The U.S.

Is Providing Air Cover for Ethnic

Cleansing in Iraq
Irans Shiite militias arent a whole lot better than
the Islamic State.

BY MICHAEL WEISS, MICHAEL PREGENT-MARCH 28, 2015

American warplanes have begun bombing the Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Tikrit in
order to bail out the embattled, stalled ground campaign launched by Baghdad and
Tehran two weeks ago. This operation, billed as revenge for the Islamic State (IS)
massacre of 1,700 Shiite soldiers at Camp Speicher last June, was launched without any
consultation with Washington and was meant to be over by now, three weeks after
much triumphalism by the Iraqi government about how swiftly the terrorist redoubt in

Saddam Husseins hometown was going to be retaken.

U.S. officials have variously estimated that either 23,000 or 30,000 pro-government
forces were marshaled for the job, of which only slender minority were actual Iraqi
soldiers. The rest consisted of a consortium of Shiite militia groups operating under
the banner of Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Population Mobilization Units (PMU), which
was assembled in answer to afatwah issued by Iraqs revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali
Sistani in June 2014 following ISISs blitzkrieg through northern Iraq. To give you a
sense of the force disparity, the PMUs are said to command 120,000 fighters, whereas
the Iraqi Army has only got 48,000 troops.
Against this impressive array of paramilitaries, a mere 400 to 1,000 IS fighters have
managed to hold their ground in Tikrit, driving major combat operations to a halt. This
is because the Islamic State is resorting to exactly the kinds of lethal insurgency tactics
which al Qaeda in Iraq (its earlier incarnation) used against the more professional and
better-equipped U.S. forces. BuzzFeeds Mike Giglio has ably documented the extent to
which IS has relied upon improvised explosive devices, and just how sophisticated
these have been. Even skilled explosive ordnance disposal teams many guided by
Iranian specialists are being ripped apart by what one termed the hidden enemy in
Tikrit.
Because IS controls hundreds of square miles of terrain in Iraq, it has an unknown
number of bomb manufacturing plants, and because it knows the terrain so well, its
been able to booby-trap houses and roads. Even Shiite prayer beads left lying on the
ground are thought to be rigged to explosives. One Kurdish official told Giglio that the
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters alone have defused or detonated more than 6,000 IEDs
along their 650-mile front with ISIS since the war began in August.
The toll this has taken on the militias is extraordinary. Cemetery workers in Najaf told
the Washington Post that as many as 60 corpses are arriving per day. Former Defense
Intelligence Agency officer Derek Harvey tweeted last week that an Iraqi Shiite source
told him the number of militia war dead from the Tikrit offensive so far may be as high
as 6,000. So the militias triumphalism, much of it no doubt manufactured by Irans
propaganda machine, proved to be misplaced. Jeffrey White, another former DIA
analyst now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes theres a failure of
will on the part of the militias and government forces. They just didnt have the
sufficient desire and determination to take the fight forward given the casualties
theyve been sustaining.
So now, the same Iraqi government which earlier dismissed the need for U.S. airpower
had to put in an eleventh-hour request for it, lest an easy victory descend into

embarrassing folly. But the past few months ought to have shown that even indirectly
relying on Iranian agents to conduct a credible ground war against Sunni extremists
was always a lousy idea for three reasons: those agents hate the United States and have
threatened to attack its interest in Iraq; theyre guilty of IS-style atrocities themselves;
and theyre lousy at fighting an entrenched jihadist insurgency.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told Congress on March 3: What we are
watching carefully is whether the militias they call themselves the popular
mobilization forces whether when they recapture lost territory, whether they engage
in acts of retribution and ethnic cleansing. He neednt watch any longer. They are
engaging in exactly that.

The crimes of war

On March 10, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR) released a comprehensive study of human rights violations committed by
both IS and pro-Iraqi forces. The Islamic State, OHCHR concluded, has likely
committed genocide against the Yazidis, a ethno-religious minority in Iraq, in a
catalogue of war crimes and crimes against humanity that include gang-rape and
sexual slavery. But OHCHRs language is equally unambiguous in condemning the
other side on the battlefield: Throughout the summer of 2014, the report noted,
[PMUs], other volunteers and [Shiite] militia moved from their southern heartlands
towards [Islamic State]-controlled areas in central and northern Iraq. While their
military campaign against the group gained ground, the militias seem to operate with
total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake. [Italics added.]
Sunni villages in Amerli and Suleiman Bek, in the Salah ad-Din province, have been
looted or destroyed by militiamen operating on the specious assumption that all
inhabitants once ruled by IS must be IS sympathizers or collaborators. Human Rights
Watch has also lately discovered that the liberation of Amerli last October another
PMU/Iranian-led endeavor, only this one abetted by U.S. airstrikes in the early stages
was characterized by wide-scale abuses including the looting and burning of homes
and business of Sunni residents of villages surrounding Amerli. The apparent aim was
ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch concluded, from witness accounts, that
building destruction in at least 47 predominantly Sunni villages was methodical and
driven by revenge and intended to alter the demographic composition of Iraqs
traditionally diverse provinces of Salah al-Din and Kirkuk.
Sunnis werent the only demographic subjected to collective punishment. A 21-yearold Shiite Turkmen from the Yengija village was burned with cigarettes and tied to a

ceiling fan by militants of Saraya Talaa al-Khorasani, another Iran-backed militia. He

told Human Rights Watch: They kept saying, You are ISIS, and I kept denying it.
They were beating me randomly on my face, head, shoulders using water pipes and the
butts of their weapons. They went to have lunch and then came back and beat us for
an hour and half. Later that night they asked me if I was Shia or Sunni. I told them I
was Shia Turkoman and they ordered me to prove it by praying the Shia way. They
kept me for nine days.
This account tracks with a mountain of social media-propagated video and
photographic evidence showing that Iraqs Shiite militias are behaving rather like the
Islamic State beheading and torturing people they assail as quislings, and then
exhibiting these atrocities as a means of recruitment. More worrying, a six-month
investigation by ABC News has found that U.S.-trained Iraqi Security Force personnel
are also guilty of anti-Sunni pogroms, with officers from Iraqs Special Forces shown in
one video accusing an unarmed teenaged boy of being a shooter (a charge the boy
denies) before opening fire on him.

Looking the other way

The Obama administrations counterterrorism-driven policy for the Middle East, and a
quietly pursued diplomatic reconciliation with Iran, has resulted in Americas
diminishment of grave war crimes committed by Irans clients and proxies, and the
problem is hardly just confined to Iraq. In Syria, for instance, the National Defense
Force, a conglomerate of militias trained and equipped by Irans Revolutionary Guards
Corps-Quds Force (IRGC) a U.S.-designated terrorist entity has been accused by
the Syrian Network for Human Rights and the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights,
of [burning] at least 81 people to death, including 46 civilians; 18 children, 7 women,
and 35 of the armed opposition fighters, along with other pro-Assad forces. The State
Department has offered condolences to Irans President Hasan Rouhani on the death
of his mother; to date, it has not said a word about the immolation of these Syrians at
the hands of a Quds Force-built guerrilla army.
All of which raises the question: Does the United States have a common interest, as
Secretary of State John Kerry phrasedit, with a regime in Tehran whose proxies are
currently burning people alive in their houses, playing soccer with severed human
heads, and ethnically cleansing and razing whole villages to the ground?
It really ought to surprise no one in the U.S. government that what amounts to an
Iranian occupation of the Levant and Mesopotamia would lead to an increase in
jihadist bloodletting. Dempsey has less of an excuse than most. A four-star general, he

formerly commanded the First Armored Division in Baghdad, which in 2004 was the
unit redirected, as it was about to go home, to fight the Shiite militias who had taken
over Karbala and other southern cities, so he would have seen the precursor to the
PMUs in action. Yet somehow managed to brief legislators that the Islamic Republics
role in Iraq might yet prove positive provided, that is, it didnt lead to an uptick in
sectarianism.This is like arguing that death wouldnt be so bad if it didnt result in
being dead. It did not take much, however, for the scales to fall from Dempseys eyes.
He took a helicopter tour of Baghdad last week andnoticed the plethora of flags, only
one of which happens to be the Iraqi flag, The rest, he told reporters to evident
dismay, belonged to Shiite militias. (He might have also added that posters of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are now omnipresent in the
Iraqi capital where ones of Saddam Hussein used to be.)
Everyone from Gen. David Petraeus to Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani is
acknowledging the obvious: that Shiite militias pose more of a long-term threat to the
stability of Iraq than does the Islamic State. Even Ayatollah Sistani has
madenoises lately about the rampant abuses committed by the volunteers he
assembled through a religious edict.
While it is true that most Iraqis do not wish to live in a state of vassalage to Iran, it also
true that most of the units in the PMUs are well-known subsidiaries of the Quds
Force. The indoctrination theyve been getting is anti-American, Khomeinist
ideology, said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias and author of a
comprehensive survey of them put out by the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy. Sectarianism has been promoted whether we like it or not.
According to Chris Harmer, a former U.S. Naval officer and now an analyst at the
Institute for the Study of War, there really is no dressing up who the supposed good
guys in Iraq now are. They killed hundreds of Americans during the war, Harmer
said. These are not affiliated organizations they are same guys, the same
organizations. And can you find me anybody stupid enough to say that what Iran
wants is a stable, unified, secular, non-sectarian Iraq?

The enemies of our enemy are our enemy

Indeed, quite apart from having American blood on their hands and American
interests furthest from their mind, Shiite militias following Tehrans favorite
playbook have also taken to conspiratorially blaming the United States for inventing
and militarily supporting the Islamic State, while decrying any American anti-IS
involvement in Iraq. Take, for instance, the Badr Corps, headed by Hadi al-Amiri, the

commander of Hashd al-Shaabi, and a man infamous for using a power drill to pierce
the skulls of his adversaries, or so the State Department found in a 2009 cable to
Washington, which also alleged that al-Amiri may have personally ordered attacks on
up to 2,000 Sunnis. (Despite this grim record, al-Amiri was invited to the Obama
White House in 2011 when he was Iraqs transportation minister.)
Lately al-Amiri taken to both boasting that Stuart Jones, the current U.S. ambassador
to Iraq, personally offered him close air support, whilereprehending those Iraqis who
kiss the hands of the Americans and get nothing in return. But when it comes to
Tehran, hes full of praise for the unconditional support his country has received.
Now al-Amiri has found a more modest tongue. He told the Guardians Martin
Chulov on March 26: We did not ask for [U.S. airstrikes on Tikrit] and we have no
direct contact with the Americans. From what I understand, Prime Minister Haidar alAbadi made the request. However, we respect his decision.
Kataeb Hezbollah may be the only Iraqi Shiite militia in Iraq to be designated a
terrorist entity by the United States, but that hasnt stopped it from driving around in
Abrams tanks, Humvees, armored personnel carriers, MRAPs, and toting M4 and M16
rifles all the accidental largesse of Uncle Sam, which has sent $1 billion in military
equipment to Baghdad, but has no oversight as to which actors, foreign or domestic,
ultimately receive what. An abundance of U.S. weapons hasnt dissuaded Kataeb
Hezbollah from openly inciting violence against the American-led coalition to destroy
the Islamic State.
Recently we had them accusing the United States of supplying [IS] via helicopters,
said Smyth. Kataeb Hezbollah then came out with a bullshit article claiming that they
shot down a British cargo plane carrying arms to [IS]. They also said they were going
to move antiaircraft missile batteries in Anbar and north of Baghdad to counter U.S.
airdrops to [IS]. Whenever they sense too much of a U.S. influence in Iraq, they start to
threaten American soldiers. Kataeb Hezbollah, it bears mentioning, is headed by Abu
Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iranian spy who is widely believed to have planned the
bombings of both the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s. Theres even
a photograph of him holding up a Kuwaiti newspaper fingering him for this act of
international terrorism. Kataeb Hezbollah has also been caught on video
playingbongos with severed human heads.
Another prominent Shiite militia is Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous,
which in 2007 set an ambush which killed 5 U.S. servicemen in Karbala. It, too, now
also happily motors around Iraq in U.S. armored vehicles, some of them thought to
have been stolen from the U.S. consulate in Basra. One unnamed U.S. official told Al
Jazeera that Asaib was most recently responsible for burning down homes in Albu Ajil,

a village near Tikrit in retaliation for massacres carried out by the Islamic State. It has
also been implicated in the abduction and murder of Sheik Qassem Sweidan al-Janabi,
one of the Sunni tribal leaders who worked cheek-by-jowl with U.S. forces in fighting al
Qaeda in Iraq during the so-called Awakening period.
Remarkably, the demagogic Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, once the bane of U.S. forces
in Baghdad, condemned al-Janabis murder in language more severe than anything
contrived by the U.S. State Departments Marie Harf or Jennifer Psaki. Did not I tell
you that Iraq will suffer from the brazen militias? al-Sadr was quoted as saying. Did I
tell you that the army must handle the reins? Al-Sadr demanded that Shiite headloppers be punished and actually backed up his rhetoric with action, suspending the
participation of his own al-Salam Brigades and al-Yaom ak-Mawood military in
ongoing operations. (He unsuspended these militias a week ago to help with the battle
in Tikrit, but so far, because of the frozen nature of the ground campaign, none of the
Sadrists have seen any real action.)

Assads friends in Iraq want to kill Americans

The Basij-ization of Iraq of was both inevitable, given the defunct and corrupted state
of the U.S.-trained military, and Irans outsize influence in Baghdad even before ISIS
conquered a third of the country. When the Iraqi Army was destroyed last July, this
was a gift to Iran to build up these militias, Gen. Najim Jibouri, the former mayor and
police chief of Tal Afar, a crucial Iraqi border town now held by the Islamic State, said
in a recent interview. A few days ago, Khaled al-Obaidi, Iraqs minister of defense,
went to Tikrit, but the militias wouldnt allow him to enter. He had to stay in Samarra.
All of which makes risible U.S. officials continued emphasis that there is no direct
American coordination with Iran or its proxies. Gen. James Terry, the U.S.
commander of the coalition, claims that the ongoing Iraqi and coalition air strikes are
setting the conditions for offensive action to be conducted by Iraqi forces currently
surrounding Tikrit. Iraqi security forces supported by the coalition will continue to
gain territory.
One of the authors personally witnessed in Baghdad how the IRGC targets make their
way into the U.S. targeting queue. Shiite militia commanders pass Quds Force-selected
targets to Badr-affiliated Iraqi Security Force commanders on the ground (many of
whom are, in fact, agents of the militias), who then pass them on as legitimate targets
to Iraqs Defense Ministry representatives in the Joint Operations Centers where U.S.
advisors then put those targets into a queue for aerial sorties. This is the pattern of
target development that U.S. forces tried to stop during the American occupation of

Iraq when there was actually a military strategy for countering Iranian influence in
the country.
But this nefarious chain of putting intelligence into action and making the United
States do the dirty work has been resurrected. Soleimani knows it, al-Muhandis
knows it, al-Amiri and his Badr agents in the Iraq Security Forces know it so, too,
should the Pentagon, whatever claims to the contrary it puts out. Iranian intelligence
operatives are now Americas eyes on the ground.
What does this mean for Tikrit?The Islamic State will no doubt be flushed from the city
or bombed to death eventually, but it will be a tactical loss for IS, not a strategic one.
Theyll still have Mosul and most of Anbar province. The Institute for the Study of
Wars Chris Harmer notes that this will have a direct bearing on bigger fights ahead.
These militiamen will say, This is how badly we got beat up in Tikrit, who wants to
volunteer to storm that castle in Mosul?
Even if Irans proxies do end up massing on Mosul, theyll remain the ultimate
occupying force in post-Islamic State Tikrit. The Washington Posts Loveday
Morris tweeted on March 26 that Kataeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq have now
suspended their operations in the city, no doubt out of a desire to not appear to be
coordinating with the hated United States. But once the Pentagon declares victory, the
militias will no doubt try to hijack it and move right in to serve as the occupying force
in Tikrit.
Despite reports on Thursday that three Shiite militias were withdrawing from
operations in objection to U.S. airstrikes, now the news has come that theyve called off
their boycott, largely owing to another edict by Ayatollah Sistani. Even an alleged
accidental hit by U.S. warplanes on Asaib Ahl al-Haq barely raised that militias
pique, according to the New York Times. A Badr Corps representative also told the
newspaper, We havent retreated from our positions near Tikrit. Still, others have
indicated that theyre not going to let a good turn go unpunished and intend to strike
at American soldiers in Iraq.
Akram al-Kabi, the leader of the Al Nujabaa Brigade, which has also fought with the
Assad regime in Syria, has said: We are staying in Tikrit, we are not leaving and we
are going to target the American led coalition in Tikrit and their creation, ISIS. Today,
one of al-Kabis spokesmen reiterated thatthreat. Al-Kabi was once a deputy in Asaib
Ahl al-Haq and wasassociatedwith that militias attacks against U.S. and British troops
in 2008-2011, including an incident in which British contractors were abducted from
the Iraqi Finance Ministry and later murdered. CENTCOM commander Gen. Lloyd
Austins nevertheless briefed the Senate on Thursday with a straight face that

[c]urrently, there are no [Shiite] militia and as reported by the Iraqis today, no [PMU]
in that area as well. This is either propaganda or sheer ignorance about what is
transpiring in Austins theatre of operations. The Guardians Chulov, who just returned
from Tikrit, confirmed to one of the authors, in fact, that both al-Amiri and alMuhandis were indeed in the center of the city on March 26.
Recrimination and resentment by these militias is no light matter. According
to Politico, U.S. military planners are now worried that any decision to engage or
isolate the Assad regime in Syria will encourage Iran or its cut-outs to attack the some
3,000 U.S. military trainers currently stationed in Iraq. Its hard to tell where genuine
concern bleeds into further excuse-making on the part of an Obama administration
that has shown no intention of engaging or isolating the Assad regime, which is
responsible for the vast majority of war dead and war crimes in Syria. Regardless, the
result is the same: Washington is now behaving as if it needs Tehrans permission to
pursue its own anti-IS strategy, if it can even be called that.

You call this a plan?

What strategy? asks Chris Harmer. We have only consequentially intervened in one
part in Syria Kobani. Whats the plan for countering [the Islamic State] there?
Training 5,000 Syrian rebels per year. That is laughable when you consider the
200,000 dead from four years of attritional warfare, the four million refugees, and
slow-motion destruction of the country. Five thousand doesnt even get you into the
ballgame. You have to have a significant portion of the population on your side.
Moderate Syrians should be on our side. Theyre saying the Americans are unreliable,
theyre not on our side. This is why the moderate opposition has collapsed and the
beneficiaries of that collapse have been al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Assad.
The loss of confidence in the United States by moderate Sunnis in Syria is mirrored in
Iraq. New polling data has confirmedthat most Mosulawis, for instance, welcomed IS
back into Iraqs second city not out of ideological sympathy for the terror group, but
out of deep-seated political grievances with the Iraqi government. Yet the Obama
administration is doing next to nothing to redress these grievances. The Anbar tribal
leader Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, whose charismatic brother was notoriously gunned
down by al Qaeda just days after meeting with President George W. Bush in Baghdad
in 2007, simplycould not get a meeting with any significant official in White House
during a 10-day tour of Washington last February. Vice President Joe Biden was good
enough to drop in on a lesser confab, mainly to smile and pat them on the head and tell
them to work constructively with the new government of Prime Minister Haider alAbadi.

Many of the people in Mosul will stand with [the Islamic State] if Shiite militias
invade, said Gen. Najim Jibouri. Eighty percent of the population is does not like
[IS], but if the militias are involved 80 percent will stand very strong with [IS]. I told
the Americans before, the image now is not like it was in 2003. Now the Sunni people
want American forces. They will throw the flowers on them now, because the battle
now is not between them and the United States and [IS], its between the Sunnis and
Iran. Yet far too many Sunnis still see the United States as aligned with Iran against
them, Jibouri said.
Whether or not a nuclear agreement with Iran gets signed in Lausanne this weekend,
whether or not Obama inaugurates a perestroika with Tehran as a result, the
unshakable truth is that most of Iraq looks in the long term to remain a satrapy of the
mullahs. This will only lead to further sectarian violence and civil war. I met with
almost two dozen national leaders in Iraq last week, Ali Khedery, the longest
consecutively serving U.S. diplomat in the Green Zone, told us. I heard from Sunni,
Shiite, Kurdish officials and virtually all of them told me that the real prime minster of
the country is Qasem Soleimani and his deputy is Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images