Sunday, May 28, 2006

The Iranian controlled Shia militias in Iraq - how NOT to win a war

One way to lose a war of this type very quickly is not to control the borders and to allow politicians controlled by your enemies and armed forces armed and trained by your enemies to survive and prosper.

That's exactly what President Bush and SecDef Rumsfeld have allowed to happen in Iraq.

Iran Focus has the story today on howIranian-backed militia groups have taken control of much of southern Iraq. No revelation there to regular readers of this site!

Not only is this occuring in Southern Iraq, but in the other Shia areas of the country and in Kirkuk, where the Shia militias and the Kurdish Pesh Murga are engaged in a military standoff in Kirkuk.

The two main militias that are Iran controlled are the Badr Force and Moqata al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. They have been massively armed and trained by Iran and get logistical support from Iran with intel and new weaponry.

"We get an idea that (military training) courses are being run" in Iran, said Lt. Col. David Labouchere, who commands British units in the province of Maysan, north of Basra. "People are training on the other side of the border and then coming back."

The British blame Iranian missles for the downing of a British heliocopter over Basra on May 6 came from Iran. Five British soldiers died.

"We had intelligence suggesting five surface-to-air missile systems being brought over from Iran only seven days before it went down," said Maj. Rob Yuill, a British officer based in Basra.

Yuill said that the information suggested that the missiles were destined for the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. al-Sadr's men were also responsible for the riot that followed the rescue attempt by the Brits.

Iraqis in Maysan and Basra provinces and in the city of Basra are at the mercy of Shiite militia death squads and Iran-friendly clerics who have imposed defacto sharia - Islamic law over the inhabitants.

In Basra alcohol sales have been banned. A woman without a headscarf is a rare sight. Record shops have been replaced with stores selling Quranic recordings. Yesterday, two Iraqi tennis players were gunned down for the crime of wearing shorts.

Iran also has it's fingers in Iraq's Shiite-dominated central government.

Earlier this month, Iraq's Interior Minister Bayan Jabr sent a letter ordering Basra's police chief to hire or promote 50 men with direct ties to the Badr force.

The Iranian-backed Badr Force is the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful Shiite political party in the country. As I reported to our readers previously here, many of the current figures in Shia politics in Iraq have substantial ties to Iran.

Jabr is now the finance minister in the new Iraqi government.

That same Iraqi government, by the way, just assured the Iranians on Friday that it believes Iran has a right to develop a nuclear program and that it will not allow Iraqi territory to be used to "threaten" Iran.

Speaking during a visit by the Iranian foreign minister to Iraq to congratulate the new Iraqi government formed a week ago, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Iraq's new government "is a friendly government to Iran."

"Iraq definitely will not be a place to threaten Iran from," Zebari said at a news conference in Baghdad, with the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, standing at his side.

In essence, the new Iraqi government is taking Iran's side against the US and European Union....even though the Iranians are behind a lot of the carnage in the country. acting as a jump off point for foreign and Iranian arms and fighters attacking Iraqi soldiers and police officers. Not to mention supplying arms to the militias and those forces shooting at the British and Americans who liberated them from Saddam.

What was that about `Islamic democracy' Dubbyah? Islam trumps it every time.

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