ME conflicts to get more complex
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani’s death in Iraq has opened a new chapter in the region’s endless conflicts and no one can predict how this will turn out.
The world reacted with alarm yesterday after Soleimani was killed in a US strike, with leaders appealing for restraint. Iran has warned of “severe revenge” and its regional proxies have vowed to avenge his death.
In the latest tit-for-tat round of the proxy war in Iraq, an American contractor had been killed in a rocket attack on Friday, triggering retaliatory airstrikes against Iranian-supported militia camps. This in turn led to the storming of the US embassy compound by pro-Iran militiamen, in which no one appears to have been hurt.
Washington delivered its most decisive blow early yesterday when a volley of strikes hit near Baghdad international airport, leaving two cars torched on the access highway. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed Soleimani was killed in the strike, while Iraq’s Hashed al-Shaabi announced its deputy chief Muhandis’s death.
The killing was not like other attacks to eliminate enemies of the US—the raids that killed Osama bin Laden or IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Soleimani was a major public figure in Iran, a Major General in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, who was easily the most popular official in an Iranian government that generally is not. Inside Iran, and on social media posts circulated globally, he was the frontman of, as well as chief architect for, Iran’s regional ambitions – in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and, most immediately in Iraq, where he met his end.
He was arguably Iran’s second most powerful figure after the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Killing him an be seen as a blunt act of war against a substantial regional power. Its half-million-strong armed services are the most potent military force the US has faced since confronting the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army more than 60 years ago in Korea.
Analysts say the killings threaten to drag Iraq into the abyss of regional conflict.
Slamming the strike as an “aggression,” Iraq’s caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi said it would “spark a devastating war in Iraq.”
Fanar Haddad of Singapore University’s Middle East Institute said: “Iran’s strongest cards are in Iraq, and I think that Iraq will pay the price for this.”
Analysts said the outbreak of a wider conflict was looking increasingly likely.
Following the killing, Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement vowed “appropriate punishment’ and Yemen’s pro-Tehran Houthi rebels called for “swift reprisals”.
“If Iran does need to respond and make a performance out of this, the fear is that there will be something more than just loading rockets at embassies,” said Haddad.
“It could set Iraq along the path of internal conflict and that’s something Iran can very easily instigate,” he said.
There will be difficult questions like who leaked Soleimani’s whereabouts in Iraq to US. And those will be hard to answer.
There was nothing inevitable about this conflict. Six years ago the legacy of loathing left by the Islamic Revolution began to fade. There was a multilateral agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear programme in 2015, and an unspoken mutual non-aggression pact with Suleimani during the shared campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
“For a while when we were doing counter-Isis operations, we essentially had a gentleman’s agreement with him, that his forces wouldn’t target us and we wouldn’t target him,” Kirsten Fontenrose, the former senior director for the Gulf in Trump’s national security council, told The Guardian.
But with Trump’s abrogation of the 2015 nuclear deal and the collapse of the IS caliphate, which largely removed a common foe, it was Suleimani who emerged as the US’s arch-enemy.
Fontenrose predicted that, while the Iran-backed militias in Iraq might lash out immediately, in revenge for one of their own top commanders killed alongside Suleimani, Tehran would wait and pick the time, place and manner of its retribution – again and again possibly over years to come.
“I think they’ll probably try to hit us in other parts of the world, maybe west Africa maybe Latin America to send the message that they could get us anywhere – we should never feel safe. And I think the US is going to kind of try to spread out our assault in a similar way,” she said.
“I don’t think we’re looking at a war. I think we’re looking at a series of asymmetric semi-unpredictable strikes against each other’s interests.”
But where this new raised level of tensions will lead is hard to tell. Both sides have a long history of misreading each other’s intentions and overreaching.