Iran Is Close to Establishing an Iraqi Corridor to Syria and Lebanon

Among the forces now fighting to drive Islamic State (IS) from Mosul are the Popular Mobilization Unites (PMUs), Iranian-backed Shiite militias just recently legalized by the Iraqi parliament over the strenuous objections of Sunni legislators. Last week, the PMUs seized the Tal Afar airport—an important objective in the battle for Mosul but also, as Hanin Ghaddar writes, an important objective in Iran’s quest for regional hegemony:

Although the PMUs have not announced any specific plans for moving onward, the town just north of the airport could be their next target. Iran does not have a border crossing with Syria, but Tal Afar—located some 40 miles west of Mosul on the main road to Syria—could provide one. If its proxies do in fact capture the town, Iran would likely be able to establish a corridor from the Iraqi border province of Diyala, up through the Hamrin Mountains northeast of Tikrit, and all the way up to Tal Afar en route to Sinjar on the Syrian border. On the other side of Syria, Iranian-backed forces already have multiple routes to Lebanon via al-Qusayr and other towns in the Qalamoun region.

Although a land bridge might not be of major significance to Tehran in terms of transferring weapons, [which it is already doing by air and sea], it would provide a larger platform for projecting power and establishing a contiguous Iranian presence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. . . .

If Iran succeeds, the three countries caught in the midst of this strategy could lose whatever is left of their sovereignty. Yet an even more pressing problem is that intensifying Shiite rhetoric and power will only bolster Islamic State’s sectarian narrative and help mobilize local Sunnis around it and other radical groups that feed on such sentiment. Winning the war against IS requires seeing all brands of extremism and terrorism in the Middle East for what they are and understanding how they feed off of one another. . . .

Thus, even if completing a land bridge takes years to accomplish or proves to be an impossible or fleeting goal, the various processes that have been set in motion toward that end require continual sectarian violence and ever-widening efforts to turn Arab Shiites into armed adherents of Iran’s revolutionary ideology. Meanwhile, IS and whatever radical groups follow in its wake will take advantage of this situation to mobilize Sunnis for similarly violent ends.

Read more at Washington Institute

More about: Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Lebanon, Politics & Current Affairs, Syria

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF