Dismantling the fable of ‘Iranian-Iraqi resistance to Zionism’
Fact: Nazi-Zionists have propped up both ISIS and Khomeinist Iranian proxies. This article dives into buried facts indeed as interesting as they sound, so read it.
Prologue: overcoming a false taboo for good
One of the most incredible sights to witness are the hordes of so-called “liberals” and “leftists” who time and time again dismiss any overly complex and controversially implicating explanation—positing elite orchestration of sinister preplanned activity—by detracting the researcher presenting the argument as a “conspiracy theorist.” Have you heard this slur before? I’m sure you have.
If that slur was never applied against you by reason of your truth-searching journey interfering someone else’s fantasy utopian dualist complex, maybe you weren’t digging deep enough—nearly enough—in the first place.
The irony runs deep when people on the “left”—who long pander themselves as dissenting critics of the reactionary security state, right-wing intelligence networks, and bourgeois financial establishment—are using the term “conspiracy theorist” to denigrate authentically heartfelt researchers exposing the very military-intelligence complex they themselves rail against (or so you’d imagine). Instead, they use an Anglophile slur invented by The New York Times (during the American Civil War to denigrate commonplace knowledge of British-Confederate collusion1) and leveraged by the Central Intelligence Agency (right after the JFK Assassination to slander anyone not blaming Oswald and the “reds”),2 volunteering for free as servants on behalf of the very fascistic empire they are supposed to revile.
Sometimes, acceptance of facts otherwise denigrated by the mainstream as conspiracy theory only reaches so far before one refuses to venture farther down the route of truth-searching into a realm that contradicts their presupposed worldview of artificial binaries. This is a common theme I notice in “hard left” circles—the willingness to accept complicated and controversially implicating narratives normally demeaned and instantly discredited as “conspiracy theory” is highly selective by reason of cognitive dissonance and conformation bias.
Bridging into the main substance
What if I told you, for instance, that not only did Anglo-American intelligence circles prop up al-Qaeda and ISIS, but that simultaneously they were highly active in cultivating the spread of Iranian proxies?
Complete nonsense, so you insist? “But why would CIA, MI6, and Mossad support Iranian puppets countering the very al-Qaeda menace the same Anglo-American intelligence agencies set up?” so I hear you ask. Well, as it turns out, this duplicitous narrative that “Iran is leading anti-Zionist resistance” is just that: a duplicitous narrative. Nor are Iran and its nominally “Iraqi” proxies in existence to stave off the haunting specter of al-Qaeda and ISIS; that too is a grotesque distortion of modern history. Yes, the Zionists and al-Qaeda/ISIS are well-known kin, but that does not automatically prove the Iranian vortex to be heroes fighting the Israeli-ISIS axis.
Oh, but you thought the Iranians and their so-called “Iraqi resistance” proxies are such valiant heroes on the frontlines heralding jihad on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza? Think again—by the time you finish reading this article, hopefully you’ll learn better than to view Iran as an enemy of the Anglo-American-Zionist agenda. Prepare to grasp the workings of an illuminist triangle of dialecticalism—trialecticalism.
Phase I: CIA assists Iranian stooges against Iraq (1990s)
Ever since the MI6-bankrolled ascension of the Anglo-Zionists’ pet stooge Ruhollah Khomeini into the halls of Tehran as Iran’s fresh Supreme Leader, the country became an instant breeding ground for political “Islam”-ic fundamentalist sectarianism dedicated to the Zionist aspiration of balkanizing secular Arab governments out of existence. Had not Iran received generous piles of Israeli weapons during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War,34 the industrially thriving nation of Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist programme might have emerged fully victorious and blossomed into a regional example of exemplified success, continuing to spearhead a secular banner of pluralistically bound resistance to the Western-Zionist imperialists.
Now hold on, you’re asking! Didn’t America support Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War against Khomeini? The TL;DR answer can be shortened to “‘yes’… but not quite really.” Here’s the story you probably were never told hitherto:5
[T]he USA was opposed to a quick Iraqi victory, or to enough of an Iraqi military success to force Khomeini to the negotiating table. Moreover, America used the preoccupation of Iraq with the war, and Saddam’s inability to respond to its actions except in a subdued way, to intercept his atomic programme. On 7 June 1981 Israeli F-4 aircraft flew over Saudi Arabia, managing to avoid detection by the AWACS surveillance aircraft leased to the Saudis by America, and destroyed the Iraqi atomic reactor at Ozeirak. There is evidence that CIA director William Casey supplied the Israelis with photographs of the atomic facility.
Saddam was furious — according to a former aide, ‘hopping mad’ — but he could not do anything. He did not even issue a condemnation of America. The Saudis feigned anger, particularly because the Israeli planes had violated their air space, and King Khalid offered Iraq funds to rebuild the reactor. Meanwhile communications with the USA continued, at the United Nations, between Sa’adoun Hamadi and Assistant Secretary of State Morris Draper. Among other things, the two discussed the restoration of diplomatic relations, severed since the 1967 War, and Iraq wanted to be taken off the list of states named as sponsoring terror. Saddam’s room for manoeuvre was growing smaller and smaller.
Be prepared: you are going to meet some of CIA-MI6’s friends.
Pt. I: enter Sadrism—the British concoct a fundamentalist right-wing co-optation of Shi’a Islam (1950s-60s)
A hefty portion of people reading this (or at least finding this article listed in their email/Substack feeds) are probably socialist-leaning leftists, so let me start with this point here—never has the Qutbist-Khomeinist strain of so-called “Islam”-ism as understood in its fundamentalist connotations ever been an ally of utopian socialist endeavors. “Economic Islam,”6 notes researcher Robert “Bob” Dreyfuss, was wholly aligned with laissez-faire elite-enriching capitalism:7
Islamic finance repeatedly relied on right-wing economists and Islamist politicians who advocated the privatizing, free-market views of the Chicago School. ‘Even Islamic Republics have on occasion openly embraced neo-liberalism,’ wrote Warde. ‘In Sudan, between 1992 and the end of 1993, Economics Minister Abdul Rahim Hamdi—a disciple of Milton Friedman and incidentally a former Islamic banker in London—did not hesitate to implement the harshest free-market remedies dictated by the International Monetary Fund.’
Who “laid the cornerstone for ‘economic Islam’”? It was:8
…an Iraqi Shiite clergyman named Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, the patriarch of the Sadr family and a close relative of Iraqi rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army emerged as a powerful force in Iraq in 2003. Ayatollah Sadr’s ideas provided the theoretical justification for an Islamist economic policy.
I’ll just run through a summarized history of this Sadr character: he contributed to the foundation of a clandestine terrorist group operating by the name of “Islamic Call” (Al Dawa) during the 1950s, an Iraqi arm of the fundamentalist “Islam”-ist movement rallying conservative university students against Marxists in addition to subsequently operating as a paid asset of the Anglo-French installed Iranian SAVAK intelligence services to terrorize the growing Ba’athist movement in Iraq.9 Additionally:10
Sadr’s partner in creating the Call was Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, founder of another long-lasting Iraqi fundamentalist political dynasty, whose scions would also take part in the U.S.-installed regime in 2003 through the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Sadr and Hakim were the co-organizers of right-wing political Islam in Iraq in the late 1950s.
Don’t let the SCIRI’s name slip from your mind. It’ll become relevant soon.
What is notably worthy of remembrance here—especially if you lean towards a leftist, socialist worldview—is that the “Islamic” fundamentalist movement elevated into power in 1979 in Iran represented the exact same goals reactionaries who brazenly sabotaged an anti-imperialist popular front on behalf of conservative elite interests. The Iraqi Left, namely its Communist Party, represented the interests of poor Shi’ite masses to such effectually produced bridge-building extents that Anglo-American geopolitical architects were alarmed. One CIA official observed that the Communist Party in Iraq was “the only political party that represented the Shi’a.”11
British imperialists were not the only avowed enemies of growing leftist movements in Iraq. The aforementioned Sadr and Hakim were similarly aghast to behold:12
…that hundreds of young Shiites, especially on university campuses, were abandoning their allegiance to Islam and joining the socialists, the communists, the Baath, or the pro-Nasser forces. Led by Ayatollah Hakim’s son, Mahdi al-Hakim, the Call ‘was organized along strict party lines.... The party functioned in secrecy, with small cells, anonymity, and a strict hierarchy.’
Many of Iraq’s leading clerics had long-established ties to British intelligence. For more than a century, London had maintained ties to the Shiite clergy of Iraq and Iran, especially those based in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq. From 1851 until the early 1950s, through a clever financial mechanism called the Oudh Bequest, imperial England and its intelligence service kept hundreds of Iraqi Shiite clergy in Najaf and Karbala on the British payroll. After the overthrow of England’s Iraqi king in 1958, many of those ayatollahs began organizing against the Iraqi left and the Iraqi Communist Party, and it was during this period that the Islamic Call was founded, with direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (despite the fact that the Brothers were Sunni and the Iraqis were Shiites). In 1960 a joint Sunni-Shiite declaration representing something called the Islamic Party issued a strong attack on the Iraqi government and its communist allies, an attack that was endorsed by Ayatollah Hakim. Concluded Yitzhak Nakash, the author of The Shi’is of Iraq, ‘Hakim not only supported the memorandum, but himself issued a fatwa attacking communism by name and asserting that it was incompatible with Islam.’
Pt. II: united conspiracy against the Iraqi nation-state (1970s-90s)
The organizational umbrella for reducing Iraq—from a secular country of pluralistic unity and left-wing anti-Zionist resistance into a (nominally) Shi’ite fundamentalist conservative one—was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), founded by the ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, one of ten sons of Bakr al-Sadr’s co-conspirator Muhsin al-Hakim. Mohammed Baqir’s brother Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was later a co-conspirator to the American occupation of Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s overthrow—more on this in the next section.
Anyhow, the paramilitary wing of the SCIRI was the Badr Brigades, whose membership ranks were enormously drawn from:13
…tens of thousands of Iraqi Arabs, the majority of them Shia political activists and anti-Baath operatives, who fled to Iran in the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly following the execution of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr and his sister in April 1980.
Why was Baqir al-Sadr executed, you ask? Because he, as a reactionary stoker of “conservative revolution” shenanigans against Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government, was an agitator at the behest of foreign divide-and-conquer interests who wanted to cripple Iraq. Treason is traditionally designated a capital crime.
At the time of the Iran-Iraq War, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and his military Zionist-furnished ilk of sectarian Qutbist extremists set their gazes on radicalizing the Shi’ite majority of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, spreading the “Islamic Revolution” to its neighbor on the west. This sectarian appeal during the 1980s failed to take hold, as the Iraqi Shi’a community was far from universally supportive of the Khomeini/SCIRI “revolutionary” network—during and after the war, the Badr Brigades:14
…carried out bombings and attacks on Iraqi Baath officials and offices during the 1980s and 1990s and sent units across the Iran-Iraq border in March-April 1991 to aid the uprisings in southern and northern Iraq among the Shia and Kurdish populations. These uprisings, encouraged by the U.S. government, were brutally crushed by Baath security forces and the Republican Guard after the United States refused to aid the rebels.
Ameri-Janus’s overt face: Poppy Bush
Yes, the president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, publicly encouraged and incited a rebellious insurrection to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Thousands of naïveté-seeped dupes tried in vain; thousands of naïveté-seeped dupes died in vain.151617
Ameri-Janus’s ‘covert’ face: CIA freedom fighters
The United States had backed SCIRI “before the 2003 War,”18 and the organization’s leadership in spite of its foremost association to Iranian intelligence “proved willing to work with the United States from the late 1990s onwards.”19
For a bit of context: although the SCIRI represented the umbrella for Shi’ite political Islamist revolution aimed specifically at converting Iraq into a Khomeinist “Islamic” state, it was only one entity part of a larger (CIA-backed) united front of the “Iraqi Opposition”20 comprising different ideological molds—another CIA-backed front for instance was the Iraqi National Accord.21 The Iraqi National Congress (INC) was set up in June 1992 with London headquarters, its council initially including the Sadrist-Khomeinist SCIRI and Al-Dawa.22 British author Mark Curtis points out in Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion With Radical Islam (2010) that “regular meetings” were reportedly ongoing in 1995 between the SCIRI and British foreign minister Douglas Hogg, although a mutual dissension arose between the Khomeinists and Kurds over a future balkanization of Iraq, leading to a near-collapse of the INC as the SCIRI/al-Dawa side would pull out of the council an as the British began to advise their American CIA counterparts against prioritizing support to the INC by reason that they worried a hastily executed pro-Iranian coup in Iraq would risk blowback to Western control over the country.23
Mind you, this was not because the West opposed the long-term goal of balkanizing Iraq, or purely because of the Iranian factor. It dealt precisely with whether a Western-orchestrated overthrow of Saddam Hussein would ultimately assure a “stable” prospect for continued Western imperialism to run without diametrically problematic interference. So long as the Iranian side would be brought to the table to cooperate just enough, that sufficed.
In spite of the seeming break between MI6 and SCIRI:24
…there appears to have been some significant British cooperation with SCIRI at times. In November 1998, Labour’s foreign minister, Derek Fatchett, said that he was continuing to conduct ‘regular meetings’, every two or three months, with over a dozen Iraq opposition groups, including SCIRI These meetings may have involved not just discussion about future plans for Saddam’s overthrow, but actual military cooperation. It is possible, for example, that some of the Anglo-American military strikes against Iraq in the late 1990s were in effect coordinated with SCIRI forces on the ground. On 23 November 1998 Fatchett met representatives of over a dozen Iraqi opposition groups, including SCIRI three weeks later, in December, British and US aircraft conducted a four-day bombing campaign against military targets in Iraq. London and Washington then quietly stepped up their ‘secret’ war, increasing the frequency of their bombing missions in the ‘no fly zones’ in northern and southern Iraq, flying thousands of sorties and dropping hundreds of tons of bombs. Largely uncommented on by the mainstream media, this aerial campaign marked the true start of the war against Saddam’s Iraq that culminated in the March 2003 invasion. In March 1999, RAF Tornadoes and US F-16 Falcons were targeting Iraqi radar and communications sites southeast of Baghdad at the same time as SCIRI’s ‘Voice of Rebellious Iraq’ radio was reporting popular uprisings in some southern cities. The respected intelligence website, Stratfor, noted that during and since the December 1998 bombings, the air strikes appeared to be coordinated with, or were at least paving the way for, opposition activities on the ground.
When the United States Congress in 1998 passed the Orwellian-named “Iraq Liberation Act” authorizing overt funds to the “Iraqi Opposition,” $100 million was granted to the INC for training and equipment arms—SCIRI despite being among the approved recipients of the foreign aid allocation “refused to accept such U.S. assistance” in this specific instance likely out of an awkward fear of becoming too conspicuously identified with their American sponsors, but this would hardly be the last time it was embroiled in Machiavellian entente with Washington, D.C.25
At the height of the War Against Iraq, a report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) noted the transpiration of this tidbit in 1995:26
In early March, a CIA representative met with a representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), who said SCIRI’s armed wing, the Badr Corps, Shi’a tribes, and other Shi'a resistance groups in the south would support the early March coup attempt. The details of the plan were outlined in a March 2, 1995 CIA intelligence report.
The report noted additionally that Ahmed Chalabi—the fraudster who founded and headed the INC—held talks of an anti-Saddam plot with “senior opposition figures” who told the CIA representative who implied American support of the organized plan, entailing for one the deployment of 15,000 troops to create a diversion while another would move its units around Mosul.27 Chabali simultaneously courted Iranian support for the plan, a move the CIA did not express disapproval of, and the Tehran was given a returning message through the shared INC asset proxy head:28
…that said America would welcome his involvement of Islamic forces in the operations against Saddam Hussein, on the condition that the independence and unity of Iraq are preserved, and the Iraqi borders are not changed.
Here is a longer explanation of the financial sponsorship details:29
Through its public relations arm Rendon Company, the CIA was concurrently responsible for founding and funding the INC, headed by Aḥmad Chalabî, which held its first meeting in Vienna in April 1992. Between 1992 and 1996, the CIA had paid it $12 million. This investment increased substantially in later years, however. Figures from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report even higher figures, claiming that, from March 2000 through September 2003, the INC received a total of $33 million. The US found in Chalabî’s ambitions a working façade for mobilizing Iraqi expatriates to replace the Hussein regime following its overthrow (Chossudovsky, 2004; Dizard, 2004; Peri, 2003; Source Watch, 2010). In 1992 the Clinton Administration attempted to market Chalabî and the INC in the Arab world as a legitimate opposition to Saddam Hussein, while pressuring Saudi Arabia to officially host him and his two close associates, Layth Kubba and Muhammad Ali. Although they were issued Saudi entry visas, no Saudi official met with them (al-Zubaidi, 2009). In October 1992 an opposition meeting was held in Salahuddin, Iraqi Kurdistan, under the tutelage of PUK leader Jalâl Țâlabânî and KDP leader Mas‘ûd Barzânî. Both SCIRI and the Iraqi Da'wa Party attended the meeting and developed a leadership structure and executive council whose composition was based on an explicit principle of ethnosectarianism (Allawi, 2007, p. 53).
Communications between Chalabî and powerful American officials, such as Richard Perle (chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee), appear to have allowed him to extract a written commitment from the Clinton Administration to help overthrow Saddam Hussein, namely the Iraqi Liberation Act, which was signed in October 1998. The Act referred to ‘democratic parties,’ which included the KDP, PUK, SCIRI, INC, the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK) and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement (CMM).
1995-96 coup d’etat attempts against Saddam—unlike the one in Apr. 2003—embarrassingly failed.303132
Phase II: from Sadr to Badr and sea to shining sea (2000s)
Pt. I: preparations (cir. 2002)
By various accounts, the SCIRI was a continuously useful asset for CIA machinations advancing Washington, D.C.’s purposes. One source in those discussions issued this starkly revealing admission: “SCIRI can be used by Washington to send a message to the Shia community in Iraq, to help in a military strike and as a conduit to Tehran.”33
During the August of 2002, nearing the eve of the consequentially notorious invasion of Iraq, author Curtis notes:34
In August 2002, in the run-up to the invasion, the US invited SCIRI to an opposition gathering in Washington, along with five other groups. SCIRI also played a prominent part in pre-invasion opposition conferences in London in December 2002 and in Iraqi Kurdistan in February 2003. British officials were in regular contact with SCIRI both in London and Tehran at the time of the invasion.
This detail—concerning American-granted permission for SCIRI attendance in CIA-sponsored “Iraqi Opposition” meetings—is substantiated in Anglo-American correspondent Charles Glass’s book The Northern Front (2006):35
Friday, 16 November 2002 — London
The Arabs’ only opposition militia of any size is the Badr Brigade, armed wing of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The US doesn’t care much for its Iranian backers or for Shiites, but it lets SCIRI representatives attend Iraqi opposition meetings with the CIA.
Well prior to the War [Against] Iraq:36
…many leading Iranian clerics expressed happiness about a probable American-led campaign. They assumed that it would inadvertently bolster Iraq’s ‘Shiite brothers’ and thus create a new regional ally for Iran’s own clerical regime.
And who was in charge of directly arming and training these Khomeinist-“Shi’ite” paramilitary units,37 particularly the Badr Organization?38 None other than Soleimani: yes, Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. I’ll get into the finer details on his record soon—let’s briefly jump back for a moment and recollect the Fourth Reich (Israeli) role helping foment the War Against Iraq.
Israeli fulmination against Iraq
The foremost vocal proponents of destroying Iraq who stood on the frontlines stumping for American intervention were not beholden to Iran, but the so-called “Israel.” Prof. John J. Mearsheimer documents that in spite of numerous denials put forth by mouthpieces for the Zionist Lobby strenuously insisting Israeli internal criticism of a war against Iraq and that the true entity dreaded by the Fourth Reich at that time was Iran:39
…Israel’s concerns about Iran never led it to undertake a significant effort to halt the march to war. To the contrary, top Israeli officials were doing everything in their power to make sure that the United States went after Saddam and did not get cold feet at the last moment. They considered Iraq a serious threat and were convinced that Bush would deal with Iran after he finished with Iraq. They might have preferred that America focus on Iran before Iraq, but as Kramer admits, Israelis ‘shed no tears over Saddam’s demise.’
Who told Paul Bremer to issue the consequentially disastrous de-Ba’athification order? “The answer is [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith,”40 two officials in the Bush Cabal known for their longstanding affiliations to the AIPAC-Likudnik neo-Revisionist imperial maximalism.41 The statements of Fourth Reich crime minister Ariel Sharon—channeling American-contrived rubbish4243—additionally demonstrate the sheer extent to which the Revisionist-Likud supremacist nazijew faction of the Zionists desperately aspired Ba’athist Iraq’s destruction.44454647
Once the motion was set for regime change, the Fourthreichi (“Israeli”) side was quick to distantiate themselvs from the war they advocated for, feigning neutrality.48 The pro-Zionist and Israeli effort ever since to angrily disavow records of their own regime-change-advocating history continue to pivot to the false binary of “Israel vs. Iran,”49 quick to willfully forget the Israeli arms sale to Iran in the 1980s against Saddam Hussein. Who cares if we’re at war this week with Eurasia or Eastasia—anyone who brings up the past must be a “conspiracy theorist” and “antisemite”!
Pt. II: post-invasion collusion—the untold relationship between American and Iranian geopolitics (2003-11)
It is apparently a mainstream assumption that the interests of D.C. and Tehran ran into a state of loggerhead animus purely clashing over post-Saddam Iraq. That premise is demonstrably and provably false.50
First off, the IRGC-equipped51 Badr Organization (comprising Iraqi exiles cowering in Iran until the American invasion52) even after the American invasion of Iraq did not spend the first half of the post-regime-change process opposing the Western-forced restructuring of Iraq into a de-Ba’athized overnight nightmare. Rather, it “support[ed] the U.S. military presence as a facilitator of Iraq’s transition into Shiite rule.”53 The SCIRI rebranded itself from a military to “security”-oriented grouping following the American occupation at the direction of ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim in the closing of May 2003 (he was assassinated three months later and succeeded as SCIRI head by his brother Abdul Aziz), and in the face of American pressure bent over backwards to appease the United States from top-down orders.54
Secondly, Iran sought from 2003-05 to utilize the U.S.-installed faux “democratic” governance to rally a Shi’ite Islamist domination through electoral means, thereby participating in—rather than interfering with—the American occupation.55 IRGC/Quds commander Qassem Soleimani also directed the flood of Badr lackeys to occupy fresh vacancies in the Iraqi army, security, and intelligence positions which had been emptied by the American Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) de-Ba’athification diktat creating the vacuum—the Badr Organization was in fact Soleimani’s “preferred vehicle” for achieving the pragmatically Machiavellian of using the American-perpetrated hollowing-out of Iraq’s governmental infrastructure to fill those occupations with Badr so-called “volunteers.”56 In fact, Badr head Hadi al-Ameri was a “close personal friend of Qassem Soleimani” in addition to his functionality as one of the IRGC’s “principal allies” in Iraq.57
Compounding the classic Kurdish sacrificial goats on top of the overtly CIA-backed longtime INC, top intelligence agents from the SCIRI were also recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency and trained in the mastery of molding raw intelligence into targets usable in operations.58
Author Mark Curtis additionally makes note:59
US planning for post-invasion Iraq was partly based on empowering SCIRI and other Shia leaders who were promised key roles in the country’s future, while SCIRI’s paramilitary arm, the Badr Corps, remained armed with US acquiescence after the invasion. Washington may have sought to establish a new centre of Shi’ism in Iraq to counter that in Iran — perhaps seeing Najaf, the Iraqi shrine city that is the holiest place in Shia Islam, replacing Qom, the clerical centre in Iran. For its part, SCIRI opted to accept key positions inside US-established institutions to benefit from US protection while moving the political process forward in its favour. Washington has since regarded SCIRI — which removed the word ‘revolution’ from its name in 2007 to become the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) — as its ‘privileged instrument’ with which it is in a ‘cosy relationship’, according to the International Crisis Group.
ISCI’s former leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who was succeeded by his son, Ammar, on his death in 2009, was cast as a moderate by the US and Britain, meeting President George Bush at the White House in 2004 and in 2006. Then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw described having ‘good relations’ with al-Hakim in March 2006 while in January 2007 then Defence Secretary Des Browne met al-Hakim in Baghdad, describing him as ‘a very devout man.’ When al-Hakim visited London in December 2006, Browne described him as a very significant player in Iraqi politics’ due to his position as head of the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of mainly Shia-based political parties. His family had suffered violence at the hands of the Saddam regime and he ‘personally has made a significant contribution to freedom in his country’; Browne added that he ‘had views to which we should listen’.
Dreyfuss points out the same thing concerning Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (who if you will recall from the previous section’s rundown of the anteceding history, was the brother of Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, founder of the SCIRI):60
But Bush, consciously and with deliberation, encouraged Iraq’s Islamists to reach for power. American forces and the CIA brought an ayatollah from London to Najaf, Iraq, and forged a pragmatic alliance with another ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, an Iranian cleric who became the kingmaker in Iraq after the war. The United States worked with a radical Iraqi cleric, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, who commanded the 20,000-strong paramilitary Badr Brigade, a force that was armed and trained by Iran. And it promoted a terrorist group called the Islamic Call, or Al Dawa, a group that over its forty-year history had conducted bombings, assassinations, and other violent attacks, including an attack against the American embassy in Kuwait in the early 1980s. On the Sunni front, in central Iraq, the chief political party to emerge after the war in 2003 was the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s official branch in Iraq.
‘Efficiency’ logic of Empirical Janus
With all that said, the de facto Machiavellian-Faustian seesaw between America and Iran was far from perfectly harmonious because that is the whole point to the Janus-faced divide-and-conquer: the middlemen joint assets must cater to both sides and allow the dirty work of eliminating useful-idiot sacrificial goats to be carried out by lower-ranking units for plausible deniability to ride the fence between “collaborator” and “resistance.” That was precisely why the overtly Anglo-American-friendly61 Shi’ite cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei (a longtime exile residing in London62) was brutally63 assassinated64 by hardline Sadrists promptly upon returning to Iraq in the immediate invasion aftermath—expendable proxy vassals of the empire are nothing more than the red shields (a.k.a. rothschilds) of the neo-Templars’ invisible empire.
Dialectical pendulum swings are of course a rotational cycle between differing tactical preferences rather than a reductionist assumption of material sides as simple favorite vs. archnemesis. The savage mob murder of al-Khoei shook the Shi’ite religio-political establishment, and Tehran, out of fear that unrestrained Sadrist rank-and-file violence would severely jeopardize institutional “stability,” attempted to contain the Mahdi Army’s publicly anti-American blazing hardliner figurehead Muqtada al-Sadr. One author summarizes Iran’s Janus duplicity this way:65
Broadly speaking, Iran adopted a two-pronged approach to undermining and ultimately defeating Anglo-American strategic objectives in Iraq. At one level, SCIRI and Al-Daawa were encouraged to work closely with the Americans with a view to defining the post-Baathist political order. At another level, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shia ‘street’ were utilised to push back against the occupation. In due course ‘special’ groups were formed from within the ranks of the Sadrists to oppose the occupation at a military level. From the start the Iranians were much more exercised by the British presence in Basra and the south generally than by the American presence in Baghdad and the rest of the country. At one level this was the continuation of the volatile Anglo-Iranian relationship and reflected Iran’s deep mistrust of the UK. But at a more pragmatic level, the Iranians had identified the UK military presence in Basra and the surrounding region as the Achilles heel of the occupation and accordingly mobilised and directed resources to test the limits of that vulnerability.
The outward opposition between Muqtada al-Sadr and Abdul Majid al-Khoei, was, of course, almost certainly in the context of a political power struggle rivalry and not over diametrical ideological reasons,66 much as in Syria a decade later a parallel scenario unfolded: there would fluctuate between ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra on one hand control/rivalry-induced mutual bloodshed and on the other hand joint collaboration against Hezbollah at the Syria-Lebanon border.
In fact, the characterization of Iran’s Janus geopolitial playbook as “two-pronged” is well-substantiated across multiple records.67 As journalist Nader Uskowi further explains, Soleimani not only directed Badr tactical intersection with American policy, but additionally funded the far more hardline Mahdi Army responsible for direct clashes against American-Coalition occupation.68 (although it was noted that Mahdi received significantly less direct Iranian patronage than Badr,69 which more or less indicates the Iranian military-intelligence deep state elites’ far greater preoccupation with forging a Machiavellian-Faustian relationship with the U.S. than diametrically opposing them) The Mahdi uprising was crushed by the U.S.-Coalition in Apr. 2004, but Soleimani was not—the Mahdi movement presented itself as an independent Iraqi movement unaffiliated with the Iranian Quds Forces, not only sanitizing their own image as the “pure Iraqi resistance” they weren’t, but also granting Soleimani plausible deniability. The Faustian Iranian general apparently held no qualms shamelessly pivoting between both realms as frontline Khomeinist fanatics were used as cannon fodder bleeding for Iranian geopolitics in clashes killing some five hundred American soldiers; once ISIS became a top menace after years of American-Iranian overseen de-Ba’athification enabling AQI-ISI’s otherwise-undercut inroads among economically desperate Sunni ex-Ba’athists, the sectarian Shi’ite militias under Soleimani’s helm were suddenly once again aligned openly with the Kurdish separatists and American-Zionist occupiers vowing to exterminate the very ISIS/DAESH problem they all undoubtedly contributed to the creation of.70
Cui bono?
Iran.71 It’s that simple: the American-Zionist invasion of Iraq was a victory for Iran.72 The senior historian to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff described the 2003 destruction of Iraq as an “opportunity to achieve what Iran could not achieve in eight years of bloody slaughter in the 1980s.”73
AQI-ISI and Badr-Mahdi-KH: feedback loop
Outwardly, the sectarian extremists on the “Sunni” side and sectarian extremists on the “Shi’ite” side appeared to constitute diametrical enemies vowing the annihilation of one another as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) clashed with the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army, Badr Corps and Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH). Yet reprisals were collectively applied, torturing and mass-murdering civilians as Sunnis were blamed for al-Qaeda crimes and Shi’ites for Iranian-backed Badr/Mahdi/KH crimes.
So before you assume AQI’s obviously grotesque war crimes automatically define the Iranian-backed militias as heroes by comparison, maybe take a gander at Dreyfuss’s 2007 summary of the Iraq War in Mother Jones describing the Mahdi Army as:74
A cluster of militias led by the controversial and charismatic (in a grim-faced sort of way) thirtysomething [sic] cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, scion of the Sadr family that helped found Dawa. Its tens of thousands of armed men are only loosely under Sadr’s control. Like sciri [sic], the Mahdi Army has spawned death squads, including a possibly rogue unit in Baghdad led by Abu Deraa, ‘the Zarqawi of the Shiites.’ Sadr, who also has ties to Iran, is more of an Iraqi nationalist than other Iran-allied Shiites.
From the SCIRI-Badr perspective, terrorism by Al-Qaeda in Iraq did not hinder their sectarian Shi’ite class-collaborationist Iranian-aligned goals. They were instead a tremendously opportune boon to present themselves as protecting saviors of Iraq’s Shi’ite majority against AQI. Per a 2007 hearing in the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:75
The Badr Corps and the Jaysh al-Mahdi share some goals and concerns, but not others. They both seek to establish Shiite sharia law in Iraq and to ensure Shiite domination of the country. They are both concerned about Sunni rejectionism and the Sunni insurgency, which has provided the principal justification for their efforts to recruit and maintain their militias. Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s relentless attacks on Shiite civilians have powerfully supported their justification and aided their recruiting.
From the Iranian perspective of shrewd blood-sacrificing calculations, why not fund the AQI opposition to exacerbate the jihadist insurgency problem ever helpful for the justification of state-sponsored Khomeinist death-squad terrorism? That was exactly what happened—all the while the Iranians colluded with American “Crusader” Zionist occupiers on their “cooperationist” face of the Janus complex, they ran clandestine coordination with AQI on the faux “sabotage America” face of the exact same Janus empirical theater.76 Both America77 and Iran in their own trajectories supported Al-Qaeda in Iraq in a war advocated by so-called “Israel”—the only loser was the people of Iraq, and by the next decade spilling over into Syria.
And so, Bob Dreyfuss concluded with the following to his masterfully comprehensive 2005 book: “The devil’s game continues.”78
Phase III: accomplished Anglo-Zionist proxy ouroboros (2010s-present)
That Badr-Mahdi-KH ethnic cleansing of Iraqi Sunni Muslims drove al-Qaeda and ISIS recruitment inroads didn’t deter those Iranian proxies from mass-murdering Sunni Ba’athists who had originally had nothing to do with AQI. The American-overseen “Iraqi” Minister of Interior (MOI)—dominated by Iranian-trained ideological Khomeinist Iraqi exiles who flooded Baghdad in the wake of the American brutal occupation of the country—and its Quick Reaction Forces (Wolf Brigade) alongside the Badr Organization were accused of orchestrating sectarian mass murders against the Iraqi Arab Sunni minority; additionally, “few citizens believed” the SCIRI-Badr claim of relinquishing their weapons.79
The Guardian reported in 2013 of Badr’s crimes against humanity:80
After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.
…
Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were unaware of what the commandos were doing. ‘Until I left, the Americans knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the interrogations and they knew the detainees. Even some of the intelligence about the detainees came to us from them – they are lying.’
Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.
Reuters took sober note that:81 (← read the linked article for extensive details)
…Washington, seeking to defeat Sunni jihadists and stabilise Iraq, has consistently overlooked excesses by Shi’ite militias sponsored by the Iraqi government. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both worked with Badr and its powerful leader, Hadi al-Amiri, whom many Sunnis continue to accuse of human rights abuses.
Yes, the whole time, AMERICA AND IRAN *CONSCIOUSLY* ENABLED ONE ANOTHER’S TERRORISM AGAINST THE IRAQI PEOPLE. And remember who clamored hard for this barbaric war against the Iraqi people: the Judeo-Nazi Lobby.
And the Palestinians? Refugees in Iraq from Palestine were granted extraordinarily generous privileges by Saddam Hussein and faced intense persecution after the Zionist overthrow of the Ba’athist government ushered in Iranian stooges violently robbing the Palestinian refugees of their longstanding human dignity, many detained, tortured, and forcibly disappeared by the Zionist-Iranian controlled “Iraqi” government for no apparent reason other than that they were treated well by Saddam Hussein and also because the majority of them are Sunni.828384
The so-called “Iraqi Resistance” is pandered by useful-idiot dupes for the mainstream “Axis of Resistance” narrative as courageous fighters avenging the suffering of Gazans by firing endless missiles into the Zionist regime, but their record proves otherwise: in late Nov. 2024, they instantly recoiled after a threat issued by the Fourth Reich.85
Who comprises the ranks of this so-called “Iraqi Resistance” whose organizational umbrella is known as the “Popular Mobilization Forces” (PMF)? One integrated dimension is none other than—you guessed it—the Badr Organization!86 The majority of operations commanders in the PMF “are senior members of Iranian-backed militias such as Asaib Ahl al Haq and the Badr Organization.”87
Later in Dec. 2024, during the final days of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Ba’athist government—the last Arab anti-Zionist state on the planet sponsoring the cause of Palestinian human liberation—did his so-called “Iraqi allies” among the PMF provide robust assistance to stave off the HTS insurgency? No.888990 Instead, the supposedly “anti-ISIS” Iraqi government after Assad’s ouster held amicable talks with Al-Qaeda in Syria head and former ISIS-affiliated, Zionist-appeasing commander Abu Mohammed al-Jewlani to discuss reopening the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline,9192 demonstrating once and for all that Iran’s Badr-PMF proxies were never installed in power for the primary purpose of countering al-Qaeda/ISIS terrorism nor the Zionist regime and their collaborationists, nor to champion the cause of liberation Palestine from Zionist occupation.
Penultimate closing answer
So you might be among those still left wondering by this point, perhaps: why is Anglo-American foreign policy contradictory, seeing they supported Iran then and have funded anti-Iranian al-Qaeda proxies for over the past decade? The American and British sponsorship of al-Qaeda and ISIS, after all, are documented facts confirmed by researchers including The Dissident,93 Kit Klarenberg,94 and vanessa beeley,95 to name a few outstanding writers.
The answer is very simple: the core goal is not the long-term advancement of any particular side of Qutbist-“Islamist” jihadism, rather the temporal sustained existence of sectarian divide-and-conquer between Sunnism-co-opting al-Qaeda/ISIS factions and Shi’ism-co-opting Iranian-Khomeinist-PMF factions, both of which exist to make sure no alternative of cross-sect, politically secular, pluralistically unifying Arab nationalism is allowed to thrive and pose direct headaches to the Zionist project.
When the U.S. began a “switch” in the late 2000s and especially early 2010s from quiet coordination with Iranian-SCIRI factions to rehabilitating Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) salafi-jihadists into a tool against “Iranian proxies,” there was no contradiction or authentically scurrying backtrack in the CIA script, because they were two sides to the same coin of Zionist-expansionist temporal preservation: whether arming sectarian extremism from the nominally Sunni or nominally Shi’ite sides of the coin was nothing more than a Janus-faced balance act to ensure each side would never fully quash one another too soon, ensuring the existence of each side would continue to fuel the “opposing” sectarian umbrella’s raison d’être.
The real enemy to Anglo-Zionist-Nazi empire was never al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, IRGC, Kata’ib Hezbollah, the Badr Organization, or the Mahdi Army. Nay, their real potentially formidable geopolitical enemies were the Arab nationalist Ba’athist governments of Iraq and Syria led by Saddam and Assad (also Lebanon’s Hezbollah when it aligned wholly with Assad in the 2010s). I’ve explained this before:
Epilogue: lessons learned(?)
It appears that in every human generation, a better part of the population—even “well-meaning” dissenters—like to imagine they already know it all. Any renegade and robust explanation of the larger perceptual framework shattering their presupposed binaries are instantly dismissed not because the scoffer who dismisses it researched the facts in 99% of cases to comprehend the full picture for themselves, but because it is fundamentally easier and ego-satisfying to castigate independent researchers arriving at different conclusions as “conspiracy theorists”—a term to be lazily equivocated a la association fallacy to “right-wing extremists” and “Holocaust deniers”—than to admit their own fundamental ignorance.
Until those Janus-faced smokescreens are sifted past to recognize the full picture at hand, the devil’s game continues unabated to brainwash the populace.
Jan. 4, 1863, “England and America: British Feeling and Policy Toward America,” The New York Times, p. 2.
Apr. 1, 1967, “Document 1035-960: Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” Central Intelligence Agency.
Jane Hunter (Nov. 3, 1986), “Israeli Arms Sales to Iran,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Special Report, p. 2.
Bahran Alavi (Apr. 1, 1988), “Khomeini’s Iran: Israel’s Ally,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Special Report, pp. 4-6.
Said K. Aburish (2000), “Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge,” ch. VIII, pp. 205-6.
(free full PDF book download here)
Dreyfuss’s intent of course was not to scapegoat the Islamic religion, rather to highlight the extent to which political fundamentalists co-opted and hijacked the religion. He makes this distinction clear in the introduction to his book where he states (pp. 2-3):
Unlike the faith, with fourteen centuries of history behind it, Islamism is of more recent vintage. It is a political creed with its origins in the late nineteenth century, a militant, all-encompassing philosophy whose tenets would appear foreign or heretical to most Muslims of earlier ages and that still appear so to many educated Muslims today. Whether it is called pan-Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, it is an altogether different creature from the spiritual interpretation of Muslim life as contained in the Five Pillars of Islam. It is, in fact, a perversion of that religious faith.
Bob Dreyfuss (2005), “Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,” pp. 172-73.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 176-77.
Brian L. Steed (Feb. 15, 2019), “Iraq War: The Essential Reference Guide,” p. 105.
Ibid.
Khidhir Hamza, Jeff Stein (2000), “Saddam’s Bombmaker: The Daring Escape of the Man Who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon,” ch. XII, p. 251.
Anca Carrington, Leon M. Jeffries (2003), “Iraq: Issues, Historical Background, Bibliography,” pt. I, ch. IX, p. 110.
Geoffrey Perret (2004), “Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power Into a Threat to America's Future,” p. 320.
Bamo Nouri (Sep. 9, 2021), “Elite Theory and the 2003 Iraq Occupation by the United States: How US Corporate Elites Created Iraq’s Political System,” ch. V.
Michael J. Boyle (Apr. 15, 2014), “Violence After War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States,” p. 280.
Remind you of that so-called “Syrian Opposition” insurrectionist umbrella against Assad in more recent times?
Kenneth Pollack (Sep. 2002), “The Threatening Storm: What Every American Needs to Know Before an Invasion in Iraq,” p. 288.
Mark Curtis (2010), “Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam,” pp. 232-33.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 233-34.
Ibid.
Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-WV) (Sep. 8, 2006), “Report on the Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress: Together with Additional and Minority Views,” sec. II, p. 13. United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., pp. 14-15.
Tareq Y. Ismael (2015), “Iraq in the Twenty-First Century: Regime Change and the Making of a Failed State,” pp. 87-88.
Mar. 14, 1995, “Iraqi coup attempt fails, reports say,” The Baltimore Sun.
Youssef M. Ibrahim (Jun. 20, 1995), “Iraq Reportedly Cracks Down On Clan That Tried a Coup,” The New York Times.
Robin Wright (Sep. 8, 1996), “Hussein Torpedoed CIA Plot Against Him, Officials Say,” Los Angeles Times.
2002, “The Echo of Iran,” Iss. 156-165, p. 35.
Curtis (2010), op. cit., p. 324.
Charles Glass (2006), “The Northern Front: An Iraq War Diary.”
Markus Kaim (2008), “Great Powers and Regional Orders: The United States and the Persian Gulf,” ch. VIII, p. 135.
Hooman Majd (2010), “The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge,” p. 268.
Joseph Alpher, Yossi Alpher (2019), “Winners and Losers in the ‘Arab Spring’: Profiles in Chaos.”
John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt (Aug. 27, 2007), “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” ch. VII, p. 261.
Tom Lansford, “The War in Iraq,” p. 77.
Michael Lind (Apr. 9, 2003), “How neoconservatives conquered Washington — and launched a war,” Salon.
Dec. 24, 2002, “Sharon: Iraq may be transporting banned weapons,” Irish Examiner.
Aftab Kamal Pasha (2003), “Iraq: Sanctions and Wars,” p. 127.
Gideon Alon (Aug. 13, 2002), “Sharon to Panel: Iraq Is Our Biggest Danger,” Ha’aretz.
Anton La Guardia, Inigo Gilmore, David Rennie (Aug. 17, 2002), “Sharon urges America to bring down Saddam,” The Telegraph.
Aluf Benn (Feb. 18, 2003), “Sharon Says U.S. Should Also Disarm Iran, Libya and Syria,” Ha’aretz.
Ari Shavit (Apr. 13, 2003), “Ariel Sharon to Haaretz: ‘Iraq War Created an Opportunity With the Palestinians We Can't Miss,’” Ha’aretz.
James Bennet (Mar. 11, 2003), “Threats and Responses: Israel’s Role; Not Urging War, Sharon Says,” The New York Times.
Stephen M. Walt (Feb. 8, 2010), “I don’t mean to say I told you so, but…” Foreign Policy.
Sep. 2, 2003, “An Unlikely Alliance,” RANE.
Christopher Paul Anzalone (2013), “Badr Organization,” The Iraq War Encyclopedia.
James H. Lebovic (Jun. 20, 2010), “The Limits of U.S. Military Capability: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq,” pp. 87-88.
Feb. 27, 2018, “US-Iran Political and Economic Relations Handbook - Strategic Information and Developments,” p. 252.
W. Andrew Terrill (2004), “The United States and Iraq’s Shi’ite Clergy: Partners Or Adversaries?” p. 26.
Kenneth Katzman (2010), “Iran-Iraq Relations,” p. 1.
Nader Uskowi (Nov. 9, 2018), “Temperature Rising: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Wars in the Middle East,” p. 52.
Afshon Ostovar (2016), “Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,” p. 209.
Nicolas S. J. Davies (2010), “Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq,” ch. XIII, pp. 258-59.
Curtis (2010), op. cit., pp. 324-25.
Dreyfuss (2005), op. cit., p. 340.
Patrick Cockburn (2008), “Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq,” ch. X, pp. 121-22.
W. Andrew Terrill (2003), “Nationalism, Sectarianism, and the Future of the U.S. Presence in Post-Saddam Iraq,” p. 22.
Ofira Seliktar (Dec. 17, 2019), “Iran, Revolution, and Proxy Wars,” pp. 136-37.
Mahan Abedin (2019), “Iran Resurgent: The Rise and Rise of the Shia State,” p. 119.
Ibid., p. 120.
Terrill (2003), loc cit.
Uskowi (2018), loc. cit.
Ibid., p. 53.
Anthony H. Cordesman, Martin Kleiber (Sep. 30, 2007), “Iran’s Military Forces and Warfighting Capabilities: The Threat in the Northern Gulf,” p. 206.
Alpher, Alpher (2019), loc. cit.
Jeffrey Record (2010), “Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq,” p. 124.
Hal Brands (May 2, 2023), “The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age,” ch. XL, p. 1,003.
Alma Keshavarz (2023), “The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps: Defining Iran’s Military Doctrine,” ch. VII, p. 84.
Bob Dreyfuss (Mar. 1, 2007), “Iraq 101: Players, Haters – Iraqi Politics at a Glance,” Mother Jones, vol. XXXII, Iss. I-V, p. 59.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-DE) (Jan.-Feb. 2007), “Securing America’s Interest in Iraq: The Remaining Options: Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations,” p. 195. United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Thomas R. Mattair (Jun. 30, 2008), “Global Security Watch—Iran: A Reference Handbook,” ch. V, pp. 116-17.
James Corbett (Sep. 11, 2021), “False Flags: The Secret History of Al Qaeda,” The Corbett Report.
Dreyfuss (2005), op. cit., p. 342.
Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-IL), Sen. Richard J. Lugar (R-IN) (Apr. 2006), “Annual Report, International Religious Freedom: Report Submitted to the Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate by the Department of State, in Accordance with Section 102 of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998,” p. 579. United States Department of State.
Mona Mahmood (Mar. 6, 2013), “Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres,” The Guardian.
Ned Parker (Dec. 14, 2015), “Torture by Iraqi militias: the report Washington did not want you to see,” Reuters.
Sep. 9, 2006, “Nowhere to Flee: The Perilous Situation of Palestinians in Iraq,” Human Rights Watch.
Adnan Abu Amer (Jan. 8, 2018), “Why is Iraq now stripping Palestinians of their rights?” Al-Monitor.
Dec. 20, 2018, “Palestinians in Iraq fearful after loss of Saddam-era privileges,” Reuters.
Ameer al-Kaabi, Michael Knights, Hamdi Malik (Nov. 26, 2024), “Iraqi Militias Downscaling Their Anti-Israel Actions,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Michael Knights, Crispin Smith, Hamdi Malik (Sep. 2, 2021), “Profile: Badr Organization,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Johanna Moore (Mar. 19, 2024), “The Leadership and Purpose of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces,” Institute for the Study of War.
Suadad al-Salhy (Dec. 6, 2024), “Inside the Iraqi factions’ decision to keep out of Syria,” Middle East Eye.
Tom O’Connor (Dec. 7, 2024), “As Assad Prepares Last Stand, His Ally Iraq Rules Out Military Intervention,” Newsweek.
Nicole Grajewski (Dec. 9, 2024), “Why Did Iran Allow Bashar al-Assad’s Downfall?” Carnegie Endowment.
Nadim Kawach (Jan. 3, 2025), “Assad’s fall spurs calls to revive Iraq-Syria oil pipeline,” Arabian Gulf Business Insight.
Sinan Mahmoud (Aug. 12, 2025), “Iraq and Syria discuss revival of Kirkuk–Baniyas oil pipeline,” The National.
