BY
What if we
understood al Qaeda and the Islamic State as protégées of Iran, rather than
merely its rivals? At first glance, this might seem outlandish, given
that al Qaeda and the Islamic State are Sunni militant groups while Iran is a
Shiite theocracy, and each nominally regards the others as theological
apostates. Because the suggestion of a familial lineage between these groups
and Iran flies in the face of conventional wisdom, it is necessary to test the
claim by looking for indications of mutual influence, shared values, and
shared goals. For example, on June 10, 2016, Tallha Abdulrazaq, a researcher at
the University of Exeter’s Strategy and Security Institute, suggested, “Iran is
what the Islamic State will look like if it succeeds.” He pointed to
similarities in behavior between Iran and its supposed protégée: Each had
committed horrendous terrorist actions and human rights violations at home
and abroad in the name of Islamist militancy. Similarities in behavior,
however, may not be sufficient to demonstrate family ties.
U.S. cable traffic released by Wikileaks showed links between Tehran and al
Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of the Islamic State. A cable titled “Iraq
war logs: Al Qaida’s new suicide bombing tactics,” dated November 17,
2006, and published in the Guardian on
October 22, 2010, provided evidence that Tehran trained al Qaeda
insurgents in Iraq to use suicide vests fitted with cameras. On March 9, 2016,
the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York in Manhattan ordered Iran to pay compensation to
September 11 victims for Tehran’s alleged role in aiding the al Qaeda
hijackers.
The roots of these
potential links go back to 1979. “The threat of violent Sunni Islamism was
essentially nonexistent until 1979,” when Iran’s revolution became a symbol of
the potential power of political Islam, Andrew Peek, an expert on terrorism in
the Middle East, wrote in Foreign
Affairs. Not coincidentally, Sunni extremists seized the Grand
Mosque in Mecca that same year. While their theological differences are real,
Sunni and Shia militants both made their modern debut on the global stage that
year, as violent Islamism became a new global presence.
The Islamists’ perspectives found
fertile ground as radicalism prospered in soil fertilized with the blood
of extremists in the post-Gulf War period. More recently, Iran’s
efforts to spread its revolution to Iraq and Syria provided the oxygen for
the rise of al Qaeda’s terrible descendant, the Islamic State. The Iranian
regime has made indirect use of the Islamic State to bolster Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, and to control Iraq by supporting sectarian
killings by militias in places like Fallujah.
The conventional wisdom is that al Qaeda
and the Islamic State are mortal enemies with Iran. But the conventional wisdom
misses a deeper way in which the apparent enemies are mutually dependent and
inspired by a common apocalyptic vision of Islam. They are mutually dependent
as sometime adversaries who are all nonetheless sworn enemies of secular,
Western values. The United States needs to defeat al Qaeda and the Islamic
State, but not in a way that further empowers Iran and provides the seed
for the next generation of this toxic family. Hence, President
Barack Obama’s realpolitik acquiescence to Iran’s support
for Shia proxies and the Revolutionary Guard in Iraq is exactly the wrong
tonic.
The counterargument is that ousting Iran
from Iraq might require reinsertion of U.S. ground forces, for which there is
scant public support, and which would jeopardize relations with other world
powers. Discussed below: options other than a massive ground force
deployment.
Islamist
Protégées
According to Nawaf Obaid, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy
School, the Iranian regime is seeking to overthrow a balance of power that has
endured for some 1,400 years. Besides Christians and Sunnis in Syria and Iraq,
Tehran’s targets include Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
The Revolutionary Guard in Iraq, the Quds special forces, and
Tehran’s proxies, like Hezbollah in Syria, spread the Islamist revolution of
1979 across borders. Thus, it is not a surprise that Riyadh views Tehran in an unfavorable light. The same has
begun to hold true for the Lebanese and Hezbollah.
The Islamic State did not just rise up
from hell. Its ascent derives from Assad’s killing of civilians. His
primary sponsor is the regime in Tehran, according to Gen. Jack Keane, chair of
the Institute for the Study of War. Iran is using the rise of the Islamic State to
consolidate power in Syria, and to keep Iraq’s Shiites and Assad standing
against well-armed and tenacious Sunni forces.
In May, leaked documents revealed Assad-Islamic State collusion stretching
back to the start of the Syrian civil war. The Assad regime and Iran nurtured
the rise of al Qaeda, and then the Islamic State, in Syria. After the
group had matured fully, Damascus and Tehran offered themselves as
partners to the United States in the Vienna talks on Syria. On the battlefield,
however, Russian and Syrian warplanes continue to provide support, while
maintaining plausible deniability, for the Islamic State, as it advanced
on rebel-held areas. Meanwhile, the Islamic State and pro-Assad forces mainly
refrained from attacking each other in an entente cordiale.
In July 2015, just before the United
States adopted the nuclear deal with Iran, a pan-Arab daily, Al-Hayat, reported that Secretary of State
John Kerry, during a trip to Russia, had posed the idea of setting up a
Syrian “contact group” consisting of regional and international actors. Kerry
would have included Doha, Istanbul, Moscow, Riyadh, Tehran, and Washington.
Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in October that Washington had
legitimized Iran’s local assets and means of projecting power by
recognizing the country as a principal “stakeholder” in Syria.
Legitimizing Tehran as an interested
party implicitly acknowledges its support for Hezbollah and interest in
preserving a land bridge to Hezbollah’s base in Lebanon. Since 1997, the State
Department has listed Hezbollah as a designated terrorist
organization — yet the State Department advocated inclusion of Iran in a
contact group.
“After many years of sanctions targeting,
today Hezbollah is in its worst financial shape in decades…. And I can
assure you that, alongside our international partners, we are working hard to
put them out of business,” said Adam Szubin, acting U.S. Treasury undersecretary
for terrorism and financial intelligence, as quoted by Jonathan Schanzer,
a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury and now vice president for
research at FDD.
But Hezbollah is a wholly owned
subsidiary of Iran. Tehran bargained for and received a humongous financial
windfall of some $100 billion pursuant to last summer’s nuclear deal; with such
money available to Hezbollah, Schanzer wisely comments that no entity is in a position to put
it “out of business” anytime soon.
The conventional wisdom that Iran is an
enemy of al Qaeda and the Islamic State because they have fought each other is
partly correct. But this interpretation masks areas in which cooperation is
also present. The three are like “frenemies,” actors that purport to be enemies
but covertly perform friendly interactions on more than an occasional
basis, as has been demonstrated above.
The counterargument also assumes that
even if a new U.S. president were to see the need to oust Iran from Iraq, she
or he might have to authorize ground combat forces to go into Iraq and Syria.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey suggests another way: Deter Iran while
destroying al Qaeda and the Islamic State by rebuilding the CIA alignment with
Sunni tribal chiefs in Anbar province.
In addition, a new political-military
strategy needs to focus on the constellation of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, to keep them in check.
How? Organize a coalition of Sunni Gulf states, Jordan, Turkey, and the Kurdish
Peshmerga in northern Iraq. Along with Iranian dissidents, such a coalition
would increase costs to Tehran, its proxies, and Shiite militias for colluding
with Islamist organizations in the destabilization of Iraq and Syria. And it
would bring strategic clarity to an important but overlooked fact: America’s
adversaries are militant Islamists of the Sunni and Shia variety, embodied in
al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Iran.
* Raymond Tanter was a former member of the National Security
Council staff and Representative of the Secretary of Defense to arms control
talks during the Reagan-Bush Administration.
* This article was published first by Foreign Policy on
06/07/2016
