War In The Age of Trump. Patrick Cockburn
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seem to be expecting trouble. Street protests have become a familiar part of Iraqi politics over the last few years. In 2016, demonstrators broke into the Green Zone and ransacked parliament and the prime minister’s office. Last year in Basra, protests over water and electricity shortages led to the setting ablaze of government and party offices, though only twelve people were reported killed.
Last month in Baghdad, the response of the security forces was very different. And, as it turned out, not only of the security forces: also patrolling the streets were the pro-Iranian factions of the predominantly Shia paramilitary Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Units. When the protesters tried to cross the al-Jumhuriya bridge leading from Tahrir Square towards the Green Zone, they were met with live fire.
The next day I drove through Tahrir Square, where protesters and soldiers were eyeing each other nervously during a lull in the demonstrations. A man was lying on the pavement on a slip road leading up to the square, but I couldn’t see whether he was injured or dead. Shortly afterwards the government declared a twenty-four-hour curfew in Baghdad, a city of seven million people, as well as in towns and cities in the overwhelmingly Shia southern part of Iraq. It cut off access to the internet in the hope of making it impossible to organise protests—but the effect was that smaller rallies began popping up all over Baghdad. My contact in Medical City reported that his hospital had been invaded by pro-Iranian Shia paramilitaries—members of either Kata’ib Hezbollah or Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq—who were beating injured protesters as they lay in their beds. He complained to one of the paramilitary commanders, who hit him with a baton and told him to mind his own business.
News of the protests was being broadcast by local media. In an attempt to put an end to the publicity, members of a group called Saraya Talia al-Khurusani invaded TV stations, wrecking studios and smashing equipment. In the streets, riot police fired heavy-duty tear gas grenades directly at protesters, inflicting serious and, in some cases, fatal injuries. According to surgeons who treated the wounded, paramilitary snipers were aiming for the head or chest. The government announced that these tactics were prohibited and would not be repeated—but it was clearly no longer in control of the way the protests were being policed. The use of maximum force proved counterproductive since, over the next few days, the demonstrations gathered in size, but whoever was issuing the orders was apparently determined that this was the only way to deal with them.
That person was reportedly the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite al-Quds Brigade. Soleimani had flown into Baghdad airport on 2 October and taken a helicopter to the Green Zone to chair a security meeting—taking the place of the usual chair, Iraq’s prime minister. There could be no plainer demonstration of Iranian power over Iraqi policy, or of the arrogance with which it has been exercised. Soleimani is the architect of Iran’s regional security policy, determined to maintain Iranian influence by every means available as the US struggles to realise Trump’s declared ambition of containing it. In recent confrontations, Soleimani, who has a reputation for being a skilled commander, has repeatedly outmanoeuvred the US and its Gulf allies. But success appears to have gone to his head. At the meeting in the Green Zone, he made clear his belief that there was only one way to respond to the protests. “This happened in Iran and we got it under control,” he is reported as having said. He was presumably referring to Iran’s successful repression of the Green Movement that sprang up there in 2009—but then there had been no indiscriminate shooting into crowds, or singling out of movement leaders by snipers. By the end of October, the strategy as implemented in Iraq had resulted in the deaths of at least 250 protesters—the actual figure is probably much higher—with no sign of the demonstrations slowing. What’s more, they have taken an increasingly anti-Iranian turn: on 3 November, protesters set fire to the Iranian consulate in the Shia holy city of Karbala.
Like so many security chiefs down the centuries, Soleimani has helped fuel the revolutionary situation he was trying to prevent. As an Iraqi friend told me, “shooting people isn’t going to work because too many of them have nothing left to lose.” Repression on this scale was unexpected, as well as unwise. In the days before the rally that led to the first shootings, I spoke to the commanders of several of the pro-Iranian paramilitary groups, none of whom seemed to be anticipating a crisis. I asked them how they thought the US-Iran face-off would affect Iraq. Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, was confident that in Iraq as elsewhere, Iran knew how to handle tensions in a way that would stop short of full-scale military confrontation. There would be no war, he said, “because Trump does not want one.” Abu Ala al-Walai, the leader of Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, was more apprehensive: a recent drone attack, which he blamed on Israel, had destroyed fifty tonnes of arms at al-Saqr, a base under his command on the outskirts of Baghdad. I went to see it; evidently, a giant blast had torn the place apart. “The big new development,” Abu Ala said, “is that Israel has come to Iraq.” But the reaction—the overreaction—of the Iranians and their paramilitary allies to the protests in Baghdad may be a sign that they interpret events on the ground in the light of their struggle with the US. At the end of October, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that “the US and western intelligence agencies, with the help of money from regional countries, are instigating unrest in the region. I advise Lebanon and Iraq to make it a priority to stabilise these security threats.”
Mass protests erupted in Lebanon on 17 October after the government tried to introduce a tax on the use of voice messaging systems like WhatsApp and FaceTime. As in Iraq, economic and social grievances have gradually escalated into generalised opposition towards a corrupt and dys-functional political system. As in Iraq, pro-Iranian militias—in this case, supporters of Hezbollah—have used force against demonstrators, attacking protest camps in central Beirut. In both Iraq and Lebanon, Iran and its Shia allies feel that the political status quo they have fought for is at risk. Paranoid that the US may be playing its part in encouraging dissent, they have opted for repression. If sustained for long enough, this strategy may succeed, not because force will necessarily win out but because in neither Iraq nor Lebanon have protesters given much indication that they have any concrete ideas about how to replace the present discredited system—or with what.
As these events were unfolding in Lebanon and Iraq, there was similar unrest in Syria—but for entirely different reasons. Trump had long declared his intention to bring home American troops, or at least to extract them from the Syrian “mess,” and the withdrawal of the 2,000-strong US military force in the north-east of the country began on 6 October. The time had come: the troops were there to fight Isis and Isis had been defeated. The idea—pushed by Washington’s foreign policy establishment—that this small force could simultaneously protect the Kurds, defend against Iranian influence, weaken Bashar al-Assad, and deter Russia had always been unrealistic. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara and Assad in Damascus, much though they dislike each other, were united in their determination to eliminate Rojava, the Syrian Kurdish mini-state which—with the assistance of American airpower and a limited number of US troops on the ground—had been established after the Syrian army withdrew from the area in 2012.
A US withdrawal may have been inevitable, but its shambolic on/off nature was not. Unlike the White House, the Pentagon wanted to keep a presence in Syria—however unclear its purpose in a region now under the sway of Russia, Iran, and Assad—and had not prepared contingency plans for withdrawal. In the ensuing shambles, the US military bombed its former headquarters in a cement factory near the city of Manbij and abandoned other bases to the Russians and the Syrian army. Trump’s tweet greenlighting a Turkish invasion of Rojava was—understandably—portrayed in the US media as gross treachery towards America’s brave allies, but it was no surprise to anyone in the region. In early 2018 Turkey invaded the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, north of Aleppo, and engaged in ethnic cleansing—no objection was raised in the US or elsewhere. Erdogan made it clear then that Rojava would be next. I was in Rojava at the time of Afrin’s fall and spoke to Kurdish leaders, who knew that fending off both Erdogan and Assad would be next to impossible. The area they controlled was flat and indefensible, so they had no real military option. Much of the population lived close to the Turkish border and even a small-scale Turkish incursion would turn them into refugees. These fears have now been realised, with some 132,000 Kurds displaced from the border region.
There was clearly a degree of complicity between the main players in Syria after Trump’s