In re-engaging in Iraq in early August, it made sense to use force to prevent genocide by ISIS against the Yazidis and to protect the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the freedom and prosperity of which is the greatest success of the Iraq invasion. But even hawks had grave doubts about a re-engagement in Arab Iraq, since striking at ISIS there would make the U.S. the air force of a government that was an Iranian satellite, and whose authoritarianism and anti-Sunni sectarianism was a major cause of the crisis to begin with. Syria was important in ISIS’s ability to invade Iraq in June, but the passive support of Sunni Arabs on which ISIS relied for its conquest was only present because of the Maliki government’s behaviour. This was an indigenous Iraqi crisis, not merely the end-point of a mistaken belief that Syria’s crisis could be quarantined.

Soon after the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq against the Islamic State began it was confirmed that the U.S. was acting in alliance with Iran to defend an Iraqi government loyal to Iran. “Iran got the West and Sunnis to fight its fight,” and then extracted concessions from the U.S. in the nuclear negotiations as tribute for allowing the U.S. to fight its fight.

At the end of August, with the help of U.S. air cover, what was left of the Iraqi Army and Iranian proxy “paramilitary forces,” the Imam Ali Brigade (IAB) and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), pushed ISIS out of Amerli, a Shi’a Turcoman town in northern Iraq. After they conquered Amerli, IAB engaged in savage conduct, wholly indistinguishable from the Islamic State, beheading unarmed prisoners and celebrating it on video. IAB is a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), as is AAH, which was the most dangerous anti-Western Shi’ite group in Iraq during the American regency, murdering hundreds of American and British soldiers.

Just before Amerli, Iran had put troops across the Iraqi border into Jalawla, Diyala Province, to fight alongside the Peshmerga, seen by most as the West’s most reliable on-the-ground ally. The pictures later of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, the foreign action wing of the IRGC, charged with exporting the Islamic revolution, in the company of the Peshmerga were clearly meant to say to the West that Iran was ubiquitous; that to do anything in the region, the U.S. needed Iran’s help. (It was also for local purposes: to shift credit away from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose fatwa on June 13 triggered a mass-mobilisation of Shi’ites to fight ISIS)

There were Shi’ite militias alongside official Iraqi forces when ISIS was driven from Jurf al-Sakhar in Babil Province in late October with the help of “heavy coalition air strikes,” and U.S. airstrikes were key in breaking ISIS’s hold on Baiji, a town with a major oil refinery in Baghdad. Even when the headline of news stories was that there had been Sunni Arab tribal help for the Shi’a-led Iraqi government’s armed forces, supported by U.S. airstrikes, in al-Anbar against the Islamic State, it turned out there had been a “need to call in some 3,000 Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen,” so ramshackle a condition is the Iraqi Army in and so pervasive is Iran’s presence in Mesopotamia.

For reasons unclear, Iran’s Shi’a proxy jihadists do not seem to have the same connotations of pure horror in the West that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State do. But these militias behave every bit as cruelly as al-Qaeda and ISIS (255 Sunni civilians were slaughtered over less than two weeks in June as Iran’s militias swept across central Iraq, an incident of war-crimes-bordering-on-ethnic-cleansing); are every bit as fanatical (“Suleimani has taught us that death is the beginning of life, not the end of life”), and they have the backing of an oil-rich State and a global intelligence service. They also started this cycle of sectarian killings.

An excellent article in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 5 noted that politicians in Baghdad were already referring to Iran’s proxies as “Shi’ite Islamic State”. The group that drove ISIS out of Jurf al-Sakhar is run by Ahmed az-Zamili, who was recruited by the Hizballah in Lebanon, where he learned to desire to “sacrifice myself for the sake of God and religion” at training camps. On return to Iraq, Zamili worked closely with Qais al-Khazali, AAH’s commander and another Iranian agent, and he has been for further training in Iran before waging jihad in Syria, the site of the first multinational Shi’a jihad akin to the Sunnis’ Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya in the 1980s and 1990s. Zamili’s group is called al-Qara’a (Judgment Day) and fought alongside Kataib Hizballah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, in Jurf al-Sakhar. Zamili’s group openly admits murdering Sunni POWs, and at one stage “Al Qara’a members hurried out of a meeting with a reporter for The Wall Street Journal to deliver the severed head of an Islamic State fighter to relatives of a slain militia member before his funeral ended.” Senior Shi’ite politicians worry that in the chaos Iran is creating “Shi’a al Qaeda,” and with good reason.

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After repeatedly denying that there would be any co-ordination with Iran, despite repeated reports that the U.S. was co-ordinating with Iran’s proxies in Iraq using the Iraqi military as an intermediary, the Obama administration first leaked to sympathetic columnists at the beginning of September that it had “opened a quiet back channel to Iran to ‘deconflict’ potential clashes” as both Iran and the U.S. battled ISIS, and then it was admitted outright that there were “occasional back-channel conversation on this topic” in mid-September. In late November 2014, Iran sent its own fighter jets into Iraq to bomb the Islamic State, something it is inconceivable that Iran would do without some kind of foreknowledge of the U.S. — and what is this if not tactical co-ordination? (There are claims that co-ordination was “full”.) Iran lacks the capacity, even if it had the will, for air attacks that don’t kill large numbers of Sunni civilians, and Sunnis can only now conclude these attacks have U.S. sanction. John Kerry said as much: Iran’s actions were a “positive” development, Kerry said, before adding that this was “not something that we’re coordinating.” As I have previously noted, “the Obama administration rhetorically holds up the ‘We Will Not Cooperate With Iran’ line like an amulet, while on the ground the evidence to the contrary mounts up.” As even The New York Times noted, “The Obama administration has made clear that … it welcomes Iran’s help in fighting [ISIS].” Moreover, Obama’s pledge to destroy ISIS by “working with the Iraqi government” is an announcement of co-operation with Iran. Iran is in effective command of the Iraqi government’s military, as was underlined at the end of December, when Iran and Iraq signed a security agreement under which Tehran will continue to train units of the Iraqi military. Obama professed to believe that replacing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with Haider al-Abadi created an “inclusive” government in Baghdad. This was blatantly untrue: Abadi was an “Iranian victory.” As just one example, Abadi was “determined” to appoint Hadi al-Amiri as Interior Minister, the part of the Iraqi State officially dealing with the “volunteer” Shi’ite militias fighting alongside the army, many of which have been co-opted by Iran even though they were initially responding to Sistani’s fatwa. Amiri is a long-time agent of Iran and leader of the Badr Brigade from which many of Iran’s other proxy groups in Iraq and Syria originate. Eventually a fig-leaf candidate was chosen but Amiri and Iran retain their control of this key institution of the Iraqi State. Anything passed to Baghdad goes to Tehran — and everyone knows it.

One Iranian official claimed that Iraq was “very similar to what happened in Bosnia,” where “Iran supported the Muslims … while the United States showed verbal support.” Now in Iraq, Iranians “are the ones fighting on the ground … while the airstrikes by the United States and its allies materialized nothing on the ground.” This is a large degree of truth to this: up until the major NATO air campaign after Srebrenica, the U.S. had rhetorically supported the Bosnian Muslims while allowing Iran to do the work on the ground, bringing in more than $200 of materiel, including fourteen thousand tons of weapons, and embedding its intelligence apparatus in the Bosnian State. That attempt at co-operation with Iran ended with an Iranian attempt to assassinate the CIA station chief in Sarajevo in 1995.

The only thing the U.S. appears to have gotten out of this partnership with Iran in Iraq is that in early October, the Supreme Leader told Iran’s proxies in Iraq to lay off American troops while they were being Iran’s de facto air force. It seems however that this was contingent on that support continuing: Now U.S. officials see U.S. troops, and even embassy staff, inside Iraq as hostages, who could be targeted if the U.S. did anything to check Iran’s imperial ambitions in the Fertile Crescent. (Obama has done this before: When he put troops in Kuwait, supposedly to contain Iran, they were then used to blackmail Israel that if she did anything to disarm Iran, U.S. troops could be attacked. Instead of a tripwire, the U.S. troops were made willing hostages.) In this case Iran need not have worried. As Hisham Melhem reported, John Kerry had “asked for a review of options … but cautioned that the options should not include anything that would upset Iran and could conceivably have a negative impact on the nuclear negotiations with Tehran or its long-term strategic interests,” and while this was true for Iraq, Kerry was particularly adamant that nothing should be done to upset Iran in Syria.