There are concerns Iran's involvement will aggravate sectarian tensions.
[Dempsey] said that “we’re alert to the challenges of having Iran supporting Shiite militia,” and Tehran’s influence had sparked concerns in the anti-IS coalition, which includes Sunni Arab countries that view Iran as a threat.
It was not clear if Iran shared the same strategic goals as the Washington-led coalition, he said. The international coalition was committed to a “unified” Iraq that represented the Sunni and Kurdish communities as well as the larger Shiite population, he said. “I want to make sure that those efforts can truly be complementary. If they can’t, we’re going to have a problem, “ he said.
Going to have a problem? It seems "we" already have one.
Hassan Hassan, writing in the Guardian, says Hashd al-Shaabi, the umbrella organisation for Iranian-backed Shia militias, has the lead offensive role in Tikrit. Iraq says Sunni tribal fighters are taking a prominent role, but Hassan says that's not true -- at best they have a "back-seat" role.
Hashd al-Shaabi has a track record of human rights abuses and sectarian and ethnic cleansing, as documented by Human Rights Watch. Instead of highlighting that Tikrit’s civilians have almost completely fled the city, the government should focus on ensuring no similar reprisals against civilians by these notorious militias are committed in Tikrit.
Hassan says the fight over Tikrit will boost Iran's militias but ultimately backfire politically.
A victory in Tikrit will boost Hashd al-Shaabi immensely in Iraq, politically, militarily and financially. The likely motivation is that Hashd al-Shaabi recognises that the fight against Isis in the Sunni districts of Tikrit will be a massive political win.
... However, unilaterally launching a revenge-tinged campaign in a Sunni area by sectarian militias with a track record of acts of cleansing will unavoidably be seen as a vigilante operation.
Hassan writes that ISIS will benefit from the Tikrit offensive even if it loses militarily, and it won't do anything to assist with the planned retake of Mosul. He also says ISIS will only be defeated in Iraq if the Sunnis do it.
If the history of fighting Isis, and its previous incarnations, can teach us one lesson, it is that Isis can only be defeated by Sunni from within. The idea that the offensive in Tikrit is a national effort is a myth.
...Isis will benefit from the offensive in Tikrit, even if it loses militarily, as long as the victors are sectarian militias that behave in a similar manner. ....the defeat of Isis in Tikrit will not help in the fight in Mosul. On the contrary, it will convince Sunni communities living under Isis that the alternative is just as bad.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, another prominent researcher and analyst says the U.S. has already lost Iraq to Iran.
Concern has been expressed that the U.S. 'risks' losing Iraq to Iran in the fight against IS, but it is probably more accurate to say the U.S. has already lost Iraq to Iran. No good options seem to exist, and the expansion of Iran's sphere of influence may well have to be accepted as an inevitable consequence of the original decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam's regime from power.
What does the Iranian state news say? Almost every recent news bulletin about Tikrit contains this paragraph:
The ISIL terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.
Here's more on the direct involvement of Iran and its Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani with the Shia militias in Iraq. And more from the Kurdish Globe.
The new war in Iraq seems just as doomed to failure as the last one.
