ouster of Prime
Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki as a condition for renewed American military
support. He believed that Maliki’s draconian policies and crackdowns on Iraqi
Sunnis had helped lead to the rise of the militants.
Maliki, who had lived in exile
in Iran in the 1980s, was a favorite of Tehran’s. His replacement, the
British-educated Haider al-Abadi, was seen as more friendly to the West and
less sectarian. Facing the uncertainty of a new prime minister, Hassan
Danaiefar, then Iran’s ambassador, called a secret meeting of senior staffers
at the Iranian Embassy, a hulking, fortified structure just outside Baghdad’s
Green Zone.
As the meeting progressed, it
became clear that the Iranians had little cause to worry about the new Iraqi
government. Abadi was dismissed as “a British man,” and “the Americans’
candidate,” but the Iranians believed that they had plenty of other ministers
in their pocket.
One by one, Danaiefar went
down the list of cabinet members, describing their relationships to Iran.
Ibrahim al-Jafari — who had
previously served as Iraqi prime minister and by late 2014 was the foreign
minister — was, like Abdul-Mahdi, identified as having a “special relationship”
with Iran. In an interview, Jafari did not deny that he had close relations
with Iran, but said he had always dealt with foreign countries based on the
interests of Iraq.
Iran counted on the loyalty of
many lesser cabinet members as well.
The report said the ministers
of municipalities, communications, and human rights “are in complete harmony
and at one with us and are our people.” The environment minister, it said,
“works with us, although he is Sunni.” The transportation minister — Bayan
Jabr, who had led the Iraqi Interior Ministry at a time when hundreds of
prisoners were tortured to death with electric drills or summarily shot by Shia
death squads — was deemed to be “very close” to Iran. When it came to Iraq’s
education minister, the report says, “we will have no problem with him.”
The former ministers of
municipalities, communications, and human rights were all members of the Badr
Organization, a political and military group established by Iran in the 1980s
to oppose Saddam. The former minister of municipalities denied having a close
relationship with Iran; the former human rights minister acknowledged being
close to Iran, and praised Iran for helping Shia Iraqis during Saddam’s
dictatorship and for help defeating ISIS. The former minister of communications
said that he served Iraq, not Iran, and that he maintained relationships with
diplomats from many countries; the former minister of education said that he
had not been supported by Iran and that he served at the request of
Abadi. The former environment minister could not be reached for comment.
Iran’s dominance over Iraqi
politics is vividly shown in one important episode from the fall of 2014, when
Baghdad was a city at the center of a multinational maelstrom. The Syrian civil
war was raging to the west, ISIS militants had seized almost a third of
Iraq, and American troops were heading back to the region to confront the
growing crisis.
Against this chaotic backdrop,
Jabr, then the transportation minister, welcomed Suleimani, the Quds Force
commander, to his office. Suleimani had come to ask a favor: Iran needed
access to Iraqi airspace to fly planeloads of weapons and other supplies to
support the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad in its fight against
American-backed rebels.
It was a request that placed
Jabr at the center of the longstanding rivalry between the United States and
Iran. Obama administration officials had been lobbying hard to get the Iraqis
to stop Iranian flights through their airspace, but face to face with the Quds
chief, Iraq’s transportation minister found it impossible to refuse.
Suleimani, Jabr recalled,
“came to me and requested that we permit Iranian airplanes to use Iraqi air
space to pass on to Syria,” according to one of the cables. The transportation
minister did not hesitate, and Suleimani appeared to be pleased. “I put my
hands on my eyes and said, ‘On my eyes! As you wish!’” Jabr told the intelligence
ministry officer. “Then he got up and approached me and kissed my forehead.”
Jabr confirmed the meeting
with Suleimani, but said the flights from Iran to Syria carried humanitarian
supplies and religious pilgrims traveling to Syria to visit holy sites, not
weapons and military supplies to aid Assad as American officials believed.
Meanwhile, Iraqi officials
known to have a relationship with the United States came under special
scrutiny, and Iran took measures to counter American influence. Indeed, many of
the files show that as top American diplomats met behind closed doors with
their Iraqi counterparts in Baghdad, their conversations were routinely
reported back to the Iranians.
Throughout 2014 and 2015, as a
new Iraqi government settled in, the American ambassador, Stuart Jones, met
often with Salim al-Jabouri, who was speaker of the Iraqi Parliament until last
year. Jabouri, although he is Sunni, was known to have a close relationship with
Iran, but the files now reveal that one of his top political advisers —
identified as Source 134832 — was an Iranian intelligence asset. “[I] am
present in his office on a daily basis and carefully follow his contacts with
the Americans,” the source told his Iranian handler. Jabouri, in an interview,
said he did not believe that anyone on his staff had worked as an agent for
Iran, and that he fully trusted his aides. (Jones declined to comment.)
The source urged the Iranians
to develop closer ties to Jabouri, to blunt American efforts to nurture a new
class of younger Sunni leaders in Iraq and perhaps bring about reconciliation
between Sunnis and Shias. The source warned that Iran should act to keep the
parliament speaker from “slipping into a pro-American position, since one of
Salim al-Jabouri’s characteristics is credulousness and making hasty
decisions.”
Another report reveals that
Nechervan Barzani, then the prime minister of Kurdistan, met with top American
and British officials and Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister, in Baghdad in
December 2014, and then went almost immediately to meet with an Iranian
official to tell him everything. Through a spokesperson, Barzani said he did
not recall meeting with any Iranian officials at the time and described the
cable as “baseless and unfounded.” He said he “absolutely denies” telling the
Iranians details about his conversations with American and British diplomats.
Sometimes, the Iranians also
saw trade value in the information they received from their Iraqi sources.
One report from the Jabouri
adviser revealed that the United States was interested in gaining access to a
rich natural gas field in Akkas, near Iraq’s border with Syria. The source
explained that the Americans might eventually try to export the natural gas to
Europe, a major market for Russian natural gas. Intrigued, the intelligence
ministry officer, in a cable to Tehran, wrote, “It is recommended that the
aforementioned information be used in exchange with the Russians and Syria.”
The cable was written just as Russia was significantly stepping up its
involvement in Syria, and as Iran continued its military buildup there, in
support of Assad.
And although Iran was
initially suspicious of Abadi’s allegiances, a report written a few months
after his rise to the premiership suggested that he was quite willing to have a
confidential relationship with Iranian intelligence. A January 2015 report details
a private meeting between Abadi and an intelligence ministry officer known as
Boroujerdi, held in the prime minister’s office “without the presence of a
secretary or a third person.”
During the meeting, Boroujerdi
homed in on Iraq’s Sunni-Shia divide, probing Abadi’s feelings on perhaps the
most sensitive subject in Iraqi politics. “Today, the Sunnis find themselves in
the worst possible circumstances and have lost their self-confidence,” the
intelligence officer opined, according to the cable. “The Sunnis are vagrants,
their cities are destroyed and an unclear future awaits them, while the Shias
can retrieve their self-confidence.”
Iraq’s Shia were “at a
historical turning point,” Boroujerdi continued. The Iraqi government and Iran
could “take advantage of this situation.”
According to the cable, the
prime minister expressed his “complete agreement.” Abadi declined to comment.
SWEETNESS INTO BITTERNESS
EVER SINCE THE start of
the Iraq War in 2003, Iran has put itself forward as the protector of Iraq’s
Shias, and Suleimani, more than anyone else, has employed the dark arts of
espionage and covert military action to ensure that Shia power remains
ascendant. But it has come at the cost of stability, with Sunnis perennially
disenfranchised and looking to other groups, like the Islamic State, to protect
them.
A 2014 massacre of Sunnis in
the farming community of Jurf al-Sakhar was a vivid example of the kinds of
sectarian atrocities committed by armed groups loyal to Iran’s Quds Force that
had alarmed the United States throughout the Iraq War, and undermined efforts
at reconciliation. As the field reports make clear, some of the Americans’ concerns
were shared by the Iranian intelligence ministry. That signaled divisions
within Iran over its Iraq policies between more moderate elements under
President Hassan Rouhani and militant factions like the Revolutionary Guards.
Jurf al-Sakhar, which lies just
east of Fallujah in the Euphrates River Valley, is lush with orange trees and
palm groves. It was overrun by the Islamic State in 2014, giving militants a
foothold from which they could launch attacks on the holy cities of Karbala and
Najaf.
Jurf al-Sakhar is also
important to Iran because it lies on a route Shia religious pilgrims use to
travel to Karbala during Muharram, the monthlong commemoration of the death of
Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussein, a revered figure for Shias.
When Shia militias supported
by Iran drove the militants out of Jurf al-Sakhar in late 2014, the first major
victory over ISIS, it became a ghost town. It was no longer a threat to the
thousands of Shia pilgrims who would pass by, but Iran’s victory came at a high
cost to the town’s Sunni residents. Tens of thousands were displaced, and a
local politician, the only Sunni member on the provincial council, was found
with a bullet hole through his head.
One cable describes the damage
in almost biblical terms. “As a result of these operations,” its author
reported, “the area around Jurf al-Sakhar has been cleansed of terrorist
agents. Their families have been driven away, most of their houses have been
destroyed by military forces and the rest will be destroyed. In some places,
the palm orchards have been uprooted to be burned to prevent the terrorists
from taking shelter among the trees. The people’s livestock (cows and sheep)
have been scattered and are grazing without their owners.”
The Jurf al-Sakhar operation
and other bloody actions led by Iran’s proxies and directed by Tehran further
alienated Iraq’s Sunni population, according to one report, which notes that
“destroying villages and houses, looting the Sunnis’ property and livestock
turned the sweetness of these successes” against ISIS into “bitterness.”
One of the Jurf al-Sakhar cables cast the impact of Shia militias in
particularly stark terms: “In all the areas where the Popular Mobilization Forces
go into action, the Sunnis flee, abandoning their homes and property, and
prefer to live in tents as refugees or reside in camps.”
The intelligence ministry
feared that Iran’s gains in Iraq were being squandered because Iraqis so
resented the Shia militias and the Quds Force that sponsored them. Above all,
its officers blamed Suleimani, whom they saw as a dangerous self-promoter using
the anti-ISIS campaign as a launching pad for a political career back home in
Iran. One report, which states at the top that it is not to be shared with the
Quds Force, criticizes the general personally for publicizing his leading role
in the military campaign in Iraq by “publishing pictures of himself on
different social media sites.”
Doing that had made it obvious
that Iran controlled the dreaded Shia militias — a potential gift to its
rivals. “This policy of Iran in Iraq,” the report said, “has allowed the
Americans to return to Iraq with greater legitimacy. And groups and individuals
who had been fighting against the Americans among the Sunnis are now wishing
that not only America, but even Israel, would enter Iraq and save Iraq from
Iran’s clutches.”
At times, the Iranians sought
to counter the ill will generated by their presence in Iraq with soft-power
campaigns similar to American battlefield efforts to win “hearts and minds.”
Hoping to gain a “propaganda advantage and restore Iran’s image among the
people,” Iran devised a plan to send pediatricians and gynecologists to villages
in northern Iraq to administer health services, according to one field report.
It is not clear, however, if that initiative materialized.
Just as often, Iran would use
its influence to close lucrative development deals. With Iraq dependent on Iran
for military support in the fight against ISIS, one cable shows the Quds Force
receiving oil and development contracts from Iraq’s Kurds in exchange for
weapons and other aid. In the south, Iran was awarded contracts for sewage and
water purification by paying a $16 million bribe to a member of Parliament,
according to another field report.
Today, Iran is struggling to
maintain its hegemony in Iraq, just as the Americans did after the 2003
invasion. Iraqi officials, meanwhile, are increasingly worried that a provocation
in Iraq on either side could set off a war between the two powerful countries
vying for dominance in their homeland. Against this geopolitical backdrop,
Iraqis learned long ago to take a pragmatic approach to the overtures of Iran’s
spies — even Sunni Iraqis who view Iran as an enemy.
“Not only doesn’t he believe
in Iran, but he doesn’t believe that Iran might have positive intentions toward
Iraq,” one Iranian case officer wrote in late 2014, about an Iraqi intelligence
recruit described as a Baathist who had once worked for Saddam and later the
CIA. “But he is a professional spy and understands the reality of Iran and the
Shia in Iraq and will collaborate to save himself.”
Document excerpts have been
retyped to avoid identifying markings.
Additional reporting: Matthew
Cole and Laura Secor for The Intercept; Rick Gladstone, Falih Hassan,
and Alissa J. Rubin for the New York Times
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