The defeat of the Iranian regime in Iraq
The Islamic regime in Iran did not realize the extent of the Iraqi problem in which it is drowning. Tehran believed that any Shiite population around the world would be a fertile ground for the recruitment of loyalists to the Iranian regime, so that they would become Shiites who would engage in its intelligence, terrorist and militia wars, and that Iraq, with a Shiite majority, would turn into the largest country affiliated with the Iranian regime.
But Tehran’s calculations failed for several reasons that the Iranians did not take into consideration, the first of which is the huge Iraqi Shiite bloc. In Lebanon, for example, there are a million and a half Shiites, and in Bahrain hundreds of thousands, which means that the Iranian regime can allocate salaries to the majority of the Shiites of Lebanon and Bahrain, and finance a network of social services for them and educational, health and recreational institutions.
In return for Iranian offerings, Tehran expects the loyalty of these Shiites to the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, so they do not skimp on Iran, and turn into “soldiers in the Wali al-Faqih Army,” according to the leader of the Lebanese “Hezbollah,” Hassan Nasrallah, and fight even their own compatriots to serve for Tehran.
The “Guardian of the Faithful Army” does everything that Iran asks of it, from the attempt to assassinate the writer Salman Rushdie in the United States, to throwing missiles from Lebanon at Israel to discourage it from disrupting the Iranian nuclear program, or to blackmail Iran’s neighboring countries, especially the Gulf states. This is in Lebanon and Bahrain.
But the situation in Iraq is completely different, where the Shiites number more than twenty million, which makes it impossible for Iran to allocate salaries to them or provide social services in exchange for their loyalty.
Moreover, the Iraqi state’s oil revenues are greater than Iran’s, which is what drives Iraqi leaders to race for power and use its revenues to establish rentier networks loyal to them and separate from Iran. To the conciliatory alliance with it only after his exit from power.
Iraq is superior to Iran in its Shiiteness. Iraq is the cradle of the Shiite sect, in which are the graves of six of the twelve imams: Ali bin Abi Talib, Hussein his son, Musa Al-Kadhim, Muhammad Al-Jawad, Ali Al-Hadi, and Al-Hassan Al-Askari. In the world of Shiites, Mecca leads the world’s cities in terms of its holiness, followed by Medina, then Najaf, where the shrine of Imam Ali, Karbala, the site of the killing of Hussein and his shrine and his brother Abbas. Najaf occupies a spiritual rank for Shiites, similar to the importance of the Vatican to Catholic Christians.
As for Iran, it is new to the Shiite sect, which was adopted by the Safavid Sufi groups to compete with the Ottoman sultans for the leadership of the Islamic world. In Mashhad in Iran, the shrine of Imam Ali al-Rida. In Qom, there is a shrine for an obscure Shiite figure whose history is disputed, Fatima, the sister of Ali al-Rida, who is called “Ma’sumah.” Granting Our Lady of infallibility contradicts the teachings of the Shiite sect, but the entry of the Iranians into the sect introduced with it many heresies, most of which the Arab Shiites still refuse to recognize.
Thus, in contrast to the weakness of Lebanon and Bahrain in front of Iran, numerically, financially and spiritually, Iraq surpasses Iran financially and spiritually, in addition to the fact that between Iraq and Iran a long historical feud that preceded Islam by centuries, which began since the Mesopotamian civilizations invaded Elam in southern Iran, then the Parthians invaded Babylon and its king, Nabunaid in The year 536 BC, followed by the invasion of the Sassanids in the year 274 AD. But the Arabs defeated the Sassanids in 651 and ruled Iran for nearly a thousand years, until the Safavids began forming the state of Persia, which expanded and became the Iran we know.
For this reason, it was easy for Saddam Hussein to incite the Iraqi Arab Shiites against the Iranian Shiites. Despite the sectarian similarities, the hostility and competition between the two civilizations has existed for more than two millennia.
Since the collapse of the Hussein regime in 2003, Iran has repeatedly tried to gather Iraqi Shiite leaders in various formats under the name “Shiite House,” and then tried to repeat the experience of the Lebanese “Hezbollah” by pushing generalized clerics to play leadership roles and establish parties and militias that still exist today and are called “militias.” Wilayat, meaning loyal to Khamenei.
Nevertheless, Iran’s militias in Iraq remained limited in popularity, at a time when organizations without capabilities, such as the successive militias established by the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, outperformed them, for the sole reason that al-Sadr rode the wave of Iraqi patriotism.
Al-Sadr is distinguished from all the current Iraqi leaders that he and his father did not oppose Saddam Hussein from exile, but rather lived in Iraq before and after Saddam, which reinforced the impression of their patriotism much more than the exiled opponents such as Nuri al-Maliki, Haider al-Abadi, Hadi al-Amiri, the family of al-Hakim and the late Jamal al-Jarrah (Abu Mahdi). The engineer).
Today, Iran is carrying out all possible political maneuvers, simultaneous with the terrorism it exercises against its opponents, including the assassination of large numbers of them, with the aim of building a rule of iron and fire held by one of its Iraqi mercenaries. Tehran prefers that Maliki not be its man, because he suffers from megalomania and seeks only his personal interest.
Iranian violence and assassinations have not succeeded in silencing Tehran’s Iraqi opponents, who do not miss an opportunity without burning the Iranian consulate, Khamenei’s pictures in Iraq, or the statues of Qassem Soleimani. And last Monday, when confrontations erupted between Iran’s opponents on the one hand, especially from the Sadrist movement, and Tehran’s supporters, on the other, Iran’s opponents taught its allies a harsh lesson and outperformed them in fighting, burning the offices of the state militias, and winning popular sympathy and support, while Iran’s militias retreated and went It kills the Iraqis by stealth and through liquidations and executions, if we believe some of the reports carried by the Iraqi media.
Iraq exposed Iran and revealed that it is not a superpower as it imagines itself, but rather a ruling terrorist gang trying to intimidate the neighboring peoples and rule them with iron and fire. And Iraq showed Iran that doctrine is not superior to patriotism, and that the Iraqis will not retreat silently and turn into mercenaries, as some Shiites in Lebanon and Bahrain did.
Rawabetcenter.com